National Academy Of Sciences President Acknowledges Climate Guide Authors’ Ties To Plaintiffs

The president of the National Academy of Sciences claimed that the authors behind a climate science guide for federal judges had significantly more ties to plaintiffs than to defendants in litigation involving climate issues.

National Academy of Sciences (NAS) President Neil Shubin made the claim during an interview with Science magazine Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp published Thursday, nearly a month after the Academy removed a climate science section from its website and announced an independent review of the process used to produce it.

“Neil Shubin just admitted that the National Academies’ climate chapter in the ‘Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition,’ was never impartial science,” American Energy Institute CEO and founder Jason Isaac, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“It was litigation strategy dressed up in a lab coat. In his own words, the authors were ‘associated more with the plaintiffs’ side than with the defense side,’ and the chapter skipped the conflict-of-interest review NASEM [National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine] claims makes its work credible in the first place,” Isaac continued.

Shubin defended the decision to conduct another examination during his interview with Science while acknowledging criticism that the Academy was yielding to political pressure.

The perception surrounding the climate chapter warranted a new examination and that the Academy needed to take a “new fresh look” at the process behind it, Shubin said during the interview.

The National Academy of Sciences did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

The Oversight Project, a conservative watchdog organization, published an April report alleging that portions of the chapter closely resembled a 2020 climate attribution paper co-authored by Columbia Law professor Michael Burger. The group claimed that approximately 33% of the chapter matched previously published material; Burger’s 2020 paper alone appeared to account for approximately 23%.

The climate chapter’s acknowledgments also credited Burger with providing “insights and helpful feedback,” according to the Oversight Project.