Charles Rotter
Late last year the federal judiciary quietly released a document that almost nobody outside legal circles normally notices: the fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Within weeks one section of that manual vanished.
The reason it vanished reveals something deeply troubling about how climate science, academic institutions, and high-stakes litigation have become entangled.
The manual itself is not obscure inside the legal system. Since the early 1990s it has served as the judiciary’s technical guidebook for evaluating scientific claims presented in court. The need for such a guide arose after the Supreme Court’s 1993 decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, which placed judges in the position of evaluating whether expert testimony is scientifically reliable before allowing it to reach a jury.
Judges are not physicists or epidemiologists. They are generalists. The manual exists to translate complex scientific disciplines into language courts can use.
Because of that role, the document carries extraordinary weight. Judges cite it. Lawyers study it. It is produced jointly by the Federal Judicial Center—the research arm of the federal courts—and the National Academies of Sciences.
Neutrality is supposed to be its defining feature.
The fourth edition, released on December 31, 2025, contained a new element: a chapter devoted entirely to climate science. That chapter ran roughly ninety pages and attempted to explain the fundamentals of climate research and the emerging field of climate attribution.
Within weeks it became the center of a political and legal storm.
In January 2026 a coalition of 23 state attorneys general sent a letter to the judiciary raising concerns that the chapter presented contested scientific issues as settled fact. Members of Congress soon followed with similar objections.
The concern was not abstract.
Courts across the United States are currently handling dozens of lawsuits filed by states and municipalities seeking to hold fossil-fuel companies financially responsible for alleged climate damages. Those cases rely heavily on scientific claims about causation—claims the manual was now summarizing for judges.
In other words, the manual was explaining the very science at the center of ongoing litigation.
Bloomberg Law reported that critics believed the chapter risked “predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs alleging injuries from fossil fuel production.”
One passage raised particular concern. The chapter warned that public disagreement about scientific questions can arise from “strategic attempts to manufacture uncertainty.” Critics argued that language resembled advocacy rather than neutral scientific explanation.
Investigative reporting by ProPublica added another layer of concern: several contributors to the chapter had ties to institutions actively involved in climate litigation strategy.
Under mounting scrutiny, the Federal Judicial Center withdrew the chapter in early February 2026, removing it from the version of the manual distributed to federal judges.
That decision alone would have made the episode notable.
But the most revealing discovery came afterward.
Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist who studies science policy, examined the text of the chapter and noticed something odd. Large portions of the discussion of attribution science closely resembled an earlier academic article on the same topic.
That article had three authors.
The judicial manual listed only two.
After comparing the texts, Pielke found extensive overlap between the two documents:
“Exact word-for-word matches of ten or more consecutive words and lightly reworded passages account for roughly 41–48% of overlap in the Detection & Attribution Methods and Extreme Event Attribution sections of the chapter.”
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/who-actually-wrote-the-climate-manual
The third author of the earlier article—missing from the manual—was Michael Burger.
That name turns out to be central to the entire story.
Burger is the Executive Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, an institution devoted to developing legal strategies to advance climate policy. The center maintains extensive databases tracking climate lawsuits and provides legal research supporting those cases.
Burger also holds another role.
He is Of Counsel at Sher Edling LLP.
Sher Edling is not simply another law firm. It is the legal spearhead of climate liability litigation in the United States.
Founded in 2016, the firm was created specifically to pursue lawsuits against fossil-fuel companies on behalf of states and municipalities. Since then it has become the dominant force in that field.
Sher Edling represents jurisdictions including Rhode Island, Delaware, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Honolulu, Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, and many others. By recent counts the firm has been involved in the majority of climate liability lawsuits filed in the United States.
The strategy behind these cases is straightforward.
Instead of attempting to regulate emissions directly—something federal law largely reserves for Congress and federal agencies—the lawsuits attempt to hold energy companies financially liable for climate damages using state tort theories such as public nuisance or consumer fraud.
If successful, the potential financial consequences could be enormous.
Sher Edling typically operates on contingency fees, meaning the firm receives a percentage of any financial recovery. Climate liability judgments could run into the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.
That financial incentive alone makes the firm a central player in climate policy battles.
But the firm’s operations have drawn scrutiny for another reason: its funding.
Investigations by congressional committees have documented that Sher Edling has received millions of dollars from nonprofit organizations, including funding routed through the New Venture Fund, part of a large philanthropic network managed by Arabella Advisors.
The arrangement effectively allows wealthy donors to support climate litigation through nonprofit channels while remaining largely invisible to the public.
In practice, a privately financed legal campaign is being conducted through government plaintiffs.
Now consider how that connects to the withdrawn judicial manual chapter.
The lawsuits pursued by Sher Edling rely heavily on a field of research known as extreme event attribution. These studies attempt to estimate how much human greenhouse-gas emissions contributed to particular weather events such as hurricanes, floods, or heat waves.
Establishing that connection is essential for climate damages claims.
Without some scientific method for linking emissions to specific harms, the legal theory collapses.
That same attribution science occupied a major portion of the withdrawn manual chapter.
According to Pielke’s analysis, those sections appear to draw heavily from the earlier academic paper co-authored by Michael Burger.
Yet Burger’s name was not listed among the authors of the judicial manual chapter.
In academic publishing, that practice has a name: ghost authorship. When a substantial contributor to a publication is not listed as an author, transparency about intellectual responsibility disappears.
Under normal circumstances, that would already raise questions.
In this case the implications are far more serious.
A judicial reference manual intended to help federal judges evaluate climate science appears to have incorporated substantial intellectual contributions from a lawyer affiliated with the firm bringing many of the climate lawsuits before those same courts.
If that connection had been clearly disclosed and Burger listed as an author, readers could at least evaluate the potential conflict.
Instead, the contribution appears to have been hidden.
The result is a document guiding judges that may have been shaped—at least in part—by someone connected to a law firm that stands to gain financially from the legal interpretation of the science being described.
This is the sort of conflict that would normally trigger immediate alarm in other areas of science and law.
Imagine a pharmaceutical litigation guide written with undisclosed input from attorneys suing drug manufacturers. Or a toxicology manual influenced by lawyers pursuing mass tort claims.
The outcry would be immediate.
Yet within the climate policy world such entanglements have become increasingly common.
Academic centers develop legal theories. Philanthropic networks fund litigation strategies. Law firms file cases. Governments serve as plaintiffs. Scientific research supporting those cases circulates through the same network of institutions.
The boundary between scholarship and advocacy becomes difficult to locate.
The withdrawn climate chapter in the judicial manual briefly exposed that system.
The Federal Judicial Center ultimately removed the chapter, which may have prevented a far larger controversy from erupting inside the courts.
But the episode raises a troubling question that extends well beyond a single publication.
When the same network of academics, advocacy groups, philanthropic funders, and contingency-fee law firms shapes both the science presented in court and the lawsuits relying on that science, neutrality becomes extremely difficult to maintain.
Judges depend on resources like the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence precisely because they expect them to provide impartial explanations of complex research.
If those explanations are quietly influenced by individuals tied to the litigation ecosystem itself, the integrity of the process begins to erode.
The disappearance of the climate chapter solved one immediate problem.
It did not solve the deeper one.
The deeper issue is that climate science, climate policy, and climate litigation have become part of the same institutional machinery.
And once those gears start turning together, separating scientific analysis from legal strategy becomes nearly impossible.
H/T Paul Driesen
