Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The Federal Judicial Center’s “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence” is supposed to help federal judges understand scientific evidence and methodologies. Judges increasingly confront complex scientific questions and need reliable tools to evaluate expert testimony. The reference manual is one such tool — or at least most of it is.
In a very anti-scientific turn, and without catching the irony, “How Science Works” misleadingly suggests that broad consensus — not reason, test results, or repeatability — constitutes “the highest level of certainty science has to offer.”
Hand with black glove pushing on scale of justice in dark room with black background. Concept of injustice, espionage, partiality, law.
The Federal Judicial Center’s “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence” is supposed to help federal judges understand scientific evidence and methodologies. Judges increasingly confront complex scientific questions and need reliable tools to evaluate expert testimony. The reference manual is one such tool — or at least most of it is.
At the request of 27 states’ attorneys general, the Federal Judicial Center recently removed the manual’s chapter on climate science because it did more to influence judicial outcomes than to help federal judges evaluate scientific evidence. And the reference guide’s chapter called “How Science Works” is guilty of a similar offense.
Judicial reference manuals should teach judges how to evaluate scientific evidence—not tell them which scientific conclusions to draw. Unfortunately, “How Science Works” does a lot more telling than teaching, putting a green-agenda thumb on the scales of justice. So, as The Buckeye Institute and other concerned public policy organizations expressed in a letter to the Federal Judicial Center, the dubious chapter has to go.
In a very anti-scientific turn, and without catching the irony, “How Science Works” misleadingly suggests that broad consensus — not reason, test results, or repeatability — constitutes “the highest level of certainty science has to offer.” It then asserts that the hypothesis of man-made climate change has reached such “scientific consensus,” despite that hypothesis’s many contested, untested, and controversial claims. The chapter goes on to contravene important legal authorities and doctrines that govern expert testimony.
Federal Rule of Evidence 702, for example, requires courts to determine whether expert testimony rests on sufficient facts or data, results from reliable principles and methods, and reflects a reliable application of those principles and methods to the facts of the case. The rule emphasizes that applying an expert’s methodology to the facts is critical to whether scientific evidence gets admitted in court. Similarly, in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court explained that science’s method of generating hypotheses and testing them to determine whether they can be falsified is what distinguishes science from other forms of inquiry. Daubert ruled that when it comes to scientific evidence, the quality of an expert’s methodology should trump consensus or “widespread acceptance.” The court may be surprised — and not amused — to learn that the federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence dismissively calls the scientific method’s authoritative role a “myth.”
Elevating a so-called consensus over rigorous methodology when weighing scientific evidence in the courtroom risks serious, real-world consequences for litigants, especially in the energy sector. What federal judges read about scientific evidence in judicial reference guides will influence how they evaluate scientific evidence at trial, and those evaluations may mean billions of dollars in unwarranted liability.
As climate-related litigation marches across America and energy companies defend themselves and their business decisions against the charge of inflicting climate change, judges and juries should not be encouraged to rely on agenda-driven “consensus” to render their verdicts. Courts may be asked, for example, whether a particular climate model establishes causation; whether an attribution methodology supports a particular claim for damages; or whether an expert’s assumptions justify imposing liability on an energy company. Those questions should not be answered with “four-out-of-five scientists agree,” as if judges were shopping for a new toothpaste.
Instead, the Federal Judicial Center should remove the “How Science Works” chapter from its reference manual, or else rewrite it to conform with Daubert and the center’s own historical approach to judicial guides. When the first edition of the manual was published, the center explained that it was providing the bench with primers on scientific methods and identifying issues on which experts might disagree. The current edition strays far from that circumspect position, all but telling judges what to think rather than how to think about a contested scientific conclusion.
In October, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Suncor Energy Inc. v. Boulder County, a case in which climate activists hope to impose a very expensive net-zero carbon agenda nationwide. The parties and the country should hope that the Suncor decision adheres to science derived by the scientific method and eschews today’s “widely held beliefs” that may or may not be so widely held tomorrow.
American energy depends on sound, objective science to fuel the future. And American litigants deserve an objective judiciary not primed with politically predetermined conclusions presented as scientific fact.
Under Pope Francis and now Leo the Catholic Church has drunk deeply of the climate Kool-Aid, says Professor Roger Watson. It’s about time it quit the pseudo-scientific scaremongering and got back to saving souls.
Under Pope Francis and now Leo the Catholic Church has drunk deeply of the climate Kool-Aid, says Professor Roger Watson. It’s about time it quit the pseudo-scientific scaremongering and got back to saving souls.
How the Roman Catholic Church moved from its great commission to save souls to its current obsession with saving the planet is not clear. But it is obvious that the hierarchy of the Church has drunk deeply of the climate change Kool-Aid and, and while it would be unfair to say that it has abandoned saving souls, its mission has certainly drifted considerably into an area which is not exactly within its area of expertise. Wherever it is getting its advice on climate change from, it is most definitely listening to the wrong people.
The problem, as some Catholics see it, is demonstrated amply in a column in the September issue of Middlesbrough Diocesan Catholic Voice – known locally as the Voice – which is distributed to and through parish churches in the Middlesbrough Catholic Diocese. It is always with trepidation that I take a copy from the pile at the back after Sunday Mass.
