Tag: Courts

Trump is Right to Take On the Climate Litigation Complex

President Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ on May 23rd 2025, aiming to overhaul research-integrity policies and ensure that federal government-sponsored science is “transparent, rigorous and impactful”. The order sparked concern among scientists who fear it could lead to political interference in scientific research and undermine independent scientific inquiry.

From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

President Trump has laid into a new report from the National Academy of Sciences that purports to support ‘extreme weather’ climate litigation. He’s right to do so.

There is a particular kind of institutional decay that announces itself not through incompetence but through overreach – the moment a body built to advise quietly converts itself into an advocacy outfit. That moment arrived in plain view last week when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a 253-page report claiming that scientists can now attribute individual heatwaves and rainstorms to man-made emissions “with a high degree of confidence”, and wildfires, droughts and cyclones with “moderate confidence”. Two days later, President Trump did something no prior occupant of the White House had quite dared to do: he called the report what it is on Truth Social: “Fraudulent, biased and misleading,” ordering federal suspension and debarment officials to review the Academies’ conduct and taxpayers’ exposure to what he termed “Climate Fraud”.

The howls of outrage were immediate and predictable. But strip away the theatre of a Presidential Truth Social post – capital letters, “Radical Left Dumocrats”, the invented spelling – and what remains is a serious institutional question that deserved to be asked years ago: has the National Academy of Sciences become an advocacy organisation wearing the borrowed authority of ‘consensus science’?

From weights and measures to trial-lawyer auxiliary

Congress chartered the National Academies in 1863 for a modest and useful purpose: advising the government on technical matters such as the calibration of currency and the protection of ship hulls from corrosion. It is worth dwelling on how far the institution has travelled from that brief. As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board observed in its own broadside against the report, published the same weekend under the pointed headline ‘A Climate Coup at the National Academies of Science’, the new document explicitly frames itself as “relevant to policy and legal decisions pertaining to climate change and liability for losses sustained as a result of extreme weather and climate events”. That is not the language of scientific advice. It is the language of a legal brief.

The report goes further, noting that its methodology could help state and local governments demonstrate the “concrete injury” needed to establish standing in lawsuits against fossil fuel producers, and that it might “inform” measures such as Vermont’s climate superfund law – which empowers state officials to calculate the “financial impact” of greenhouse gas emissions and then demand payment from energy companies to cover it. As the Journal‘s editors put it with admirable bluntness, “the point is to put a scientific gloss on a coercive exercise of government power”. The scientific gloss provides a legal strategy, built to order, for a litigation campaign that has been running for the better part of a decade against the companies that keep the lights on.

None of this should surprise anyone who has followed the emergence of so-called ‘attribution science’ as a distinct field, nor is it the first time House Republicans have raised the alarm: members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology argued that the report presents a conflict of interest precisely because attorneys involved in ongoing climate litigation helped establish the scientific standards the Academies used.

As noted in these pages in an earlier article examining the Nature paper on “the scientific case for climate liability”, the World Weather Attribution initiative itself has admitted that, unlike any other branch of climate science, “event attribution was originally suggested with the courts in mind”. That is a remarkable thing for a scientific field to concede about its own origins. Most disciplines discover applications for their findings after the fact. Attribution science was conceived, from the outset, as a tool for tort lawyers – the conclusion came first, and the methodology was reverse-engineered to support it.

The conflict-of-interest problem

The most damning detail in the whole affair, and the one that ought to trouble even sympathetic observers of the Academies, concerns Michael Burger, the Executive Director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law. Burger assisted with the new report and is cited approvingly within it. What the report does not mention is that Burger is also a counsel at Sher Edling LLP, the law firm that has led – and profited handsomely from – the wave of municipal and state lawsuits against ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and the rest of the industry. This is not a minor conflict of interest tucked away in a footnote. It is the central actor in the litigation campaign helping write the scientific document that the litigation campaign will then cite as independent authority.

This is not the first time the pattern has surfaced. The WSJ editorial board reminds readers that a climate chapter written for the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence – a joint publication of the Federal Judicial Centre and the National Academies, distributed to federal judges as guidance on how to weigh expert testimony – drew heavily on Burger’s prior work without proper attribution. That chapter, once the plagiarism and the conflicts came to light, was quietly retracted by the Federal Judicial Centre in February. Electronic copies had already gone out to hundreds of federal judges the previous December and, as one report on the affair noted dryly, could not be recalled. Judges across the country had already been handed a manual instructing them, in effect, on how to receive plaintiff-side attribution evidence – drafted substantially by a plaintiffs’ lawyer.

