It is truly remarkable how easy it is to fool the smartest people. And especially when you tell them they are helping to save the world.
So something called the Federal Judicial Center has just come out with a new edition, the 4th, of something called the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The publication date appears to be December 31, 2025.
The idea that the federal government, and in particular the judiciary, needs a reference manual on scientific evidence seems to date from the 1990s. The courts, then as now, were facing an increasing volume of cases involving complex scientific evidence; and meanwhile almost none of the judges are trained in science. Best to provide them with a good grounding in the basics. Fortunately, back in the 60s Congress had established something called the Federal Judicial Center as a “research and education agency” of the judicial branch. Here was the perfect opportunity for that bureaucracy to expand their mission and budget.
In this latest version of the Reference Manual, the FJC has totally lost its way. Somehow, it got captured by a clique of climate charlatans who have inserted a lengthy section that is anti-science and based on logical fallacy. And many dozens of seemingly smart people who were supposedly reviewing this have gotten hoodwinked.
From the outset this Reference Manual thing was not a small project. For the First Edition of the Manual in 1994, the FJC partnered with the Carnegie Corporation, rounded up 19 authors and 98 peer reviewers, and produced a document of some 637 pages. But they were only getting started. For the Second Edition (2000), Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer got involved, and the list of contributors had grown substantially. By the Third Edition (2011), the National Research Council (part of the “National Academies”) had joined the project, and the addition of multiple new topics had caused the Manual to expand to 1034 pages.
And now we are up to the Fourth Edition. It runs to 1682 pages. The National Academies have become heavily involved, along with lots of judges. Seven pages preceding the Foreword are taken up listing the dozens of highly distinguished members of various committees and peer review panels who had some role in producing the document. Justice Elena Kagan has written the Foreword.
Many topics have been added. One of those is a section running from page 1561 to 1652 called “Reference Guide on Climate Science.” This is a transparent advocacy piece inserted to further the goals of various “climate” litigations brought in the court system. At the core of this section is a fundamental logical fallacy. How all the distinguished pooh-bahs who signed on to this Manual allowed this chapter to pass through is beyond me.
Now I’m not saying that everything in the Manual is wrong. I guess that a fundamental problem with 1600 page documents is that there is going to be a lot that is wrong and nobody intelligent is ever going to have the time to root all out all the fallacies.
Among sections of the Manual that aren’t too terrible is a section running from pages 47 to 112 titled “How Science Works.” The authors are Michael Weisberg and Anastasia Thanukos. This section contains basic information on the logic of the scientific method, along with many examples of applications. The section is by no means written the way I would have written it (it is way longer than it needs to be, and the most important points are buried), but still I can subscribe to its general approach. At page 62 begins a sub-section titled “Science Investigates Testable Hypotheses.” I think the word “falsifiable” is better than “testable,” but this is close enough. Here is an excerpt from that sub-section:
Communities engaged in scientific endeavors work with testable hypotheses. For a hypothesis to be testable, it must, by itself or in conjunction with other hypotheses, generate specific predictions— a set of observations that one could expect to make if the hypothesis were true and/or a set of observations that would be inconsistent with the idea and lead one to believe that it is not true. If an explanation is equally compatible with all possible observations, then it is not testable and hence, not within the reach of science.
Yes! I would add after Weisberg/Thanukos’s first sentence that if a community refuses to articulate testable hypotheses that can be associated with specific predictions, then that community cannot claim to be scientists. This is precisely the fundamental problem with the community of people who call themselves “climate scientists”: they scrupulously avoid ever articulating any proposition that can be associated with specific quantitative predictions, and which thus can be tested and potentially falsified.
For example, is global warming from human CO2 emissions causing an increase in extreme weather events, like hurricanes and tornadoes? You would think that that proposition could be easily articulated as a testable hypothesis, perhaps associated with some known published index like the ACE (“accumulated cyclone energy”) index. For example: “We predict that for each increase of 50 ppm in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, the ACE index will increase by 20 units.” I’m not saying that that is the only possible testable hypothesis for the association of CO2 emissions with extreme weather, but that is how articulation of a testable hypothesis is done. Under this prediction, if the atmospheric CO2 concentration goes up by 50 units and the ACE index follows by going up 20 units or more, the prediction is looking good. To the contrary, if the atmospheric CO2 concentration goes up 50 ppm and the ACE index follows by going down, the hypothesis has been contradicted.