The Voice, while it contains useful diocesan information, dates of events and news from the parishes, almost always has at least one article which, for me, is an ‘occasion of sin’ as to read it conjures up thoughts which are far from Christian. My only justification being that this is engendered by reading content that is far from Christian. Inevitably, if we do not have a report on the oxymoronic concept of the Diocesan LGBT Masses it will be an article on the so-called climate emergency.
Blessed are the carbon conscious
The September issue of Middlesbrough Diocesan Catholic Voice contains an article by Sir John Battle, former Labour MP for Leeds West and a minister in the Blair government titled ‘Stop taking a climate change gamble’. A Roman Catholic and made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory by Pope Benedict XVI – who clearly didn’t get everything right – Sir John hinges his argument on the gambling industry and the obvious love of gambling among the British people.
The first quarter of the article, on the popularity of gambling and its possibility of easy returns for one’s money, is rather tenuously linked to the gamble that we are taking over climate change. This expectation of quick profit is blotting out people’s minds to the realities of what we can do to mitigate the damage of global warming.
The customary superlatives are used to support his argument. Thus “wildfires rage” across Europe and “devastating floods” hit Bangladesh. Never mind that the fires in Europe were almost certainly deliberately caused by arsonists and that there have been floods in Bangladesh for as long as anyone can remember. Add to that the news that, far from melting, the polar caps are increasing in size, the polar bears and penguins are thriving and coral reefs are growing. The facts must not stand in the way of a good argument. After all, there is a “scientific consensus” on the issue and “daily news reports of worldwide extreme climatic events”. So, it must be true.
Sins of emission
Sir John explains that the much bandied Net Zero mantra “does not mean producing zero emissions but rather taking action to reduce emissions as much as possible”. If so, then why call it ‘Net Zero’ and why does the UK have a target of Net Zero by 2050? According to the University of Oxford’s Net Zero Centre, Net Zero means “balancing the greenhouse gases put into the air with an equal amount taken back out”. That is a subtlety I have never heard any of the zero carbon fanatics explain on BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
Sir John refers to the “merchants of doubt”, pointing the finger at Big Carbon (not Sir John’s description) who have “financial interests” in not reducing our use of hydrocarbon sources. This leads people to doubt anything untoward will happen to them because of climate change due to the gambling mentality referred to in the initial paragraphs of his article. These “powerful vested interests” – spoken like a true socialist Sir John – then try to shift the blame on to consumers and society. But the consumers in turn think ‘why bother?’ when places like China and America carry on emitting greenhouse gases like there is no tomorrow.
Having seemingly criticised Big Carbon and such vested interests in trying to offload their responsibilities for the planet onto the little people, Sir John then quotes arch climate catastrophist Gabriel Winslow-Yost, who reckons climate change to be a “crime” and that we are all “implicated”. Winslow-Yost, clearly a lover of dramatic prose, says, “car rides and plane trips, coffees and burgers, heating and cooling and clothing are paid for in blood, contributing every moment to the suffering and destruction global warming brings”. My goodness, but he sounds like he’d be a regular hoot on a night out, doesn’t he?
The catechism of climate change
As if to give his article some theological clout he quotes Pope Leo who “insists” that climate change is “a scientific reality and a moral responsibility”. I think you’ll find, Pope Leo, that you are wrong on both counts there. Laudato Si’, the late Pope Francis’s execrable encyclical letter, is quoted twice, including his ridiculous exhortation to “ecological conversion”. We Catholics had all hoped for better from Pope Leo, but he seems to have fallen for the climate change catastrophe agenda as much as anyone, referring to concepts such as “environmental justice” and how it is part of the Church’s mission to “promote human dignity, peace and care for creation”.
It is hard to know what lies behind all this nonsense being spouted by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and by senior Catholics who should know better. Are they – as I fear they might be – genuine believers in the climate change catastrophe? Perhaps they are trying to be ‘relevant’ and ‘relatable’ by addressing topical concerns in a vain attempt to fill the pews. If so, why would that work? If people want to hear scientific social justice based gobbledygook, there is always the Anglican Church, the BBC or the Guardian.
The Catholic Church rightly encourages Christians to be good stewards of creation, but has that stewardship begun to eclipse salvation? Reducing carbon emissions seems to be a greater priority than reducing sin. The Church’s unique mission is to proclaim the Gospel, administer the sacraments and prepare souls for eternity. If it chooses to become just another voice in the chorus of climate activism, it should not be surprised if people conclude that it has become more interested in saving the planet than in saving the souls of the people who inhabit it.
Professor Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including the Salisbury Review, the European Conservative and the New Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. His Substack can be found here.
A recent article at The Blaze, “Elena Kagan gave bogus science a blind endorsement,” says Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s glowing forward endorsing the Federal Judicial Center’s (FJC) “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (RMSE)” was inappropriate and careless, since she has subsequently said she hadn’t read the document. The RMSE is biased, giving undo weight to so-called “scientific consensus” over empirical data.
