Founded during the US Civil War to provide advice to the government, the National Academies of Science have become one of the most prestigious scientific organizations. Its primary function is to prepare comprehensive reports on scientific and technological issues, aided by its ability to attract top talent from across the country.

Those reports have not been afraid to weigh in on matters of public controversy and risk offending powerful groups, which it has managed to do without losing the respect of the governmental organizations that fund these reports. But this year, there have been increasing signs that the Academies’ ability to dodge political firestorms has reached its limit. Yesterday, a deeply reported story from Politico explained the breakdown between the National Academies and Republican politicians.

The National Academies is preparing an expert report on attribution of weather events to human-driven climate change, and fossil fuel companies are worried it will lead to findings of liability in the many cases where those companies are being sued.

A fight over climate

In public, the National Academies has been very circumspect in its approach to the overt hostility toward science displayed by the Trump administration. The organization’s president, Marcia McNutt, almost completely ignored the attacks in her annual “state of the science” address last year, and repeated that approach in this year’s. But that hasn’t helped the organization stay out of Republican crosshairs.

The problem, apparently, was projects that were started during previous administrations. One of these was the production of the fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. This was prepared for the Federal Judicial Center to help judges determine how to handle scientific issues that come before the courts.

The fourth edition was the first to contain a chapter on climate change, but a group of Republican state attorneys general had issues with it. The chapter included information from people who had been involved in litigation over climate damages; rather than seeing that as a sign of expertise, the AGs viewed it as a form of bias. Also an issue: the chapter treated human-driven climate change as established science (which it is), which was termed a failure to be impartial.

The state attorneys general demanded that the Federal Judicial Center pull the chapter, and it immediately caved. But the National Academies had already placed the original, intact report on its website. When the state attorneys general demanded that it follow the Judicial Center’s lead, it declined.

At that point, Republicans in Congress stepped in. A group of 11 representatives sent a letter to the head of the Office of Management and Budget in which they “respectfully urged” the office’s director to “investigate whether NASEM should be suspended or debarred from all
federal funding under your jurisdiction.” Again, the issue is that they feel there should be some sort of affirmative action for the views of people who refuse to accept the evidence for human-driven climate change: “Most shocking is that there was no fully independent, meaningful peer review from scientists with differing views on climate science.”

Similarly, members of Congress threatened to investigate the National Academies when it organized an updated climate report at the same time as the Department of Energy had brought together a group of fringe contrarians to produce something that said that all those carbon emissions are probably fine.

The fight over attribution

Why is there so much fuss about scientific advice to judges? The Politico piece puts it into context and suggests that things are likely to get worse.

The issue is one of attribution: Can we detect the cause of climate change in individual weather events? A few decades ago, that simply wasn’t possible. But researchers have since developed tools that allow them to determine the probability that different events would occur with and without the influence of our greenhouse gas emissions. And so it has become clear that some of the most extreme events simply wouldn’t have occurred without the warming we’ve driven.

That clarity has allowed other researchers to tie the financial damages from catastrophic weather events to the influence of fossil fuels produced by individual companies. If those studies are widely accepted as valid scientific work, then judges will be compelled to admit them as evidence in any lawsuits against said companies.

There have been a number of lawsuits filed against fossil fuel companies, but most have not succeeded because judges have decided that they impinged on policies that needed to be set on the federal level. But things like economic damages have long been considered the domain of the courts, and a direct connection between business practices and damage caused by a storm may be a harder accusation to dodge.

Those instances are where the National Academies come in again, as a committee it formed during the Biden administration is in the process of evaluating the scientific standing of attribution studies. The oil companies are concerned enough that, as the Politico article details, they’ve hired third parties to file for access to the emails of committee members who work at public universities.

All of which suggests that the fight over this report is going to get intense, and both the credibility and funding of the National Academies is likely to come under sustained assault, which may permanently damage science-based policy in the US. And that would provide yet another demonstration that, when even basic facts can become politicized, trying to avoid becoming a target by saying “we’re just focused on the science” will not be a successful strategy.