By the way, here is NOAA’s graph of the ACE index annually since 1851.
(During the time at least since 1950, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has been steadily rising. In other words, you would think from the evidence of this publicly available graph that any association of atmospheric CO2 with the level of hurricane energy has been definitively refuted.)
With that background, take a look at the section in the new Manual titled “Reference Guide on Climate Science,” beginning at page 1561. The lead author is one Jessica Wentz of Columbia Law School. She is a well-known climate alarm advocate, and has served as an expert witness for plaintiffs in litigations seeking to pin climate damage on fossil fuel use.
After lengthy background, we come to the core of this section, beginning at page 1585, with a sub-section titled “Climate Change Detection, Attribution, and Projections.” The very unsubtle idea here is to give support to litigation seeking to blame disasters of various sorts on emitters of CO2 (fossil fuel producers) by “attributing” the disasters to increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
There is a legitimate method to attempt use the scientific method to attribute various events to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. That method is to articulate a testable hypothesis and then subject it to test. That is the last thing that these “climate scientists” would ever allow to be done. Instead, they think they have better ideas. Here is how the authors of this “climate science” section describe how attribution is done in “climate science” (from page 1588-89). Get ready for a torrent of meaningless verbiage:
[A]ttribution involves sifting through a range of possible causative factors to determine the role of one or more drivers with respect to the detected change. This is typically accomplished by using physical understanding, as well as climate models and/or statistical analysis, to compare how the variable responds when certain drivers are changed or eliminated entirely. The goal of such studies is to determine whether, how, and to what extent anthropogenic drivers have contributed to the observed change. Many attribution studies use a probabilistic approach— i.e., researchers will seek to quantify the probability of a particular outcome (e.g., how likely is the occurrence of three inches of rainfall in a day at a given locale) occurring with and without anthropogenic influence on climate. However, researchers can also use a mechanistic approach to attribution, whereby they seek to examine how climate change has influenced one or more physical characteristics of an event or process.86 Mechanistic studies can provide insights on, for example, the change in magnitude or severity of an extreme event that can be attributed to climate change. In the rainfall example above, a mechanistic approach might look at the weather system that produced the heavy rain and describe how one part of climate change that we understand well— e.g., the warming of the atmosphere and its resulting increase in the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold — contributed to the event. Mechanistic and probabilistic analyses can be combined in order to develop a more complete picture of whether and to what extent climate change is influencing various processes and events.
It goes on and on — and on and on and on — from there, burying you in meaningless doubletalk and bafflegab. How about articulating a testable hypothesis and testing it? They will never, ever, ever do that. It could prove the whole enterprise to be wrong!
Well, the entire NAS (or maybe it’s now the NASEM) has been taken in. (Or maybe they are in on the scam as a way to keep their funds flowing.) Lots of top federal judges are listed on the boards and committees that signed off on this. Once again, all the smartest people prove that they are not very smart.
Yet another case of the observation that
any group not actively conservative will be coopted by The Left.
Nobody said this was ever going to be easy.
Lots of money on the ‘green’ side, almost nothing on the other side. Yet we win.
We win because the Other Side can’t prove humans are changing the Earth’s climate or weather.
That’s why they fall back on this attribution scam. They have nothing else. They are reduced to guessing. This is not the Scientific Method. It is a tactic used by scammers to promote their product.
To all the judges out there: Guessing, which is what “Attribution Studies” are, is not evidence of anything. It is an opinion of a Human-caused Climate Change promoter.
Where I come from, speculation, assumptions and unsubstantiated assertions have no place in a Court of Law, and that is all that Climate Alarmists have. They could not prove their assertions if their lives depended on doing so. This should be obvious to a competent judge. After all, that is the job of a judge: To separate evidence from speculation, assumptions, and unsubstantiated assertions. That is also the job of a competent scientist.
Someone called Michael Mann is also referenced or cited in the climate section of the manual, surely that cannot be the Michael Mann author of the dodgy ‘hockey stick’ graph who together with his attorneys has been severely sanctioned recently by a judge for intentionally misleading the jury in litigation against Mark Steyn et al. 🤔
Mann’s Hockey Stick is worse than dodgy, it’s wrong. Proven wrong. Yet he is still cited as an expert. This is what is wrong with Alarmist Climate “science”: Too many Charlatans.