One retraction might be an embarrassment. A second report, released five months later featuring the same actor and pursuing substantially the same legal agenda, is something closer to an institutional pattern – what David Wojick, writing on Watts Up With That website some years back, described as the Academy’s evolution “from guardians of science to an alarmist fortress”. Institutions rarely announce their capture by groupthink. They simply keep producing the same kind of document, staffed by the same networks, funded by the same interests, until groupthink becomes the institution’s ordinary business.

Follow the funding

It also matters as to who paid for the report. Part of the funding, as the Daily Caller reported, came from the Bezos Earth Fund – the $10 billion philanthropic vehicle established by Amazon’s founder, which has poured money into climate advocacy, activist journalism and litigation-adjacent research since 2020. There is nothing illegal about foundation funding research it favours. But there is something worth noting when a nominally independent scientific academy, chartered by Congress and substantially funded by American taxpayers, produces a document serving the strategic interests of billionaire-funded activist litigation – and does so using the imprimatur of disinterested expertise that taxpayer funding is meant to secure.

The ‘climate liability’ paper published in Nature last year attempted to quantify, down to the dollar, the specific damages attributable to individual oil and gas companies, estimating that Chevron’s emissions alone caused between $791 billion and $3.6 trillion in heat-related losses between 1991 and 2020. That paper was underwritten by the same activist ecosystem: law firms working on contingency, foundations with declared advocacy missions and NGOs as proxy plaintiffs whose stated purpose is ‘legislation through litigation’, bypassing the elected legislatures that would ordinarily set energy and climate policy. The National Academies report simply extends this machinery one further step up the credibility ladder, converting activist economics into what looks, to a busy federal judge without a physics or econometrics background, like ‘consensus science’.

The attribution chain was never solid

The scientific case underlying all of this – the claim that individual weather events, and the economic losses that follow from them, can be attributed with confidence to the historical emissions of a named company – rests on a flimsy chain of inference with at least three weak links.

The first link runs from carbon dioxide emissions to global mean surface temperature, a relationship that depends on climate sensitivity estimates still disputed within the scientific literature itself, with published ranges running from roughly 1.5°C to 4.5°C of warming for a doubling of CO2.

The second link, ‘pattern scaling’, attempts to translate that global average into specific regional and local weather outcomes – a method that imposes a linear, orderly relationship onto a chaotic and non-linear climate system. The IPCC’s own reports as well as independent researchers such as Roger Pielke Jr. have shown how such pattern scaling does a poor job explaining actual trends in hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves once the data are normalised for population growth and economic development.

The third link, translating weather extremes into quantified economic losses, ignores the adaptive capacity of modern economies – air conditioning, flood defences, crop resilience – that has driven a dramatic long-term decline in weather-related mortality, as Bjørn Lomborg has documented at length.

Each of these links is contestable on its own terms. Multiplied together across the ‘end-to-end’ framework that this style of research proposes, the uncertainty compounds rather than cancels. Tort law asks for ‘but-for’ causation: that the harm would not have occurred but for the defendant’s conduct. A model producing damage estimates for a single company spanning a range of several trillion dollars – as the Nature paper did for Chevron – is not evidence of precise causation, but rather of spurious claims dressed up in the mock certainty of numbers and dollar amounts.

There is also a more fundamental omission running through the entire attribution literature, one that the National Academy of Sciences report shares with its predecessors: the studied silence on the benefits of the very gas being prosecuted. Carbon dioxide is not merely an externality to be priced and litigated against; it is, among other things, plant food, and NASA’s own satellite data have documented a substantial global greening effect over recent decades, with researchers finding that CO2 fertilisation explains roughly 70% of the observed increase in global leaf area since 1982, an area equivalent to twice the size of the continental United States. A genuine cost-benefit accounting – of the kind William Nordhaus’s Nobel-winning integrated assessment models are meant to enable – would weigh these benefits against the harms before assigning liability. The attribution literature, by contrast, counts only one side of the ledger. It is advocacy dressed in the vocabulary of science, selectively blind to any finding that would complicate its verdict.

