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 27 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.
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.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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