There’s more. A reader cannot even get past the first page of the introduction of this thing on page 49 (PDF file pg 67) without running into this, with its footnote #2:
Notice what I highlight in the footnote there – she’s cited 8 more times in this thing. Anybody relying on Oreskes’ for insight to prove ‘deceptive industry-led public relations campaigns’ happened is – by default – putting out disinformation. The example I use regularly at my GelbspanFiles blog about her sheer lack of ‘expert insight about industry disinfo’ is her 2021 article at the Grauniad where she showed two ‘newspaper advertorials’ that were never published (I repeat, never published!), claiming they were part of an PR campaign where she can’t even get the real name of the campaign right (the label she has was unsolicited and rejected), and she claims the campaign operated under a memo directive which it never did.
Article:
“By the way, here is NOAA’s graph of the ACE index annually since 1851.”
Hmmmm, Google:
“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was established on October 3, 1970.”
Hmmm…. then the ace index must be an older thing maintained by an older organization:
“The ACE index is an offshoot of Hurricane Destruction Potential (HDP), an index created in 1988 by William Gray and his associates at Colorado State University.”
So what is it exactly:
“The calculation originated as the Hurricane Destruction Potential (HDP) index, which sums the squares of tropical cyclones’ maximum sustained winds while at hurricane strength, at least 64 knots (≥ 119 km/h; 74 mph)[4] at six-hour recorded intervals across an entire season.” <-looks like wind speed measurements needed
So there must have been lots of instruments measuring this quantity back in 1850:
“In 1850, wind measurement was undergoing a transition from subjective estimation to objective, instrumental recording, with the Robinson cup anemometer (invented 1846) beginning to see adoption, alongside the Biram anemometer (c. 1850). While the Beaufort scale (1806/1807) remained the standard for marine wind force, 1850 marks a key period for the introduction of anemometers at coastal and inland stations.”
Standard problem for all these charts. How do I trust 200 year-old data recorded in only small areas of the Northern hemisphere to be
A) accurate, and
B) representative global trends
I’m sure someone knows someone who knew someone who said “That John Thomas Romney Robinson guy was diligent and good with writing his numbers with the best possible number of decimals.” Maybe he was. Probably. Bet a few trillion dollars on it?
The same applies to all climate metrics.
From 1850-1960 ACE will be undercounted because some of the storms were never fully accounted for and some were never accounted at all.
As I understand it, Doppler radar was limited in range in 1850.
The Dopplers kept falling off the treadmills because scientists of that day had not understood how to make harnesses so small. Every time a few Dopplers stopped running, the big magnet spun too slow and the yoyodyne engine sagged, so range was terrible. Worse still, they trained egrets to fly around looking for radar waves and… duh… egrets are no good when it gets that windy. For reasons like that I don’t trust 1850 data even where local newspapers back it up.
Yes, limited to zero.
Are we that sure they are the smartest?
Smart or not, they are definitely easily influenced by the Climate Change propaganda they hear.
I guess one can be smart and gullible at the same time. It seems to be a pretty sure bet.
All of the following were copied into my “scientific quotes” text file a long time ago …
“An egghead is [some]one who stands firmly on both feet, in mid-air, on both sides of an issue.” — Homer Ferguson
“Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals could believe in them.” — George Orwell
“Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.” — Stephen Vizinczey
“Never confuse education with intelligence. You can have a PhD and still be an idiot.” — Original source unknown
Like I have said, you can be smart (intelligence) and have no common sense (Wisdom).
They certainly consider themselves to be the smartest.
Bingo! The last thing any bureaucrat wants is the appearance of having solved the problem that created their job. In particular, they must keep issuing new regulations (or, as in this case, updated and expanded work) lest they be seen as having finished their work and no longer needed.
This is known as the Shirky Principle, it’s the bureaucrat’s bible. That’s why it has been so hard to fight the climate change scam, as these indoctrinated bureaucrats and NGO academics have prevented any ministerial discussion on the scientific facts and the actual basis of the scare campaign. They just accept the orthodox science and muddle along to confuse the issues until finally the ideological policy recommendations become so toxic for the politicians, industry and the public that they are rejected, and a new more realistic policy framework is devised so that the bureaucrats can retain their positions working out the new regulations etc.
“Scientific evidence” does NOT need 1700+ pages for its definition, even in details.
Such length allows all kinds of definitions, also concerning law matters.