A recent article at The Blaze, “Elena Kagan gave bogus science a blind endorsement,” says Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s glowing forward endorsing the Federal Judicial Center’s (FJC) “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (RMSE)” was inappropriate and careless, since she has subsequently said she hadn’t read the document. The RMSE is biased, giving undo weight to so-called “scientific consensus”over empirical data. At least one of the chapters was written in large part by plaintiffs’ advocates and supporters in ongoing climate litigation, including a case soon to be argued before the Supreme Court. The Blaze’s recommended fixes, rewriting the document to restore neutrality and restoring an emphasis on data and evidence, as well as its suggestion that judges be cautious in relying on such manuals, are on the mark. In addition, Kagan shouldrecuse herself from the pending climate case, since her claimed uninformed endorsement of one side of the argument in advance gives the appearance of impropriety.
The post, written by the CO2 Coalition’s executive director Angela Wheeler, describes how at a recent Senate hearing Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan admitted that she never actually read the FJC manual that she wrote a forward for. Her forward, troublingly, describes the manual as objective and neutral, and suggests that it would be a reliable resource “for judges handling cases involving complex scientific evidence,” including climate related litigation.
Wheeler examined previous editions of the manual, finding them scientifically rigorous. Those earlier editions stressed the need to rely on hard science, data, and the scientific method. By contrast, the recent edition that Kagan signed off on had multiple chapters that placed emphasis on “social considerations and consensus among experts while giving less attention to the rigorous testing that separates science from assertion.”
This is an issue previously raised at Climate Realism and discussed here and here.Climate Change Weekly raised concerns about problems with the RMSE here, here, and here. The fourth edition of the FJC manual originally had an entire chapter devoted to climate change, which alarmingly was penned by activists and climate-plaintiff lawyers who were involved in ongoing climate lawsuits filed against energy companies. Those authors and contributors have clear interests in the science being interpreted their way to produce the outcomes they desire. Objective discussion of climate data had no place in the manual.
Attribution studies claiming that individual weather events could be attributed at least in part to specific emissions are unscientific, based on notably flawed and inadequate computer models that have consistently produced inaccurate forecasts. Climate Realism has discussed the myriad problems with attribution “science” here.
Models, of course, aren’t data, and neither is scientific consensus. Wheeler explains that consensus and collaboration matter and can lead to useful evidence, “[b]ut ‘widespread agreement’ cannot substitute for disciplined scrutiny, especially in court.”
In the case of the so-called “climate consensus,” there is a lot less consensus than activists would have us believe. The actual areas of scientific agreement are much more nuanced. Few scientists believe in anything like a “climate catastrophe,” or that individual storms can be blamed on any particular oil and gas company.
The most egregious chapter of the FJC manual was removed after public outcry, but the consensus narrative and subtle pushes towards activist-driven science remain.
Wheeler suggests that it is not too late for FJC to restore trust. To do so, the manual needs to emphasize data and “empirical verification, seek broader input from experts without policy entanglements, and reaffirm the manual’s limited role as a procedural guide rather than an arbiter of scientific truth.” She goes on to say that manuals like this shouldn’t be used as shortcuts or substitutes for research, but as mere “starting points.”
These steps are likely to help FJC look more trustworthy. However, it is still a problem that Justice Kagan was so negligent in praising a manual she now claims to have not read, especially when it addressed how to interpret science matters pending to a case before the Supreme Court.
With a major climate litigation case coming up in October, it is more important than ever that judges are not tricked into accepting overstated and politicized climate attribution studies, among other theoretical model-based presentations, as evidence. The standard for science, whether inside or outside the courtroom, should never be mere speculation, but solid proof.
Use simple keyword searches (“climate change,” “global warming”) on academic databases.
Sample thousands of papers and have (often non-expert) raters evaluate only the abstracts for “endorsement” of human-caused warming.
Count papers as part of the “consensus” even if unrelated to climate attribution (e.g., fingerprint solvents mentioning warming in passing, steel corrosion, biodiesel blends, refrigerated warehouses, political philosophy on “climate justice”).
It was counted as part of the purported 99% scientific consensus on human-caused climate change by Lynas, et al. (2021).
It’s a paper about solvents for exposing fingerprints. It has nothing to do with climate science or the focused empirical question of human contributions to the observed warming. Why was it included?
It was included because it mentioned global warming in its abstract. I kid you notly. This obviously hints at a deeper problem. Why would a journal article be counted as part of a “consensus” to begin with (since the unit of consensus is people, not articles), why is the abstract relevant, who cares if an abstract mentions global warming, and how could a paper about fingerprint solvents possibly be included? (You can read the abstract in the Appendix below.)
It’s not an outlier. Here are some other articles that were counted as relevant “climate science” papers and included in the false 99% estimate:
None of these papers have anything to do with climate science. Some of them have nothing to do with science. What happened here?
This climate change consensus study was conducted by leftist activists who did the following:
Not knowing how to perform a literature search or a systematic review on pertinent climate science questions, they simply searched the academic literature for the keywords “climate change”, “global climate change”, and “global warming”.
They took a random sample of 3,000 of the resulting papers and had their team of lay activists read the abstracts — just the abstracts.
Their team of activists rated the abstracts on whether they took a position on human-caused warming and their level of endorsement of the proposition that humans are causing warming.
They then counted the papers/abstracts they scored as endorsing the proposition and divided that by the total that they claimed took a position on the topic. They called the resulting percentage the “scientific consensus” on human-caused climate change.
