Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Climate Science Chapter — Withdrawn!

From THE MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

Here at Manhattan Contrarian, we get results. After my last three posts harshly critiquing the Federal Judicial Center’s newly revised Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, and particularly its chapter on Climate Science, suddenly on Friday the Center’s Director sent a letter stating that the Center has now “omitted” that chapter!

Well OK, I was not the only one objecting. On January 29, a coalition of state Attorneys General from red states, led by the AG of West Virginia (JB McCuskey), had sent a letter to Judge Robin Rosenberg, the Director of the Center, asking for immediate withdrawal of the offending chapter. Here is a link to the AGs’ letter. McCuskey had rounded up signatures of AGs of some 26 other states in support of the demand for withdrawal.

Judge Rosenberg addressed her letter disclosing the withdrawal to McCuskey. McCuskey posted a tweet announcing the withdrawal and attaching Judge Rosenberg’s letter at 7:07 PM on Friday evening (February 6). No surprise that this kind of thing would get issued at or about the close of business on a Friday. Charles Rotter of Watts Up With That put up a post about the withdrawal on Saturday. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board posted an editorial on the subject late this afternoon, and presumably that editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition. So far, I can find no mention of this embarrassing incident in the MSM.

Judge Rosenberg is the only signatory to her letter, and the letter is a one-liner that gives no explanation for the withdrawal:

In response to your letter dated January 29, 2026, I write to inform you that the Federal Judicial Center has omitted the climate science chapter from the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition (RMSE).

However, you have to think that Judge Rosenberg did not just do this on her own authority. McCuskey had copied the full Board of the FJC on the AGs’ letter. The Chair of that Board is Chief Justice John Roberts. It is hard to imagine that Roberts was not involved in the decision to pull this chapter, let alone other members of the Board, all of whom are federal judges. And then there’s Justice Elena Kagan, who is not a member of the FJC Board, but had put her name on a Foreword to the new Manual. It would not surprise me if all of the justices of the Supreme Court had a role.

Although Judge Rosenberg’s letter leaves us guessing at the rationale for the withdrawal, I would like to think that my posts made some contribution. The AGs’ letter is a good one, but the rationale put forth for the withdrawal is a limited one. Basically, the position taken by the AGs is that the Climate Science chapter went beyond the mission of the Manual of giving neutral advice to the judiciary, and veered into taking a substantive position on one of the most contested litigation issues of recent times. Here is an excerpt from the AGs’ letter:

[T]he Fourth Edition [of the Reference Manual] places the judiciary firmly on one side of some of the most hotly disputed questions in current litigation: climate-related science and “attribution.” Such work undermines the judiciary’s impartiality and places a thumb on one side of the scale. It does so even as these issues are pending before the Supreme Court and other parts of the federal judiciary. We ask that the Center immediately withdraw the inappropriate “Reference Manual on Climate Science” included in the Fourth Edition. Judges should resolve these issues through the ordinary processes of litigation—not by way of a judicially driven, committee-led, quasi-amicus brief. . . . [T]he authors offer unsolicited, ex parte expert opinions on matters that they recognize are directly at issue in ongoing suits.

That’s good as far as it goes; but they never quite get to saying explicitly that the “attribution” studies endorsed by the chapter are logically incorrect pseudoscience. The studies are pseudoscience because they talk around in circles to evade ever being subject to a test of falsifiability. The Federal Judiciary just came within a hair of endorsing what Richard Feynman famously called “cargo cult science.”

As a great illustration of the problem of non-falsifiability of attribution of weather events to fossil-fuel driven climate change, a reader sends along to me screenshots of two articles from the New York Times, one from two years ago and the other from yesterday.

Over at the New York Times, they don’t have anybody smart enough to realize that this sort of evasion of the principle of falsifiability undermines the whole game of “attribution.” But maybe some of the people who count in the federal judiciary have figured it out.

Now let’s see if we can get some results on the Endangerment Finding.