Thus, what is not admissible is the word “scientific” in the title. The preface should be changed accordingly.
The rest of the volume could stay as is, as these are a set of “personal opinions” (perhaps considered “scientific positions” by the athors).
I will diffuse the Report in the scientific Community for comments.
Former Director in Metrology
Without metrology, civilisation cannot be.
Yes, lots of personal opinions in Alarmist Climate “science”.
Personal opinions are all Climate Alarmists have. They can’t prove the claims they make. So they try to present their personal opinions as established facts.
Agreed. Anything that runs 1600 pages is not meant to be read and understood, it has other purpose(s) entirely.
It is however very useful for hitting people who disagree with you over the head 🙂
Excellent article. Thank you Francis Menton for bringing this to our attention. No wonder the NAS response to DOE’s CWG report was such a muddled mess.
The quoted intro to attribution is okay as far as it goes. The fallacy is that attribution claims are hypotheses treated as observations. There are ways to challenge attribution hypotheses. For example different models give very different results including no attribution. This no doubt is not discussed.
I disagree. The intro is fatally flawed, and you don’t even have to go very far into the verbal diarrhea to see it.
The”and/or” may provide lip service to “statistical analysis,” (and even there are mountains of manure that can be passed off as something legitimate, Exhibit A being Mann’s Hockey Stick garbage – all iterations of it) but they have just provided cover for nothing but (partial and ultimately hypothetical) “physical understanding” with nothing more than “climate models” to constitute “science.”
Utter bullshit, just like the whole “climate crisis” story.
I did not say it was good science. It is an accurate intro to how attribution is done.
Despite the unnecessary length I would hope that the evolution of this project is thoroughly examined as it may be strongly indicative of so much of what actually developed.
As an important example of science introduction the last college freshman introductory biology course on my shelf is dated 2002. Ironically it has ~ 7 pages in the beginning defining science quite correctly but ~20 pages at the end violating them about human effects, including diversity, ozone, and warming climate, although too many others were often true. It has ~40 pages on ecology which seemed standard for what we knew (I taught sophomore ecology and have some expert witness experience). The book is huge and heavy, ~1300 pages, adequate to cover the subject but too much for an introduction with two pages of reviewers. This is part of the reason that college introductory science had been replaced in the 1980s by environmental books with lots of information but too much politics and some with simpler coverage which attracted the education majors.
The very tells one how science is done.
“generate specific predictions”, Ha. LOL!
Climate science has had six major attempts to generate accurate predictions and totally failed. This document fails from the very beginning since “maybe”, “could”, “should”, and “expect” are all weasel words to keep from saying, “this model generates specific predictions”.
The base of climate science is built upon reasonable doubt. Not even Mann could show specific predictions that would justify libel.
I will never understand why papers like this do not use inputs from expert metrologists when developing the paper.
For instance, from the document:
“Statistical measures of variability include the range, the interquartile range, and the standard deviation. The range is the difference between the largest num ber in the batch and the smallest. The range seems natu ral, and it indicates the maximum spread in the numbers, but the range is unstable because it depends entirely on the most extreme values.
The interquartile range is the difference between the 25th and 75th percen tiles. By definition, 25% of the data fall below the 25th percentile, 90% fall below the 90th percentile, and so on. The median is the 50th percentile. The interquartile range contains 50% of the numbers and is resistant to changes in extreme values.
The standard deviation can be viewed as a kind of average or typical deviation from the mean.106 Suppose we have a batch of 50 numbers whose mean is 100. The standard deviation is found by subtracting this mean from each number, squaring each of these deviations, adding up the squared deviations, dividing by 50 (to get the mean squared deviation, or “variance”), and taking the square root. For exam ple, if one of the numbers is 105, then it deviates from the mean by 5, and the square of 5 is 52 = 25. If the mean of all such squared deviations is 400, then the standard deviation is the square root of 400, which is 20. Taking the square root gets back to the original scale of the measurements. For example, if the numbers are measurements of length in inches, the mean and standard deviation are also in inches.
There are no hard and fast rules about which statistic is the best.” (bolding mine, tpg)
Yes, there *are* hard and fast rules about which statistic is the best, at least when considering the measurement of properties of a measurand.
The 5-number statistic *always* works and gives usable results even when used with skewed populations. The mean and standard deviation, as laid out above, only gives usable results when the population is Gaussian. The problem is that things in the real world are rarely truly Gaussian.