Why would anyone do this? It’s not a method known to science and has no name. It’s not a remotely valid way to measure a consensus on any topic. It’s a spurious recreational activity that has no epistemic standing — it tells us nothing about anything. As “research” published in a peer-reviewed journal article, it’s completely insane and marks an unprecedented collapse of scientific standards.
We don’t care about anyone’s subjective ratings of abstracts with respect to the authors’ views on a topic. That’s not anything. Given that Lynas and friends counted a fingerprint solvent paper and several steelmaking papers as relevant climate science research, they lack the intelligence to even implement their invalid method properly. But even if restricted to relevant climate change attribution papers, their method would still be invalid — it would still be spurious recreational activity that has no place in a peer-reviewed journal.
We simply can’t do anything with a count of papers based on someone’s opinions of their abstracts, the set based on a keyword search, or any subsequent acts of division or other arithmetic. That’s not anything. Yet this study was widely promoted by legacy leftist media like the Guardian:
These activists didn’t come up with this on their own. They copied the method from the infamous 97% consensus paper by Cook, et al. (2012), which was also fraudulent in addition to being invalid. It was Cook who had the deranged idea of having lay leftist activists working from home (including the founder of Timbuk2 luggage) rate the abstracts of thousands of irrelevant journal articles they didn’t understand, based on “climate change” keyword matching. Cook’s 97% “climate science consensus” includes a welding paper by Volvo engineers, several other steelmaking papers, several diarrhea papers, an article on cooking stove use, etc. (more here) But again, the deeper issue is that the core method of rating and counting abstracts is irreparably invalid.
The same journal — Environmental Research Letters — published both of these papers.
To measure the consensus on human-caused warming, we’d survey relevant climate scientists with smart, focused, well-written questions on human causation, the likely extent of any human contribution, confidence in various future projections and scenarios, confidence in any effects on non-warming variables like extreme weather, hurricanes, etc. The unit of consensus is people, not papers — papers cannot be used for several obvious reasons, and they certainly can’t be assessed by lay leftist activists (and not merely through their abstracts!).
That’s how you’d measure the climate science consensus. There’s no other core method — you have to ask the relevant scientists directly. Such surveys are best implemented by non-leftists, people committed to rigor. Note that we’d still need a reason to care about this topic and any consensus around it…
Zoom out
Caring about a “consensus” on any topic is optional and we need a fuller epistemological framework to have an informed stance on the question of consensus and in what contexts we’d take it into consideration. Referring to an expert consensus is an authoritarian heuristic and we only need heuristics in emergencies or when substantive, rational methods aren’t available. Recent history is full of false scientific consensi, especially when driven by leftist ideology, for example that abolishing the use of test scores in college admissions would be fine, that sterilizing and mutilating trans-identified children is supported by quality evidence1, various claims about racism in policing, claims that COVID vaccines prevented infection and transmission, and that there was good evidence that masking in public reduced COVID spread (it’s not clear why these random empirical COVID positions became leftist dogma, though they fit the authoritarian nature of the left).
Caring about climate change is also optional. By the somewhat abstract and computationally complex measure Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST), the earth has warmed about 1.5 °C in 150 years, likely driven by human carbon emissions, at least in part. A moderate IPCC scenario might project another 1 °C of warming by 2100, an average of about 0.02 °F per year. You can care about that if you want, but there’s no way you or any other biped could notice it over the course of your life — even if you stayed in the same town for 70 years and it saw the same increase as GMST (moving would yield much larger changes up or down, destroying a “climate change” signal). The media can make you think you notice it, but that’s just the power of earth-on-fire imagery and propaganda. Being blasted with climate change propaganda is a profoundly novel way for humans to live, and it’s worth meditating on its effects. Warming is just (mild) change and we have no apparent reason to view the 19th-century baseline as optimal or to particularly care about a complex global average temperature (you live where you live), and cold is much deadlier to humans than warmth.
Enter Social Psychologists
Leftist activist and NYU social psychology professor Jay Van Bavel led a study that tried to trick participants into adopting a leftist ideological perspective on “climate change”. The researchers particularly wanted to spur activism for coercive left-wing policies like carbon taxes and even taxing meat and dairy (which would harm health). Research aimed at tricking participants to be more leftist is common in social psychology — leftists control the field and activism is an explicit goal of many researchers and organizations.
How did the study approach this? It fed participants propaganda like this:
“Did you know that 99% of expert climate scientists agree that the Earth is warming and climate change is happening, mainly because of human activity (for example, burning fossil fuels)? [Myers et al., Environmental Research Letters; Lynas et al., Environmental Research Letters; Doran and Zimmerman, EOS]”
Yes, they actually cited the insanely invalid Lynas study — the one that counted fingerprint solvent and steelmaking papers as quanta of climate science consensus.
Van Bavel and colleagues couldn’t be troubled to carefully read these journal articles. They just assumed they were valid and true, which is a huge mistake to make about academic output, but of course they’re academics and are unlikely to approach journal articles with the necessary exogenous intelligence and rigor, especially those that advance their political ideology.
They misled their participants by citing one false study (Lynas), one rigged study (Myers), and an old study that asked if human activity was a “significant” factor in warming, not whether warming was mainly due to human activity (Doran and Zimmerman, 2009).
