President Trump has jumped into the fray over a hotly contested chapter on climate science in a reference manual for judges.
Hours after attending the World Cup final on Sunday, the president took to Truth Social to attack the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine over the manual, which was released last year and has drawn criticism from Republican officials.
The chapter in question provides an overview of climate science, including how carbon dioxide and other gases trap heat in the atmosphere, and how human activity has disturbed that natural cycle. The authors noted that science is always evolving but characterized the United Nations’s scientific body, which has said the burning of fossil fuels is driving climate change, as an authoritative source.
The reference manual was partly funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the National Academies of Sciences, and the president wrote in his post that he was ordering officials to scrutinize the funding. “Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it,” Mr. Trump wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment or clarification.
The 1,700-page manual covers many different topics and was designed to provide mini-tutorials to federal judges about scientific issues that might come up in cases over which they preside. It was jointly published by the Federal Judicial Center, a government agency, and the National Academies of Sciences, the nation’s top scientific advisory body, which operates as a private organization.
Molly Galvin, a spokeswoman for the National Academies, said it remained committed to its mission to provide independent and objective scientific advice. “Our activities are conducted to ensure scientific rigor, transparency, and independence,” she said.
The Federal Judicial Center withdrew the chapter in February, after a firestorm led by Republican attorneys general. But the National Academies stood by the chapter, and it remains available on its website.
The president, who has dismissed global warming as a hoax, wrote in his post that the Academies was run by “Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change.” He claimed that the manuals “were used by Judges to decide massive ‘Climate Change’ Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country.”
While there are a growing number of cases that involve climate change in the courts, there “has not been a single court decision anywhere in the world that imposes financial liability on any country or company because of its greenhouse gas emissions,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, wrote in a recent blog post.
Dozens of American state and local governments, mostly in Democratic-led municipalities, have sued oil companies over their role in climate change, but those cases all remain in preliminary stages. None have gotten close to trial yet.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments over a legal question in one of the cases, brought by the city and county of Boulder, Colo., in its next term. The issue is whether federal law blocks the case from proceeding, and the decision could have major ramifications for the entire batch of litigation.
Conservative groups have argued that Justice Elena Kagan should recuse herself from the Boulder case because she wrote the foreword to the judges’ manual. She addressed the controversy during an appearance before Congress last week, in which she and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sought funding for security for judges amid escalating threats.
“The entire purpose of this book, really, is not to take positions on contested and contestable matters. It’s to help judges, assist judges with respect to scientific issues, but not with any kind of slant either way. And because so many people did think that that chapter was slanted in a particular direction, Judge Rosenberg decided to take it out of the book,” Justice Kagan said, referring to the director of the Federal Judicial Center, Judge Robin L. Rosenberg.
Clara Altman, the deputy director of the Federal Judicial Center, said on Monday that the center never distributed hard copies of the manual containing the climate science chapter.
Groups on the left have called for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to recuse himself from the Boulder case, pointing to his past stock holdings in energy companies.
The president’s post came days after the National Academies released a report on attribution science for extreme weather and climate events, which has also come under attack by oil-industry allies. That emerging science focuses on quantifying the effect of climate change on storms, wildfires and other disasters.
The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology has been investigating the National Academies over its “administration of federally supported activities, including its stewardship of taxpayer resources, scientific advisory processes, and compliance with applicable federal requirements,” according to a letter the committee sent to the organization last week.
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