This is where climate science goes wrong. For convenience’s sake, and SOLELY for convenience, climate science assumes the diurnal temperature curve is a pure sine wave so that (Tmax + Tmin)/2 becomes the daily mean temperature. Yet the diurnal temperature curve is highly asymmetric and skewed. And that is just considering the two main drivers of sun insolation heat gain and radiative heat loss. Every other driver you can imagine (convection, conduction, clouds, orbital mechanics, surface thermal inertia, etc) only makes the asymmetry and skewness worse. No model trained on (Tmax+Tmin)/2 can *ever* generate accurate results, either in the short term or long term. The excuse of “it all averages out in the long term” is just more garbage. Natural variation is the sum of *all* of the various factors. Assuming that somewhere in the biosphere is a low-pass filter that removes all the minor impacts only masks the true natural variation, it doesn’t eliminate it over any time interval.
It probably has something to do with the fact that metrologists, as a profession, are far less interested in Earth’s weather and climate than are meteorologsits as a profession.
A perfect example is the GHE theory of dividing incoming insolation by 4, multiplying by albedo (0.7), getting 240 W/m² as an “average” insolation. This is absurd.
Every point on earth receives insolation based on a sine function (sunrise to sunset) and the angle from normal. The temperature is then an exponential calculation. Averages don’t work.
“A perfect example is the GHE theory of dividing incoming insolation by 4, multiplying by albedo (0.7), getting 240 W/m² as an “average” insolation. This is absurd.”
Not absurd, it’s a proper application of geometry!
The Earth intercepts the sun’s radiation over its whole cross-section, therefore the total light received is Isun*𝛑r^2 where r is the radius of the Earth, because of the curvature of the Earth this is spread over the surface area over a 24 hr period so one divides by 4𝛑r^2 to find the average insolation, i.e. Isun/4. QED
No, it is not proper geometry.
Geometry
Plane wave
Here is an image.
If every point on a cross-section of the earth, πr² received an average of 240 W/m², why are the poles so cold? That is absurd. Finding the temperature from that average tells you nothing. Temperatures and intensity have an exponential relationship. Arithmetic averages simply don’t work properly.
Here is a screen shot from an online textbook by professors in British Columbia that teach meteorology.
Practical Meteorology – An Algebra-based Survey of Atmospheric Science by ROLAND STULL, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
This shows you how the angle of incidence controls how much insolation is absorbed.
Here is a question for you. If half of the insolation is absorbed, where does the other half go? And a follow-up. Why is albedo 70%?
No, you’re wrong! Insolation is the sun’s radiation that reaches the Top of the Atmosphere (ToA). As I pointed out the total insolation is equal to the solar irradiance times the cross sectional area at the ToA, due to the rotation of the Earth the average insolation/metre squared is equal to the total divided by the area of the ToA. That takes account of the angle of incidence, it’s simple geometry.
“ It varies from 1360 W/m² when the wave is exactly perpendicular to the earth and falls based on the angle of incidence. I like thinking of the angle being a cosine function. That makes “cos (0)=1” at 0 degrees and “cos (90)=0” at 90 degrees.”
And the integral of cos(𝛳) from -𝛑/2 to 𝛑/2 is 2!
So? Your integral is useful for what? That the surface area of a sphere is twice the area of a circle? It tells you nothing about how much is absorbed at any point at any given point in time.
You are missing the fact that TOA is a plane EM wave that has the same intensity at all points. Here is a quick drawing.
Turn this sideways and you have the same diagram I showed you from the textbook. Every ray hits the earth at an angle and the amount of absorption is based on that angle. The angle I use has a cosine function. Th
I got called to do something else. Here is the rest.
The angle I use has a cosine function. The textbook uses the complement angle and sine.
Now here is a shot of a clear sky insolation at my weather station. It is a sine wave from sunrise to sunset. Every point on the same latitude will receive the same sine wave with a similar peak. If the sun is over the equator, both the NH and SH look the same. Voila, times 2.
I’ll let you compute the average insolation over 24 hours at a constant latitude.
The integral shows that from -𝛑/2 to 𝛑/2 on the equator the incident light is spread over twice the area of the ToA therefore the incident light is 1360/2, also the other side of the Earth is receiving no light so the total light is spread over 4 times the area. Therefore the average incident light intensity is one quarter of the intensity at the ToA. basic geometry (or trigonometry if you prefer).
