by Angela Wheeler
Rather than a serious assessment of the connection between extreme weather and climate change, a recent National Academies of Sciences (NAS) webinar presented a 253-page report engineered to reinforce the shopworn claim that emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) threaten a climate crisis.
The hour-long presentation was as thin on real science as the self-congratulations were effusive. The NAS committee reviewing the issue, we were told, had done “a great job,” improved on a 2016 report, and now needs more funding and theoretical modeling. There was no data-driven test of whether CO2 from human activity alters the frequency or severity of bad weather. The report simply assumes the link and builds on it.
Committee Chair James W. Hurrell offered no contrary evidence. The webinar ignored a drop in hurricane activity, record extreme heat of the 1930s, and forest-management practices that increase fuel loads, suppress natural fires, and lead to explosive infernos.
Lacking was historical perspective. Unconvincing was Hurrell’s insistence that the Bezos Earth Fund and other climate-aligned groups funding the committee had no influence.
The report’s text repeatedly invokes “the consensus” and the sharp rise in attribution studies that seek to connect weather extremes to climate change. However, the prevalence of research looks more like the product of grant availability than the revelations of stronger evidence, money being a key ingredient in manufacturing consensus.
The committee’s bias toward the popular narrative of a climate crisis is revealed in a recent article in The Conversation, where members celebrated “advances in weather and climate data, climate models and attribution methods” that let researchers compare today’s weather against a theoretical world “without increased greenhouse gases.” The presumption is that CO2 has worsened weather, and researchers only need to determine by how much.
In the tradition of so-called climate science, the committee’s membership and research team excluded independent voices such as William Happer, Richard Lindzen, Steve Koonin, Roger Pielke Jr., and Judith Curry. Representation tilted heavily toward the climate orthodoxy of academia with Columbia, Yale, and Oxford among the more prominent.
Missing was any reference to research such as that of NAS members Happer and Lindzen, whose 2025 paper details atmospheric physics underlying the relatively weak warming potential of CO2. So impotent is the gas, according to their research, that reducing emissions to levels envisioned by alarmists would result in temperature changes too small to measure or feel.
A century of observations confirms that heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires show no significant long-term trends linked to rising CO₂. Many of these phenomena peaked in the 1930s or have declined. On the other hand, doubling atmospheric CO₂ would increase the world’s food supply by about 40% because of its fertilization effect.
In short, Happer and Lindzen’s physics, grounded in data, renders the report’s confidence in attributing bad weather to a beneficial gas scientifically untenable.
Notwithstanding this and mountains of other evidence contradicting doomsayers, Chapter 5 of the report tries to quantify damages from “climate change,” even discussing legal applications. By stamping NAS authority on damage numbers and “counterfactual” model runs – imagining how mild weather might have been without human influence – the report hands climate litigators a ready citation for lawsuits and settlement demands.
Hurrell noted that this is the first NAS effort to both attribute extremes to climate change and assign dollar damages. The work clearly aims to rectify the failures of litigators to connect CO2 emissions to injuries and have energy companies pay dearly for them. This is pseudoscience to give plaintiffs the so-called proof of causation and the monetary claims that judges have repeatedly said were missing when they dismissed cases.
The NAS report could trigger a wave of costly new lawsuits and forced settlements based on theoretical assumptions rather than observable evidence, drain public and private resources, and further make a mockery of NAS’s pretense of scientific legitimacy.
Perhaps even more importantly, by assuming the role of legal advocate for a bogus climate emergency, the National Academies further erodes public trust in science.
Originally published in Washington Examiner on August 6, 2026.
Angela Wheeler is executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. She is a cum laude graduate of Emporia State University, Kansas, where she studied communication, with additional biology and pre-medicine coursework.