And they didn’t cite any of the higher quality climate consensus research that gave lower estimates than these three cherry-picked papers. As I reported here, high quality studies by professional survey researchers had the consensus at 78-84%. Van Bavel and colleagues showed no rigor or real interest in the topic by not citing the much more valid Farnsworth and Lichter (2012), Bray and von Storch (2014), or Stenhouse, et al. (2014) and using their estimates instead of the 99%.
Key to these numbers was asking if human activity was responsible for most or all of the observed warming. In that case, the results were 78-84%. If asked simply if human activity was a factor or a significant factor, the results are in the high-90s, as with Doran and Zimmerman.
At this point it might not matter. In the decade since the 78-84% studies, the climate scientists who would say human activity is a factor but not the only or primary factor have probably been driven out of the field or retired, so it wouldn’t surprise me if a high-quality survey in 2026 resulted in a 95% or higher estimate.
Note that Van Bavel purports to study “misinformation” and yet he misled his participants citing an insane study that treated fingerprint solvent and philosophy papers as quanta of climate science consensus. Like every academic “misinformation researcher”, he spews a remarkable volume of misinformation into his host civilization. I’ve addressed some of his other false claims here and social psychologist Nathaniel Bork checked my work here.
Zoom In
The Lynas team are activists at an NGO called Alliance for Science…
Yes, sadly we’ve gotten used to leftists naming things the exact opposite of their true nature. Here’s what the “Alliance for Science” had to say about climate “misinformation”:
The second misinformation theme related to the claim that the ongoing climate emergency is ‘fake’ because warming so far has been “mild” and that “life on Earth thrived (and was far greener) when CO2 levels were at least 5X higher than today’s”.
They refer to “the ongoing climate emergency” as an inarguable descriptive fact. Whether 1.5 °C of warming in the last 150 years amounts to an emergency is a subjective judgment, an opinion on a matter of opinion. Leftist dogma is rife with this conversion of subjective appraisals on complex topics into inarguable descriptive facts, and the appraisals are often that something is an “emergency” or “crisis”.
They don’t just convert neurotic opinions on matters of opinion into facts. They treat this dissent as “misinformation” and then try to censor it, using government, social media companies, etc.
That this organization talks this way gives the lie to their mission being about “science”. This is ideology, not science. You can think climate change is an emergency or that it’s mild — that’s an opinion, an appraisal, and it isn’t a matter settled by science. The way different people even approach the question will vary, including the extent to which science is an input, and which science they refer to.
Lynas also said “the debate about whether climate change is real is well and truly over and is now almost entirely relegated to the lunatic fringe”.
This is a familiar formulation on the left — that “climate change is real”. Van Bavel also traffics in that phrase and seems to think that saying “climate change is real” says something important and makes the case for the whole leftist totalitarian policy package, from taxing energy to taxing or banning food that leftists have long targeted, especially meat.
Climate change is real? Okay… Yes, I’m real, you’re real, komodo dragons are real, and climate change is real. Now what?
The climate has always changed and always will. So what? Let’s tighten it up: I assume they mean that human-caused climate change is real.
Sure, though that’s awkward wording and “climate change” is too broad and vague. Let’s fix it to: human activity has contributed to the recent warming of ≈ 1.5 °C since the 1800s.
And let’s finish the thought by saying we’ll see more warming through 2100, maybe another 1.0 °C, and this will be partly or mostly driven by human activity.
All good? Now what?
Why would we care about warming? Well, we might care if 1) it affected us or humanity generally in significant, harmful ways, and 2) we could prevent these future harms, or reverse any harms we think are currently playing out.
Point #1 alone unfolds into a complex, highly variable topic. I myself have no climate harms to refer to. That is, I don’t know of any harms to me or to anyone I know. Nor do I anticipate any. Leftists increasingly group all bad weather, storms, hurricanes, even wildfires as human-caused “climate change”, but that’s not scientifically rigorous and it’s straightforwardly false in many cases.
Even if I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t be able to detect any impact on my life, say of 0.2 more extreme weather events per year where I live. I don’t know how to notice something like that, and the leftist lifestyle of consuming daily climate change propaganda that attributes so many random climate phenomena to an “ongoing climate emergency” is deeply irrational, unscientific, and unhealthy.
For Point #2, we’d need to be confident that there’s something we could do to prevent or reverse harmful climate change. I’m not sure why we’d believe that. Note that this proposition is far beyond the core proposition for which there is a documented 78-84% consensus — that human activity is the main driver of the observed warming.
Assuming you care about a consensus of academics working in the relevant fields, I’m not aware of any published consensus surveys on questions like whether we could prevent another 1 °C of warming with specific policies or what have you.
The science of mitigation is extremely complex and we need a serious epistemic framework capable of evaluating climate science and its long-term projections and modeling. We don’t have that framework. That is, we don’t have any validated way of assessing climate science at that level of rigor. We might have climate scientists claiming that we can dial back warming with such and such reduction of carbon emissions, but we have no way of evaluating such claims. As a society, we’re not yet operating at that level of rigor and intelligence, and climate science itself might not be operating at the needed level of rigor to satisfy such an epistemic framework.