Quit reading Wikipedia, it is wrong and so are many warmists sites.
The incident light IS NOT “spread” over the surface area of the earth. You didn’t read the source I gave you, and you obviously didn’t understand my drawing.
If you want to refute my assertions, you need to show some references that discuss WHY insolation is not derived from a plane wave.
Here are some questions.
Is the intensity of insolation striking earth derived from an EM plane wave?
Does an EM plane wave have a constant intensity at all points?
Is the textbook I resource I showed incorrect? Does 1360 W/m² intercept every point on the earth?
Is the absorption determined by the angle of incidence?
Quit reading Wikipedia, it is wrong and so are many warmists sites.
The incident light IS NOT “spread” over the surface area of the earth.”
Actually it is as the Earth rotates through 2𝛑 radians during 24 hours!
“You didn’t read the source I gave you, and you obviously didn’t understand my drawing.
If you want to refute my assertions, you need to show some references that discuss WHY insolation is not derived from a plane wave.”
That a plane of light reaches the ToA is exactly what I said!
I understand the drawing perfectly, although you have misdrawn it, at 𝛑/2 and 𝛑/2 the light ray would be tangential.
Quit reading Wikipedia, it is incorrect. The sun does emit a spherical wave that is subject to the r squared factor. However, by the time it reaches earth, the earth is a small dot on the immense wavefront. Because the solid angle that the earth intercepts is so tiny, the wave front appears to be a plane wave. That is, 1360 at all points, or parallel rays of equal energy. You can calculate the actual decimal values if you like. I guarantee you will end up with differences like 1359.9999999999999999 and 1360.0000000000000001
Here is a resource you can read to learn more.
https://www.phys.lsu.edu/~jarrell/COURSES/ELECTRODYNAMICS/Chap7/chap7.pdf
Nothing to do with Wikipedia! Ironically I was teaching about solar radiation this afternoon.
It is not unusual for the common misconception of how insolation is distributed on the earth. Here are some other references.
IJRAR Research Journal
I_DN = I_bh / cos θ_Z
Read this section in the following paper.
224-jakharani
It will give you a much more complicated formula, but it has the same base. The extraterrestrial insolation (TOA) is calculated as a direct component on the horizontal surface of the earth. A direct component is the normal vector that is absorbed.
From CoPilot:
This is what I tried to show you with my drawing. A bundle of parallel rays each with the same intensity. I learned this in my EE classes in the early 1970’s when dealing with antenna design for radio, VHF, UHF, and microwave.
I forgot to add that one of the reasons for the misconceptions is that the sun is considered a “point source” wherein the rays are dispersing from a point and do not all strike earth with the same intensity.
It is like shining a multi-focus flashlight at a basketball. As you widen the beam to encompass the entire ball, the intensity as you approach the edges diminishes.
Compare that with a laser large enough to encompass the entire basketball at once with coherent light rays (parallel) and you can see the difference.
“I forgot to add that one of the reasons for the misconceptions is that the sun is considered a “point source” wherein the rays are dispersing from a point and do not all strike earth with the same intensity.”
Really, who does that?
“Well, the entire NAS (or maybe it’s now the NASEM) has been taken in.”
Or would that be (AD) NAUSEAM?
Nevermind.
I downloaded the pdf.
From the Introduction to the “How Science Works” section (emphasis mine):
“Complicating matters, public relations campaigns have misled the public about the true state of scientific consensus regarding certain scientific issues. Further, scientific expertise and the trappings of science can be made to seem persuasive, even when there is little substance to them, making it more difficult for a jury to come to a just decision when presented with shaky evidence about which they have limited scientific understanding.”
OK then. Let’s say it. In our present times, with present methods, ANY “evidence” presented to a jury, by which the plaintiff claims a reliable attribution of ANY part of ANY trend of climate variables to incremental CO2 is a PR move. It’s not “how science works” in the best sense of that expression.
Thank you for listening.
P.S. Why is this so clear to me? The modelers of atmospheric motion know perfectly well that dynamic energy conversion within the general circulation makes it impossible to isolate the minor radiative effect of incremental CO2, CH4, N2O, etc. as a cause of sensible heat gain on land, in the oceans, or in the lower atmosphere. It cannot be otherwise and make any sense at all physically.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PDJP3F3rteoP99lR53YKp2fzuaza7Niz?usp=drive_link
Anytime any scientist is quoted in the press it is a public relations campaign.
