The move by the Federal Judicial Center in the U.S. leaves judges without any official support on how to weigh evidence about basic weather and climate changes,
U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. (Phil Roeder, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Under pressure from Republican state attorneys general, the agency that advises the U.S. Supreme Court and federal judges on scientific and technical matters has withdrawn the entirety of its content on climate change from a new judicial reference manual.
The move by the Federal Judicial Center leaves judges without any official support on how to weigh evidence about basic weather and climate changes just as numerous climate cases make their way through state and federal courts, including two on the docket of the U.S. Supreme Court for the current term.
The center was created as an education agency and is chaired by Chief Justice John Roberts. By law, it is charged with overseeing court policies and researching technical and scientific issues that come before the court. The Supreme Court press office did not respond to a request for comment.
On Dec. 31, 2025, the center released the first update in 15 years of its 1,682-page peer-reviewed guide, called the “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence,” including more than 90 pages defining climate terminology and describing the state of scientific consensus on climate change and the methods used to attribute specific weather events to climate warming and its causes.
The chapter acknowledges uncertainty in some areas of climate science; it generally reflects the conclusions of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The manual, widely cited and relied upon by law clerks and justices, is produced in partnership with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and also includes chapters on artificial intelligence, DNA identification and epidemiology, among other subjects.
It is considered among the most important and trusted guides for justices grappling with technical material, in large part because it is endorsed by the judicial branch itself.
Its publication of the chapter on climate change, however, drew immediate criticism from conservatives, who allege that the section is slanted against oil and gas producers and represents an effort by activists to sway the opinion of judges deliberating on current cases.
The withdrawal comes as a number of lawsuits seek to hold oil and gas companies accountable for the damage caused by climate change, which has been scientifically linked to the emissions produced by burning fossil fuels.
Republican attorneys general have repeatedly criticized these lawsuits, accusing liberal groups of using tort law to enact regulatory policy and supporting efforts to have cases dismissed or moved into federal court.
On Feb. 2, more than 20 Republican attorneys general wrote to the House and Senate judiciary committees stating that the manual is “tainted by biased authors, reviewers, and sources involved in ongoing litigation,” and that it is an “inappropriate attempt to rig case outcomes in favor of one side.”
The group encouraged the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, to include the publication in a recently announced investigation into a program by the Environmental Law Institute, a nonpartisan research group, to educate justices on climate change.
Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington. (Neutrality/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
The next day, the Federalist Society, a conservative judicial organization, convened a panel to discuss the publication of the manual. The moderator said it runs counter to the Federal Judicial Center’s role as a “neutral arbiter of fact” and warned that the “inclusion of a climate science section advances an ideological agenda.”
The chapter reflects “an assumption that certain bodies of evidence are automatically more credible than others,” Michael Williams, West Virginia’s solicitor general, told the panel’s audience. It suggests “certain questions are resolved when they’re actually still being litigated before courts.”
On Feb. 6, the director of the Federal Judicial Center, Judge Robin Rosenberg of the Southern District of Florida, wrote to West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey that the center “has omitted the climate science chapter.”
In their letter, the attorneys general raised concerns that one of the authors of the climate chapter is employed by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University and that in the footnotes of the report the authors thank the executive director of that program, Michael Burger. Burger, who declined to comment, is of counsel to the law firm Sher Edling, which represents several of the plaintiffs in the climate cases, including the city of Honolulu.
The objections by the state attorneys general represent “a bad-faith critique that is ultimately aimed at repressing scientific information,” Jessica Wentz, one of the chapter’s authors, said. The withdrawal of the chapter, she said, “is going to be used to advance this narrative that there is a debate about even the most fundamental aspects of climate change.”
Wentz said that she has never been a witness or served as counsel in any climate litigation and that it is disingenuous for the attorneys general to object to the material in the climate chapter — which acknowledges the consensus that human activity is responsible for warming — because it is the subject of contested litigation.
None of the major climate lawsuits that she is aware of debate the science of warming and instead address questions about fossil fuel companies’ responsibility. “The infusion of bias,” Wentz said, comes not from exposure to scientific information but “from the suppression of that scientific information.”
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has maintained a copy of the original manual on its own website even as the Federal Judicial Center has removed the version with the climate change chapter from its own. A representative from the center declined to comment, and members from the House Judiciary Committee could not immediately be reached for comment.
Abrahm Lustgarten reports on climate change and how people, companies and governments are adapting to it.
This article is from ProPublica.
Obvious climate changes are occurring on ALL of the planets in our solar system right now.
Don’t believe me. Check out the data from NASA, and the peer reviewed studies. I have written about, and followed the studies concerning our Sun for 15 years. In this article, it seems the author is assuming that climate change on Earth is solely anthropomorphic (human induced).