A reckoning worth having

None of this is to say that Trump’s chosen instrument – a suspension and debarment review, more commonly used to bar contractors guilty of fraud or safety violations from further federal work – is obviously the right lever, or that his framing, with its capital letters and conspiratorial flourishes, will do much to persuade anyone not already persuaded. Presidential bombast is a blunt tool, and the more considered critique here belongs to the Journal’s editorial board and to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, whose members raised the underlying conflict-of-interest concerns well before the President reached for his phone. But the underlying complaint is sound, and it would remain sound if it had been delivered in the driest bureaucratic prose imaginable. A body established by Congress to give federal judges disinterested technical guidance has instead handed them a document substantially shaped by the very lawyers profiting from the litigation that the document is meant to inform.

The Soviet Union’s Lysenko episode showed what happens when ideological conformity displaces empirical rigour inside an institution wearing the trappings of science. The National Academy of Sciences exhibits a modern Lysenkoism rife across the climate change debate. American federal judges, weighing genuinely complex scientific questions in courtrooms across dozens of pending climate lawsuits, deserve better than manuals ghost-written, in substance if not in name, by the plaintiffs’ bar. So, for that matter, does the American taxpayer footing part of the bill.

President Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ on May 23rd 2025, aiming to overhaul research-integrity policies and ensure that federal government-sponsored science is “transparent, rigorous and impactful”. The order sparked concern among scientists who fear it could lead to political interference in scientific research and undermine independent scientific inquiry. In Leftist-progressive circles, it has become fashionable to treat any political scrutiny of a scientific body as an assault on science itself – a framing that conveniently forecloses the harder question of whether the body in question has behaved as a scientific one. The path forward is clear: federal agencies and tax-funded NGOs such as the National Academy of Sciences must adopt rigorous, transparent and falsifiable standards to ensure that science serves truth, not power.

Whatever one makes of President Trump’s chosen words, the underlying demand – that a body claiming the authority of disinterested science should actually be disinterested – is one any serious defender of scientific integrity ought to be able to endorse. Surely the most litigated-against President in US history is right in ensuring that judges overseeing climate litigation in the courts are provided truly objective scientific advice.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/07/24/trump-is-right-to-take-on-the-climate-litigation-complex/

The Travesty of Mark Steyn’s $1m Libel Loss to ‘Hockey Stick’ Climate Chart Creator Michael Mann

Mark Steyn loses in Washington D.C. in the defamation trial surrounding Michael E. Mann’s unbelievable temperature ‘hockey stick’, while President Biden cannot be criminally charged for taking home state secret papers on the grounds that he is gaga. Only in Democrat America.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Mark Steyn loses in Washington D.C. in the defamation trial surrounding Michael E. Mann’s unbelievable temperature ‘hockey stick’, while President Biden cannot be criminally charged for taking home state secret papers on the grounds that he is gaga. Only in Democrat America. There was initial relief in the usual quarters at the slaying of Steyn, but the ‘settled’ climate science crowd is now stuck with the ghastly Mann and his ludicrous hockey stick. That should be punishment enough for anyone saying the debate about climate change is over.

It has hardly begun, but now there is a new breath of life for the once ubiquitous poster temperature scare that was centre stage in the 2009 Climategate scandal, and has been stinking up the science joint ever since. With Net Zero coming apart at the seams as reality about mass deindustrialisation and starvation beckons, the politicised science stories forecasting climate Armageddon are starting to attract wider public scepticism. As all cults eventually find, the sandwich-board fearmongering starts to wear thin when the forecast disasters fail to come to pass. Self-appointed promoters of irrationality descend into wilder and wilder flights of fantasy to re-capture the fleeting moments when their emotional rantings offered them a temporary place in the spotlight.

Last week a jury in Washington D.C. awarded Mann $1 million in ‘punitive’ damages against Mark Steyn, although damages for Mann’s reputation was set at a derisory $1. In itself, this should see the larger award set aside, since in recent times the Supreme Court has been cracking down on punitive awards more than nine times the damage amount.