Now, if we had the necessary exogenous framework and tools, it wouldn’t logically imply support for the totalitarian policies of the left. No one has to support anything. You might not think it’s appropriate or ethical to ban or tax meat in order to cut a 1 °C increase in GMST to a 0.5 °C increase, for example. Or to make energy more expensive for the same purpose. Energy is critical to life.
You might have all sorts of values, principles, and concerns that trump GMST, sea levels, or storm counts. That’s your prerogative as a sentient being. No one is obligated to be a climate-focused utilitarian/totalitarian. You might not think that optimizing the climate of 2100 is a valid government function, or that the premise that a 1-2 degree cooler world is in fact optimal is unfounded, or that even the idea of an optimal GMST is invalid. You might also be aware that climate propaganda has been full of false and inherently implausible scenarios like the recently retracted RCP8.5, which many legacy/leftist media outlets presented as serious science without disclosing its absurd assumptions and methodology.
Leftists aren’t cognizant of the myriad valid reasons why someone might not care about climate change or support their coercive policy agenda. Their way of being on this issue consists of a handful of simple formulations like “climate change is a real” and “climate emergency”, with an eagerness to believe any and all claims that climate change is causing {insert harm}. Nothing is rejected and no claims of harm are seriously examined. Legacy media routinely makes false claims about climate science, from promoting or mischaracterizing junk like RCP8.5 and the Lynas 99.9 percent consensus study, to calling people who approach the issue with rigor “climate deniers”.
I’ve never seen anything like the consensus studies by Cook (2012) and Lynas (2021) — measuring consensus by having conflicted political activists read the abstracts of irrelevant journal articles from an amateur keyword search, followed by deranged arithmetic? Ours was supposed to be a scientific civilization, and this is tantamount to pulling out a Ouija board and crystals. This whole topic is begging for a massive epistemic and scientific upgrade.
Joe Duarte grew up in small copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. You can find him on X here and contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.
Appendix: The fingerprint solvent abstract
Here’s the abstract for “An alternative carrier solvent for fingermark enhancement reagents”:
Solstice® Performance Fluid (PF), trans-1-chloro-3,3,3-trifluoropropene, is presented as an alternative to HFE7100, methoxy-nonafluorobutane, as a carrier solvent in a number of chemical formulations used for the visualisation of latent fingermarks. The supply of HFE7100 may be at risk due to a recent European Union regulation to control global warming. Laboratory trials using split depletions and a pseudo-operational trial of 1000 porous samples have shown that Solstice® PF is a viable alternative to HFE7100 for the chemical formulations of ninhydrin and 1,2-indanedione. Other preliminary trials have also indicated that Solstice® PF can be used as a carrier solvent for the zinc toning of marks found using ninhydrin as well as the α-naphtholflavone fixative solution for iodine developed marks. Results from the pseudo-operational trial demonstrate that the number of marks detected by ninhydrin and 1,2-indanedione formulations for each carrier solvent is comparable. When compared to HFE7100, advantages of Solstice® PF include a very low global warming potential and atmospheric lifetime in addition to a higher wetting index and lower costs. This study also provides a validation study that supports the potential replacement of DFO with 1,2-indanedione.
The Lynas team read this abstract and thought it counted as input into the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. It merely mentions EU regulations regarding global warming and touts the lower “global warming potential” of a new fingerprint solvent, a product category that cannot possibly significantly impact the earth’s surface temperature. This paper has nothing to do with climate science or climate change attribution, but even if it did, no one’s opinions of the abstract are relevant to an estimate of a climate science consensus.
As though the question of whether we should chemically sterilize and/or surgically mutilate children is a legitimate scientific question, rather than an instantly answered ethical one. See my report here.
A new edition of a science education manual for judges departs “sharply” from a “longstanding tradition of neutrality,” say three of America’s most distinguished physicists in a letter to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
A new edition of a science education manual for judges departs “sharply” from a “longstanding tradition of neutrality,” say three of America’s most distinguished physicists in a letter to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
Writing in an open letter to Justice Roberts were Drs. Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, William Happer of Princeton University and Steven Koonin of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Roberts is chairman of the Federal Judicial Center, publisher of the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, whose new chapter on “How Science Works” the letter writers want to be removed.
For decades, the Reference Manual has served as an essential guide for more than 3,000 federal judges and countless state jurists. Cited in over 1,700 judicial opinions, it has helped courts distinguish reliable science from speculation. Its strength has been a commitment to describing how science operates according to the tenets of the 300-year-old scientific method, avoiding political considerations and a drift into pseudoscience.
The letter’s authors, with more than 600 peer-reviewed publications among them, bring unparalleled expertise to the issue. Their concern centers on the replacement of the late David Goodstein’s respected chapter with an overwritten, intellectually deficient 65-page version.
The new chapter’s lead author is philosopher Michael Weisberg, who had a prominent role as a diplomat at United Nations climate proceedings, where he advocated financial payments to small island nations purportedly threatened by a warming planet. The appearance of conflict with his authoring supposedly neutral guidance on scientific evidence is unmistakable—especially in the context of climate litigation involving trillions of dollars in potential liabilities.
The substantive problems are even more serious. Where Goodstein, once a California Institute of Technology physics professor, emphasized the scientific method—generating hypotheses and testing them with data—the new chapter dismisses the scientific method as a “myth.” It elevates “scientific consensus” and “widespread acceptance” as the highest form of certainty, transforming inquiry into a popularity contest.
