In early October 2026, emails released by the US House Judiciary Committee made public something that careful readers of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence had already suspected. The climate science chapter, intended as a neutral guide for federal judges, was shaped by a plaintiffs' lawyer actively suing fossil-fuel companies, even after the Federal Judicial Center asked him to step aside over a conflict of interest.
Michael Burger, of Columbia's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and of counsel at the firm representing most of the municipal climate lawsuits, was invited by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to author the chapter. NASEM staff explicitly suggested he base it on his 2020 law-review article, The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution. When the Federal Judicial Center later barred him from formal authorship because of his litigation role, he stayed on anyway. The day after the recusal request, he wrote to his colleagues that he would continue "contributing behind the scenes." Subsequent drafts carried his edits.
The named authors, Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton—Burger's Sabin Center colleagues and co-authors on the 2020 paper—later told the Wall Street Journal that none of the text had been written by him and that any reused material came only from the scientific sections they themselves had drafted. The emails show otherwise. Substantial passages tracked the earlier law-review article. When Wentz informed the Federal Judicial Center that she and Horton had "drew heavily on our past work with him," she did not mention that Burger had continued to comment on the draft.
This is not a minor procedural lapse. The Reference Manual is what many judges reach for when they need to understand technical evidence. A chapter that began with an invitation to a litigation-side lawyer, survived his formal removal through informal editing, and then downplayed that history is not independent scientific guidance. It is advocacy that arrived with an acknowledgment footnote.
The same institutional pattern appears in the National Academies' July 2026 report on extreme-event attribution. Event attribution is the technique that produces headlines such as "climate change made this flood X times more likely." The method runs climate models with and without anthropogenic warming and compares the resulting probabilities. In principle it can be useful for trend studies. For singular events it is far more fragile.
As physicist Sabine Hossenfelder noted in a recent video, the procedure assumes that the main difference between the two model ensembles is global warming. Other factors, land-use change, natural variability, model structural error, are often treated as secondary. Climate models remain weak at simulating extremes in the first place. Most importantly, the probability ratio is highly sensitive to how the event is defined. Add more geographic or meteorological detail and both the factual and counterfactual probabilities can collapse toward zero, rendering the ratio unstable or undefined. A 2016 National Academies report was relatively candid about these limits. The 2026 version softens them into qualified language that still leaves the door open for the stronger claims that appear in litigation and media.
Several authors of the attribution report have ties to World Weather Attribution or to efforts that explicitly discuss the use of attribution science in court. Funding streams include the Bezos Earth Fund, which also supports World Weather Attribution. None of this is secret. It is simply the background against which the National Academies chose to issue a report that critics, including Roger Pielke Jr., describe as institutionalised stealth advocacy rather than pure science advice.
The practical consequence is straightforward. Judges, journalists, and the public are being given documents that look like the output of an independent scientific academy but were shaped, in material ways, by people whose professional and legal interests are advanced by particular conclusions about attribution. When those documents are later cited in court or in policy arguments, the distinction between science and advocacy blurs. The National Academies eventually withdrew the climate chapter from the judicial manual pending a process review. That is an admission that something went wrong. It does not reverse the fact that the chapter existed, was circulated, and reflected a process that treated a clear conflict of interest as manageable rather than disqualifying.
Extreme-event attribution is a legitimate research topic. Conflicts of interest and ghost authorship are not. Institutions that exist to provide impartial scientific guidance cannot treat the second as a footnote to the first and expect the first to retain credibility. The emails and the methodological critiques are now public. Whether the National Academies treat them as a reason to tighten standards, or as an inconvenience to be managed, will determine how much weight future reports on this subject deserve.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/behind-the-scenes-at-the-national
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15PV7qn8Phg