NAS Climate Attribution Report Can’t Escape Reality - Even With Activist Capture
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine just released a major report on extreme event attribution science, the increasingly trendy climate alarmism field that tries to pin specific hurricanes, heat waves, or floods on human-caused climate change and, more importantly, on the oil and gas companies activists love to sue. The headlines from the usual suspects in the media will predictably claim the science has “advanced.” What they won’t emphasize is the report’s own admission that the field still faces “significant challenges,” or the roster of climate litigation partisans who helped shape it.
President Donald Trump immediately questioned the report’s legitimacy, and the reason why is pretty simple: The report was heavily influenced by academics and activists with clear conflicts of interest. One example is Michael Burger of Columbia’s Sabin Center, who also serves as of counsel to the Sher Edling firm in Honolulu’s climate lawfare effort targeting the oil and gas industry. In that role, Burger stands to benefit if courts start accepting these studies as proof of liability. The report’s acknowledgments thank him anyway while making no meaningful disclosure of his obvious conflicts of interest.
Oh.