This inverts the traditional practice of science. As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman observed, the key to science is comparing predictions directly with observation: “If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.”
In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993), the Supreme Court made the same point: Scientific knowledge must be derived by testing hypotheses against reality. Goodstein’s earlier edition said, “Data are the coin of the realm in science,” and theories must make new predictions that can be falsified or verified. Consensus, by contrast, is a sociological phenomenon.
As Michael Crichton famously warned, “If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.” History bears this out. Popular “consensus” on plate tectonics, causes of disease and 20th-century fears of global cooling were overturned by evidence, not votes.
Further revealing the chapter’s activist inclinations is its opening citation of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt, a book that insists there is “zero argument among actual scientists” about catastrophic climate change—a claim countered by mountains of real-world data.
Labeling credentialed dissenters as outside “actual science” has no place in an educational document for judges. Science advances by challenging prevailing views with data, not by enforcing community norms.
The Federal Judicial Center wisely withdrew a chapter on climate science from the manual after 28 state attorneys general documented its conflicts and unsupported claims. Yet the “How Science Works” chapter, written largely to support that now-removed material, remains.
With more than 1,000 climate-related cases pending in state and federal courts, judges deserve guidance rooted in empirical rigor. Lindzen, Happer and Koonin are correct. The Center should promptly withdraw the new chapter and restore Goodstein’s earlier version, which captured the essence of scientific reasoning in language accessible to readers without the scientific background that most jurists lack.
They should also direct the National Academy of Sciences to withdraw both chapters from its version of the Manual. Maintaining the integrity of judicial guidance on science is not a partisan issue.
Justice Roberts and the Federal Judicial Center have an opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to neutrality and restore confidence in the Manual. In an age when science is increasingly politicized, maintaining rigorous standards for what counts as scientific evidence in court is vital. The credibility of the American judicial system requires nothing less.
Originally published on Daily Caller on April 27, 2026.
Angela Wheeler is executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. She is a cum laude graduate of Emporia State University, Kansas, where she studied communication, with additional biology and pre-medicine coursework.
Judges are not scientists, and the Supreme Court has never claimed they should resolve scientific debates. Their role is procedural and evidentiary: to demand that proffered “science” in court meets basic standards of reliability before it influences outcomes in toxic torts, regulatory challenges, or mass litigation. Post-Loper Bright, this gatekeeping is even more critical because agencies no longer get automatic deference on ambiguous statutes involving technical matters.
This is a timely and substantive call, rooted in a specific April 2026 letter from three distinguished physicists—Richard Lindzen (MIT emeritus), William Happer (Princeton emeritus), and Steven Koonin (Stanford Hoover Institution)—to Chief Justice John Roberts. They urge him, as chair of the Federal Judicial Center (FJC), to direct the removal of the new “How Science Works” chapter (65 pages) from the fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence and reinstate the earlier, shorter, neutral version by David Goodstein (former Caltech vice provost).
The scientists argue that the replacement chapter shifts emphasis from the scientific method (testable predictions confronted with data, falsifiability, reproducible results) to “scientific consensus” and “community norms,” which they view as vulnerable to groupthink, funding pressures, and untestable claims—especially in fields like climate science where controlled experiments are limited. They tie this directly to the manual’s influence on thousands of judges handling over 1,000 climate-related cases and warn it risks undermining the Supreme Court’s 2024 Loper Bright decision, which ended Chevron deference and placed greater responsibility on judges to independently evaluate technical and scientific questions in statutory interpretation.
Judges are not scientists, and the Supreme Court has never claimed they should resolve scientific debates. Their role is procedural and evidentiary: to demand that proffered “science” in court meets basic standards of reliability before it influences outcomes in toxic torts, regulatory challenges, or mass litigation. Post-Loper Bright, this gatekeeping is even more critical because agencies no longer get automatic deference on ambiguous statutes involving technical matters.
The latest edition of a scientific reference manual for judges across America is riddled with deficiencies that stem from potential conflicts of interest, politicized language, and assaults on the scientific method.
So says an April letter written to the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by a group of professional climate scientists asking Roberts to intervene in edits made to the latest edition of judicial guidance on science issues.
Restoration News obtained a copy of the letter, penned by scientists with expertise in physics and atmospheric studies, who express serious concerns about the fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The authors claim it departs from what they view as a long-standing practice of neutrality.
The scientists are asking Roberts to direct the Federal Judicial Center to remove one of the manual’s chapters and replace it with earlier version “that remains a concise, accurate, and non-ideological explanation for scientific reasoning appropriate for judicial use.” Otherwise, the scientists warn, the judiciary could be contaminated with faulty evidence.
This is no small administrative manner. In the wake of the 2024 Loper Bright decision by the Supreme Court that reversed the longstanding “Chevron Deference” doctrine, justices now have the freedom to interpret ambiguous laws, instead of deferring that interpretation to bureaucrats. Rather than relying on a federal agency to write its own rules in the face of such statutory ambiguity, judges can now rule whether federal regulations make any sense given the controlling statute.
The new rewrite of guidance to judges appears to constitute a deliberate sabotage of the Loper Bright ruling, once again boxing in judges. In this instance, however, the limitations require judges to consider “scientific consensus” OVER science determined by the scientific method.
