Tag: Fourth Edition

Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Climate Science Chapter – Withdrawn!

On January 29, a coalition of state Attorneys General from red states, led by the AG of West Virginia (JB McCuskey), had sent a letter to Judge Robin Rosenberg, the Director of the Center, asking for immediate withdrawal of the offending chapter.

Interior view of a courtroom at the Federal Judicial Center, featuring a large logo display and seating arrangements.

From Manhattan Contrarian

By Francis Menton

A formal letter dated February 6, 2026, from Judge Robin L. Rosenberg at the Federal Judicial Center addressed to Attorney General John B. McCuskey, regarding the omission of a climate science chapter from the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.

Here at Manhattan Contrarian, we get results. After my last three posts harshly critiquing the Federal Judicial Center’s newly revised Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, and particularly its chapter on Climate Science, suddenly on Friday the Center’s Director sent a letter stating that the Center has now “omitted” that chapter!

Well, OK, I was not the only one objecting.

On January 29, a coalition of state Attorneys General from red states, led by the AG of West Virginia (JB McCuskey), had sent a letter to Judge Robin Rosenberg, the Director of the Center, asking for immediate withdrawal of the offending chapter.

Here is a link to the AGs’ letter. McCuskey had rounded up signatures of AGs of some 26 other states in support of the demand for withdrawal.

Judge Rosenberg addressed her letter disclosing the withdrawal to McCuskey.

McCuskey posted a tweet announcing the withdrawal and attaching Judge Rosenberg’s letter at 7:07 PM on Friday evening (February 6).

No surprise that this kind of thing would get issued at or about the close of business on a Friday. Charles Rotter of Watts Up With That put up a post about the withdrawal on Saturday.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board posted an editorial on the subject late this afternoon, and presumably that editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition. So far, I can find no mention of this embarrassing incident in the MSM.

Judge Rosenberg is the only signatory to her letter, and the letter is a one-liner that gives no explanation for the withdrawal:

In response to your letter dated January 29, 2026, I write to inform you that the Federal Judicial Center has omitted the climate science chapter from the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition (RMSE).

However, you have to think that Judge Rosenberg did not just do this on her own authority. McCuskey had copied the full Board of the FJC on the AGs’ letter.

The Chair of that Board is Chief Justice John Roberts. It is hard to imagine that Roberts was not involved in the decision to pull this chapter, let alone other members of the Board, all of whom are federal judges.

And then there’s Justice Elena Kagan, who is not a member of the FJC Board, but had put her name on a Foreword to the new Manual. It would not surprise me if all of the justices of the Supreme Court had a role.

Although Judge Rosenberg’s letter leaves us guessing at the rationale for the withdrawal, I would like to think that my posts made some contribution.

The AGs’ letter is a good one, but the rationale put forth for the withdrawal is a limited one. Basically, the position taken by the AGs is that the Climate Science chapter went beyond the mission of the Manual of giving neutral advice to the judiciary and veered into taking a substantive position on one of the most contested litigation issues of recent times. Here is an excerpt from the AGs’ letter:

[T]he Fourth Edition [of the Reference Manual] places the judiciary firmly on one side of some of the most hotly disputed questions in current litigation: climate-related science and “attribution.”

Such work undermines the judiciary’s impartiality and places a thumb on one side of the scale.

It does so even as these issues are pending before the Supreme Court and other parts of the federal judiciary.

We ask that the Center immediately withdraw the inappropriate “Reference Manual on Climate Science” included in the Fourth Edition.

Judges should resolve these issues through the ordinary processes of litigation—not by way of a judicially driven, committee-led, quasi-amicus brief. . . . [T]he authors offer unsolicited, ex parte expert opinions on matters that they recognize are directly at issue in ongoing suits.

That’s good as far as it goes; but they never quite get to saying explicitly that the “attribution” studies endorsed by the chapter are logically incorrect pseudoscience.

The studies are pseudoscience because they talk around in circles to evade ever being subject to a test of falsifiability. The Federal Judiciary just came within a hair of endorsing what Richard Feynman famously called “cargo cult science.”