You wouldn’t know the scientists name if it weren’t. You’d have to read their published papers to find that out.
From the above article (and kudos to its author Francis Menton for its revelations), with my bold emphasis added:
“The idea that the federal government, and in particular the judiciary, needs a reference manual on scientific evidence seems to date from the 1990s. . . .
“For the First Edition of the Manual in 1994, the FJC partnered with the Carnegie Corporation, rounded up 19 authors and 98 peer reviewers, and produced a document of some 637 pages. But they were only getting started. For the Second Edition (2000), Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer got involved, and the list of contributors had grown substantially. By the Third Edition (2011), the National Research Council (part of the “National Academies”) had joined the project, and the addition of multiple new topics had caused the Manual to expand to 1034 pages.
“And now we are up to the Fourth Edition. It runs to 1682 pages. The National Academies have become heavily involved, along with lots of judges. Seven pages preceding the Foreword are taken up listing the dozens of highly distinguished members of various committees and peer review panels who had some role in producing the document.
So, first I’m informed that the subject Manual was needed to provide a reference for judges that were fundamentally ignorant about “scientific evidence”, but then I’m told that within just six years judges are involved with producing such a Manual. Really???
Then there is the stated belief by the creators of the Manual that “peer review” really has any value in today’s world of publishing, when the preponderance of evidence reveals just the opposite!
As for this well-noted statement from Mr. Menton:
“It goes on and on — and on and on and on — from there, burying you in meaningless doubletalk and bafflegab”,
it is, IMHO, amazing that the Manual ignores the fact that nowhere in accurate descriptions of the process of The Scientific Method does one find the word “consensus”.
Oh, well . . . I’m certain that AI bots will used by judges needing an “education” in science (hah!) to replace this largely-unusable 1682 page document . . . heaven help us!
And the AI will have been trained with very one-sided sources.
Apparently the fourth requires purchase so the third seemed worth checking.
The introduction is by Stephen Breyer, L.L.B., Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, page 1. Seems reasonable with statements such as this “But science is far more than tools, such as statistics.” A lot of time discussing the 1993 Daubert Decision and a long discussion on statistical methods with a glossary for all sections. Also DNA, differences between science and engineering and medical problems. An early section on “How Science Works” was discussed along with Popper, Kuhn and others historically considered for the question.
In a too brief examination the third seems also too long and complex, but this admission for the fourth seems accurate as we now have a ‘new science.’ The third discusses the “myths.”
“In the fourth edition, all reference guides from the previous edition have undergone extensive revision or have been written by new authors. New guides have been added to address eyewitness identification, computer science, artificial intelligence, and climate science, along with a new foreword from Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Elena Kagan.”
This strikes me as another example of a horse designed by a committee (a camel). The larger the committee the more outrageous the result.
I came across a 1950’s grade school math textbook years ago when my own kids were in grade school and compared their textbooks to the one from my day. The 1950’s text had 2 authors and contained a straightforward progression of arithmetic and math concepts from basic counting through long division, fractions and basic algebra. My kid’s math textbook had over 30 authors listed – most were sociologists, psychologists, education PhDs, etc. There were only a couple of mathematicians. The so-called math text was full of politically correct extraneous non-sense and short on solid mathematical content. I was quite shocked that when I helped my 5th & 6th graders with homework that they had not yet mastered basics like multiplication tables and even simple addition and subtraction problems. I spent many evenings drilling them with flash cards to try and get them caught up. To this day I very much regret not pulling them out of public schools and putting them into a private school.
That was 30-40 years ago. It is clearly much worse now with kids graduating high school being virtually illiterate and innumerate but somehow knowing capitalism is bad and socialism can make everyone equal.
This is somewhat concerning: “leaving questions of expert reliability to the jury—is inconsistent with Rule 702 … the trend over time has been for judges to exercise closer scrutiny of expert testimony, and this trend may be expected to continue as evidence in litigation becomes more complex.
Can judges simply throw out a the expert testimony and jury decision because they disagree with the testimony of the ‘expert’? Why aren’t students taught the basics of “complex” topics?
The whole thing is straight out of 1984.
States fight back!
https://ago.wv.gov/article/west-virginia-leads-fight-against-efforts-climate-activists-improperly-influence-federal