Lawfare’s Fingerprints Are All Over National Academies’ Landmark Climate Report

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine just released a major report on extreme event attribution science, the increasingly trendy climate alarmism field that tries to pin specific hurricanes, heat waves, or floods on human-caused climate change and, more importantly, on the oil and gas companies activists love to sue.

The headlines from the usual media suspects will predictably claim the science has “advanced.” What they won’t emphasize is the report’s own admission that the field still faces “significant challenges,” or the roster of climate litigation partisans who helped shape it.

President Donald Trump immediately questioned the report’s legitimacy, and the reason why is pretty simple: The report was heavily influenced by academics and activists with apparent conflicts of interest.

One example is Michael Burger of Columbia’s Sabin Center, who also serves as of counsel to the Sher Edling firm in Honolulu’s climate lawfare effort targeting the oil and gas industry. In that role, Burger could benefit if courts start accepting these studies as proof of liability. The report’s acknowledgments thank him anyway while making no meaningful disclosure of his conflicts.

Oh.

But wait, there are more! Delta Merner of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who runs their Climate Accountability Campaign and Science Hub for — guess what? — Climate Litigation, served on the committee itself into early 2025.

Jessica Wentz, another Sabin Center figure previously tied to a now-rescinded Federal Judicial Center climate chapter written by litigation advocates, shows up in the acknowledgments.

So does Michael Wehner, linked to the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project, which trains judges on these very issues. One of the report’s own authors, Joyce Kimutai, has publicly argued that the “bar is too high” for using attribution in court and that the burden of proof should flip to the defendants. That’s not science talking. That’s advocacy.

The National Academies’ own conflict-of-interest policy demands advice “free from undue influence” from interested parties. This lineup makes a mockery of that standard.