As a great illustration of the problem of non- falsifiability of attribution of weather events to fossil-fuel driven climate change, a reader sends along to me screenshots of two articles from the New York Times, one from two years ago and the other from yesterday.

Article headline discussing the unusually warm winter and its connection to climate change, featuring a seated person in a park-like setting.
People walking on snow-covered streets in Jersey City, N.J. during a winter storm, with cars seen in the background.

Over at the New York Times, they don’t have anybody smart enough to realize that this sort of evasion of the principle of falsifiability undermines the whole game of “attribution.” But maybe some of the people who count in the federal judiciary have figured it out.

Now let’s see if we can get some results on the Endangerment Finding.

Book titled 'Federal Reference Manual On Scientific Evidence' with a note stating 'Climate Science Chapter — Withdrawn!' displayed against a backdrop of dark, stormy clouds and icy waters.

Would You Trust the National Academies of Science to Tell You How Science Works?

Francis Menton’s February 5, 2026, post specifically critiques the “How Science Works” chapter in the newly released Fourth Edition of the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, a document co-developed with NASEM input.

Professor Michael Weisberg ´s work focuses on philosophy of science, particularly models and idealization in scientific practice, philosophy of biology, and related areas like simulation and global climate issues. He has also taken on administrative roles and advisory positions on climate-related topics.

A man holding a globe in one hand and a smartphone in the other, with colorful text and graphics in the background, including a prominent red button labeled 'Deny Science.'

Francis Menton’s February 5, 2026, post specifically critiques the “How Science Works” chapter in the newly released Fourth Edition of the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, a document co-developed with NASEM input.

Professor Michael Weisberg ´s work focuses on philosophy of science, particularly models and idealization in scientific practice, philosophy of biology, and related areas like simulation and global climate issues. He has also taken on administrative roles and advisory positions on climate-related topics.

A man with short hair and a beard smiling, with text above him criticizing politicized pseudoscience and suggesting that data should be changed to fit narratives.

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From The Manhattan Contrarian

By Francis Menton

My last two posts have been about the new Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, just out (December 31) from the Federal Justice Center. The Chair of that Center is U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts. The latest version of the Manual is the Fourth Edition. The prior version in 2011 was the Third Edition; and there were also two prior Editions from 2000 and 1994.

In those previous two posts, I principally criticized a newly- added chapter in the Fourth Edition titled “Reference Guide on Climate Science.” Today, I want to take a look at another chapter titled “How Science Works.” There was no such chapter in the First Edition, but a chapter by that title, written by a guy named David Goodstein (an Emeritus Professor at Caltech), was added in the Second Edition. In the Third Edition, Goodstein’s chapter was somewhat modified and slightly expanded (from 16 pages to 18). Goodstein died in 2024, and in the Fourth Edition he has been replaced by Michael Weisberg and Anastasia Thanukos, who have now produced a chapter with the same title, but now running to some 61 pages.

In my January 31 post, my comment on the Weisberg/Thanukos work product was that it was “not too terrible,” but that it was “way longer than it needs to be” and “the most important points are buried.” Further comparing this chapter to the chapter on (so-called) “climate science” (which is entirely hoakum) I continue the view that there are some good points here. However, there are also some serious flaws, and I don’t want to move on without pointing some of those out.

Let’s start with the identity of the lead author. Weisberg is said to be a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. One part of that gives great pause, and it’s not that Weisberg is a Professor of Philosophy rather than of some field of science. I think that the nature of the scientific method and of the development of scientific knowledge is actually a bona fide part of philosophy, namely logic. So, the part of Weisberg’s resume that gives me pause is instead that he works at the University of Pennsylvania. That is the institution that in 2022 hired the single biggest charlatan pseudoscientist in the entire country, namely Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, and gave him a top University Professorship. Has Weisberg ever spoken out against Mann, or criticized him in any way? Not that I can find. So, for starters, here we have a guy who is willing to look past and excuse the worst of the worst in the way of politicized pseudoscience.

As I said in the previous post, there are many things here to which I can subscribe, and I should start with those. As the most important example, the section on “Key Traits of Science,” beginning at page 60, basically has it right. Subsections include: “Science Investigates the Natu­ral World and Natu­ral Explanations”; “Science Investigates Testable Hypotheses”; and “Science Responds to Evidence.” So far, so good.