This could have direct effects on hundreds of pending and future lawsuits by radical leftists who want to sue Big Oil in the manner they utilized to destroy Big Tobacco in the 1990s. Indeed, this appears to be a naked attempt to rig the game in favor of the “#ExxonKnew” campaign that seeks to hold petroleum companies liable for man-made global warming.
These lawsuits are projected to cause trillions of dollars’ worth of damage, not just to Big Oil, but the entire economy—which, after all, runs principally on oil and natural gas.
What Is the Federal Judicial Center?
Most Americans likely have no idea this agency even exists.
The Federal Judicial Center is the primary research and education agency for the United States federal courts, established by Congress in 1967. Located in Washington, D.C., it improves judicial administration by educating federal judges and staff, researching court operations, and preserving judicial history, all while operating without policymaking or enforcement authority.
As a separate agency within the judicial branch, the Federal Judicial Center has the congressionally assigned role of providing accurate, objective information to federal judges. By statute, the chief justice serves as the center’s chair.
Since the chapter in question in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence adopts what the letter’s signatories describe as an “advocacy framework,” as opposed to scientific one, they argue, it should be disqualified as reference material. The timing is critical as the letter says there are more than 1,000 climate-related cases working their way through state and federal courts. The Reference Manual is provided to more than 6,000 state and federal judges across America, making it a highly influential document since most judges are not trained in science.
Standing out from the pack is the litigation over the Trump administration’s decision to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding” that declared CO2 a pollutant.
In February, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that his agency would reverse the Obama-era rule while saving American taxpayers more than $1.3 trillion in the process. The endangerment finding sits at the center of costly climate regulations that restrict consumer choice.
The problem began in 2007 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPAthat greenhouse gases could qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. In its 5–4 decision, the high court gave climate activists the greenlight they needed—via the EPA—to exert widespread control over the economy without congressional input.
Since the high court’s ideological complexion has changed since that time, litigation over Zeldin’s rule change could lead to a new ruling that overturns the 2007 decision. But that scenario will become less likely if federal judges do not have access to material that plays it straight with the science.
Even the Law Agrees: Consensus Is Not Science
In 1993, the Supreme Court established a precise definition of the scientific method in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. The letter to Roberts points out that the third edition of the Reference Manual, published in 1994, relies on this ruling, as well as the long-established acceptance of the scientific method as the “gold standard” for scientific evidence.
But the manual’s new chapter on science conflicts with the scientific method. The emphasis the chapter places on “scientific consensus” and “widespread acceptance” conflicts with the scientific method because consensus is a sociological phenomenon not rooted in science. They write:
Consensus is an inferior and inherently fragile substitute for the gold-standard of science: testable predictions confronted with data. It is invoked primarily in fields where controlled experiments are difficult or impossible and where predictions cannot be decisively tested. It is vulnerable to groupthink, funding lock-in, and the natural human reluctance to acknowledge error.
The revised chapter uses an absurd flowchart to justify the use of consensus, on page 97, that stacks logical fallacies on top of each other like cordwood:
Just as bad is how the revised chapter “mischaracterizes” science as a community-governed enterprise rather than a quest for objective truth. “Science is indeed a human activity,” the letter says,” but its authority derives from reproducible results, not from community norms or majority agreement.”
Scientists Grounded in the Scientific Method
Three scientists signed the letter: Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; William Happer, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University; and Steven Koonin, the Edward Teller senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
They credit the Federal Judicial Center for removing a chapter titled “Reference Guide on Climate Science” in response to correspondence from 28 state attorneys general that documented conflicts of interest and unsupported claims.
But here’s why there’s still a problem: A chapter underpinning the removed chapter remains in place. It is this massive chapter—titled “How Science Works”—that Lindzen, Happer, and Koonin want replaced with an earlier neutral and apolitical version:
Although the climate chapter has been removed, the chapter that undergirded it—”How Science Works”—remains. This chapter, 65 pages long, replaces the much shorter and widely respected 18-page version written for earlier editions by David Goodstein, former Vice Provost of Caltech. The new chapter does not acknowledge the prior version, nor does it resemble it in substance or tone.
The lead author of the new chapter, Professor Michael Weisberg, is a philosopher who also serves as a climate diplomat and advisor to several national delegations at the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP) negotiations. His public biography highlights his work developing strategies to secure climate-related financial transfers for small island states. These roles do not inherently disqualify him. But hey do create a clear appearance of conflict when writing a chapter intended to guide judges on what constitutes legitimate scientific evidence—particularly in litigation where trillions of dollars may be at stake.
The director of the Federal Judicial Center has deleted the climate science chapter from its version of the manual.
But confusingly, the National Academy of Sciences will not remove the chapter from its printed and online versions of the same manual. Instead, the organization has opted for “asterisked language” to indicate that the Federal Judicial Center has omitted the chapter from its own version of the manual.
The resulting confusion could create vulnerabilities for activist judges to exploit in favor of environmental activists—perhaps deliberately.
Chief Justice Roberts could implement an immediate fix: Simply revert to the original version of “How Science Works,” which relied solely on the scientific method.
That fix would alleviate all confusion and guide judges toward ruling according to actual science—not agenda-driven political activism disguised as “scientific consensus.”
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