The disconnect between the two awards hints at the political nature of the case. Steyn and a fellow writer Rand Simberg had criticised the hockey stick which abolished the Medieval Warming Period. Running a 1,000-year slightly declining temperature line until a sudden claimed human-caused spike in the 20th century removed the concept of natural climatic variation for a whole generation. The court heard evidence from a senior statistician working at Mann’s own University of Pennsylvania that the graph was “manipulated”. First published in 1999, Mann spent years denying requests from other academics for information about his methods. The Climategate leak with emails referring to “Mike’s Nature Trick” and “Hide the decline” blew all that apart. At the end of the recent trial, his lawyer told the jury that Michael Mann was tired of being attacked. “You have the opportunity to serve as an example to prevent others from acting in a similar way,” he added.

The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. attended the trial and he has concluded the mistake Steyn and Simberg made was thinking that it would be sufficient to win by proving their case. Steyn’s frequent contention has been that the graph was fraudulent. “The case, at least in this particular venue, was simply unwinnable no matter what cases were put by the prosecution and the defence. Mann simply had to show up,” observed Pielke.

In a statement, Mann said: “I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech.” Pielke comments that he would not be surprised to now see a flurry of lawsuits against people who have been critical of climate science and climate scientists. “Such legal action may not be limited to climate – debate over COVID-19, also presents a target rich environment for unwanted speech to silence.”

Dr. Judith Curry blames Mann for destroying her academic career at Georgia Tech when he called her a “serial climate disinformer”. Her crime was to challenge the idea of a consensus around the science of climate and the involvement of humans in causing most if not all temperature change. After the verdict was announced, she tweeted that there was no justice from a Democrat, “climate-concerned” jury. “And a huge blow for freedom of speech,” she added. 

She is right of course. The seven figure punitive damage was sought not to compensate Mann for any loss of reputation, but to deter anyone else arguing that the ‘settled’ climate activists backing the collectivist Net Zero project are wrong. For Steyn and Simberg to have lost an American defamation case, actual malice, defined as not believing what they wrote about Mann, needed to be proved. The reason many neutral observers of the case believe the result is perverse is that Steyn has spent over two decades criticising the methodology of the hockey stick, and no evidence has been presented that he doesn’t believe every single word he has written.

In commentary posted on Steyn’s website, it was noted that he was a member of the media and “supposedly afforded” First Amendment protections. “If a member of the media is no longer protected, what do you think that means for everyday citizens? And it doesn’t matter if you are in D.C. or Montana – anyone can file in the jurisdiction of his or her choosing.” It was noted that in 2019 the Supreme Court decided not to allow the case to be tried in the higher District of Columbia Court of Appeals, but there was a dissenting verdict from Judge Samuel Alito. He felt the case went to the “very heart” of the U.S. constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and the press. While not making any specific judgements on the case, he identified that the matter at issue was the “protection afforded to journalists and others who use harsh language in criticising opposing advocacy on one of the most important public issues of the day”.

The learned judge was also aware of the pitfalls of installing a jury to decide on the matter, noting, “the controversial nature of the whole subject of climate change exacerbates the risk that the jurors’ determination will be coloured by their preconceptions on the matter”. Climate change, he continued, has staked a place at the very centre of the nation’s public discourse. “The core purpose of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression is to ensure that all opinions on such issues have a chance to be heard and considered,” he said.

Not if the fake Nobel laureate Michael E Mann has anything to do with it, it might be said. A consistent abuser over the years of climate ‘deniers’, he was recently part of a gang of activists and journalists who persuaded Nature Springer to retract a paper by four Italian scientists who had investigated past weather data and concluded there was not a climate ‘emergency’.

Whether Mann gets his $1 million remains to be seen, but his trip to the libel courts, which has been spun out over a decade, will not cost him a cent. Wealthy benefactors are available to fund all his costs. Not so Mark Steyn.

Just over a year ago Steyn was in fine form on GB News serving up a scintillating prime time show on the fledgling channel – with a subversive subtext telling the state regulator of cable news to get stuffed. It was compulsive viewing, although it was never going to last in the highly-regulated Ofcom world of U.K. television. The same man, who in your correspondent’s view is incapable of writing or telling an uninteresting line, is pictured above outside the Washington D.C. court building. It might come as a shock to readers who remember him on U.K. screens as a dapper, bustling presence. Life has not been kind to Mark of late with rising legal bills and three heart attacks. White-haired, gaunt and confined to a wheelchair from which he conducted his own three-week defence in the trial. He clutches a Liberty hockey stick, a fund raising device. The stick has now sold out, but readers can provide support here.

Bravo Mark Steyn, a true radical, free thinker and brave defender of free speech.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.