But in the process of generating a way-too-long 60+ pages, Weisberg veers badly off track from time to time. There are too many examples to cover them all in a short blog post, but here are a several of the more important:

Is Science a method of inquiry or a body of accepted knowledge (or both)?

Weisberg gets this one completely wrong. From page 50:

Science is both a body of knowledge and the ­ process for building that knowledge based on evidence acquired through observation, experiment, and simulation. The term is accurately applied to knowledge on a wide variety of topics and to diverse lines of inquiry.

I completely disagree. The idea that Science can be a body of knowledge is where we get pronouncements from a priestly class that “The Science” has established such and so, and therefore we mere laymen and peons are not allowed to question it. That is the opposite of the scientific method. So, science cannot be both the method that questions all allegedly accepted propositions, and also a body of accepted knowledge. Richard Feynmann’s definition of science is the one I subscribe to: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Confused treatment of the concept of falsification.

At the beginning of a subsection titled “Science Does Not Prove Hypotheses,” Weisberg states “No ­ matter how much evidence supports or refutes it, a hypothesis cannot be absolutely proven true or false.” I agree that a hypothesis cannot absolutely be proven true, but how about false?

After making that statement, Weisberg goes through a series of examples, all of which are instances of how a hypothesis can still turn out to be false even after much accumulation of corroborating evidence.

Yes. But he gives no examples of the opposite circumstance, where a hypothesis could turn out to be true after falsified by definitive evidence. In discussing the subject, he confuses the logic of advancing knowledge through a process of falsification with a very separate concept, which is the practical difficulty of accumulating unambiguous evidence.

Sloppy statements about “accepted science” and “consensus.”

In the midst of otherwise sensible sub-sections and paragraphs, sloppy sentences repeatedly appear about things deemed to be “accepted science” and “consensus.” For example, from page 64:

Despite its tentative nature, accepted scientific knowledge is reliable.

Well, Michael, which “accepted” scientific knowledge is “reliable”? All of it? And, “accepted” by whom? By your friends? By my friends?

By the orthodox climate clique? How can someone make such a statement after the “accepted science” Covid debacle of lock- downs and masking and “social distancing” that we have just been through, not to mention the endless and ongoing climate scam?

Weisberg continues:

Such [“accepted science”] explanations generate predictions that hold true in many differ­ent contexts and at many diff er­ ent scales, allowing us to figure out how entities in the natu­ral world are likely to behave and how we can harness that understanding to solve prob­lems and dispense justice.

Well, “accepted science” explanations do generate useful predictions in some circumstances, and in other circumstances they prove to be completely wrong. The only thing significant about real science (the method) is providing a method to distinguish between those two categories. Weisberg does not do that.

Correlation and causation

From page 92:

While the often-­stated maxim that correlation does not imply causation is true, in fact, correlation is the only means that we have of establishing causation in science.

That’s just completely wrong. We absolutely have a way of “establishing causation” — or at least of progressively ruling out causes other than our hypothesized cause — which is by disproof of the null hypothesis. In the most common example with which almost everyone is familiar, pharmaceutical companies seeking approval of a drug are required to (at least tentatively) prove its efficacy by disproving the null hypothesis that a placebo is as good or better.

Weisberg follows the statement I quote above with a long example about how the causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer was established through a long series of studies proving correlation. Yes, in part. But those studies also disproved the null hypothesis that people or animals not exposed to inhaled tobacco smoke got lung cancer at the same rate.

Conclusion

So, the operating hypothesis is that Professor Weisberg wrote this chapter in complete good faith to give the courts a neutral guide to science, and the flaws I have identified are just a few innocent mis-steps attributable to short deadlines or sloppiness. But then there’s the null hypothesis that what I say are flaws were actually very intentionally inserted to give support to the litigation efforts of the most politicized consensus “science” scams going on these days, starting with the climate alarm scam. I kind of think that we are close to having to reject the original operating hypothesis in favor of the null hypothesis.