I side with neither camp as presented here, rather, an entirely different model:
Our galaxy produces massive waves of electromagnetic energy some term the Parker Spiral. Our Sun, and its cadre of planets swim around the perimeter of the galaxy, and is affected by the magnetic waves, energetic particles, and the dust–cyclically. Look at the chart. Every 12,000 years we have an ice age + major climactic changes on Earth. The Sun reacts to all of this, and has it’s own cycles. When ‘climate change’ occurs, it can happen in a big way. Right now, we are in a relatively calm period. Thousands of peer reviewed studies have been published, that point to our Sun being largely responsible for weather patterns, clouds, volcanism, and earthquakes. Mainstream science chooses to ignore the overwhelming data, so one must ask the question: Where does the funding originate for mainstream ‘climate science’? One will find these are the same sources that fund mainstream media, and foster wars.
NASA seems not to agree with your analysis.
“Is the Sun causing global warming?” (hxxps://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/is-the-sun-causing-global-warming/) makes two points:
1. “The Sun can influence Earth’s climate, but it isn’t responsible for the warming trend we’ve seen over recent decades. The Sun is a giver of life; it helps keep the planet warm enough for us to survive. We know subtle changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun are responsible for the comings and goings of the ice ages. But the warming we’ve seen in recent decades is too rapid to be linked to changes in Earth’s orbit and too large to be caused by solar activity.
“One of the “smoking guns” that tells us the Sun is not causing global warming comes from looking at the amount of solar energy that hits the top of the atmosphere. Since 1978, scientists have been tracking this using sensors on satellites, which tell us that there has been no upward trend in the amount of solar energy reaching our planet.”
2. “A second smoking gun is that if the Sun were responsible for global warming, we would expect to see warming throughout all layers of the atmosphere, from the surface to the upper atmosphere (stratosphere). But what we actually see is warming at the surface and cooling in the stratosphere. This is consistent with the warming being caused by a buildup of heat-trapping gases near Earth’s surface, and not by the Sun getting hotter.”
Sorry Bill, but you are using outdated data. NASA is also in the business of covering a lot of this up.
Nothing directly refuting the science in the climate chapter. Gee, that just leaves a letter full of speculation, potential, alleged etc., etc. Did any corporate lawyers peer review the updated manual? Probably not. Who needs science anyway right. Artie have you ever heard of the Net Radiation Equation? Of course not because you are not an expert which is what the manual is for. Expert vs expert using science as peer reviewed to argue the case. A case not without science but a case based on science. Unfortunately, that is not how corporations want it to work. Without science there is hardly any way to claim they are poisoning us. What science is used in Key Laws and Legal Mechanisms Providing Immunity based on? I bet none are using science. Makes both Artie and I and all the foie gras with a short future.
Humanity is like sheep, herded this way and that way by the powers. Good sense, skeptism is abandoned.
Ah, yes, except for the superior few, right? Never the ugly masses, the working class/peasant majority.
Never mind that lemmings don’t actually jump off cliffs and sheep aren’t stupid. Doubt that? Check the scientific evidence. www(dot)cambridge(dot)uk/research/news/sheer-brain-power-sheep-smarter-than-preiously-believed Or Animal Sentience 4 (25) Jan 2019 “Intelligence, complexity, and individuality in sheep” etc.
This is why many of us workers reject the claim for a vanguard as elitist class prejudice; the implication is we’re too stupid to manage anything on our own. Like my logger grandpa the Wobbly (IWW,) I know some of us can actually read, write, and think.
‘law clerks’ would appear to be a profession ripe to be replaced by AI.
A job where thinking was never required, just looking up sources and citing them. Will the world miss law clerks?
“leaves judges without any official support on how to weigh evidence about basic weather and climate changes”
Do you mean they may actually have to judge the merits on their own? Parties can provide expert witnesses, and they can cite sources. Judges and juries can weigh this and separate fact from BS. OMG, in the land of the free there will not be an official source that is the end all and be all at all times and which can never be disrespected or doubted. How will civilization survive if there is not an Official Truth where the Truth can always be looked up? Judges might actually earn those big salaries by having to judge something instead of just RFM.
Even now, the Liberals do not see the trap in their bizarre thinking. They insist that there must be a standard where facts that are sacred can be looked up and everyone must agree with them. But this creates a rule book and some committee that sets the standards that their opponents can attack. In this case, they are probably only lucky that their opponents have only withdrawn the previous manual, instead of just rewriting it the way they wanted it then using the Liberals’ own beloved system to ram it down people’s throats.
Let Judges judge. Let Juries decide. If you don’t like the ruling, you can appeal on the merits. It would be nice if the state level idea of voters getting a chance to vote Judges out of their robes were moved up to the Federal Level. That’s another check on Judges who decide to adopt their own idea of Science, only to be always overruled on appeal. Appointments for Life was a really stupid idea for a young revolutionary democracy to adopt.