“Omitting the climate science chapter from the Reference Manual deprives judges of a carefully reviewed baseline explanation of the relevant science,” more than two dozen contributors to the Reference Manual wrote in an open letter.
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A group of more than two dozen scientists has criticized the removal of a chapter on climate change from a manual that for decades has equipped US judges, prosecutors and defend attorneys to better interpret the scientific complexities of the cases before them.
Since it was first issued in 1994 by the Federal Judicial Center in collaboration with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence has assisted federal and state judges and attorneys in managing cases that involve complex scientific, technical, or forensic evidence. Its content has been cited more than 1,300 times.
The manual’s peer-reviewed chapters touch on topics spanning from engineering to forensic DNA, statistics to epidemiology, artificial intelligence to computer science. Until a few weeks ago, the manual – now in its fourth edition – also included a chapter on climate science. But that chapter came under fire when 27 Republican state attorneys general claimed in a letter that the content was biased and threatened to undermine judicial impartiality.
The letter, led by West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey and dated January 29, said “the Fourth Edition places the judiciary firmly on one side of some of the most hotly disputed questions in current litigation: climate-related science and ‘attribution.’” The attorneys general called on the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) to “immediately” remove the chapter, while simultaneously accusing the authors of framing climate litigation against states and fossil fuel producers as a primary tool for addressing “pressing” environmental issues.
They went on to say that the authors omitted references to the Department of Energy’s (DOE) recent report on climate change in favor of bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose authority the attorneys general appeared to contest.
In reality, the IPCC is widely recognized as the most authoritative international body for assessing the science of climate change. Conversely, the DOE’s report on climate change, published last year, has faced intense scrutiny, with scientists flagging numerous inaccuracies and “demonstrably incorrect” or “misleading” claims. It was authored by a secretive panel of five handpicked climate change skeptics who were at the center of a legal dispute last month.
More on the topic: Secretive US Climate Skeptic Panel Tasked With Writing Contentious Global Warming Report Violated Law, Court Rules
On February 6, Judge Robin Rosenberg, the Director of the Federal Judicial Center, announced the chapter had been removed from the fourth edition.
‘Political Attack’
On Monday, 28 co-authors of the Reference Manual issued an open letter, decrying the FJC’s move as a “political attack” and “a direct challenge to the independence of the federal judiciary.”
“Omitting the climate science chapter from the Reference Manual deprives judges of a carefully reviewed baseline explanation of the relevant science. It leaves judges without a tool to evaluate the parties’ framing, sometimes cherry-picked literature, and adversarially hired and paid witnesses,” they wrote, warning that the move could “hurt litigants on both sides of climate litigation.”
With climate litigation cases on the rise in the US, “[j]udges will continue to confront complex scientific evidence in these cases, and they will now have to do so with or without the benefit of a carefully reviewed educational resource,” they concluded.
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons.
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