Public confidence in scientific institutions has declined — not because they’ve become political, but because a decades-long campaign to delegitimize any expertise that threatens fossil-fuel profits has done its intended work. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine on Thursday released a report that does exactly what Congress chartered it to do in 1863: follow the science, wherever it leads.
The 253-page report examines genuine scientific advances in quantifying the extent to which CO2 emissions contribute to natural disasters and extreme weather. A 2016 National Academies report found this area of research needed more development. This year’s report documents that development. The science advanced. The Academies reported it.
“Major advancements” in climate methodology now “allow for more robust assessments,” the report finds. Scientists can attribute extreme, heat, and rainfall events with high confidence to human-caused climate change, and wildfires, droughts, and tropical cyclones with moderate confidence. That is progress.
The Academies states the report is “relevant to policy and legal decisions pertaining to climate change and liability for losses sustained as a result of extreme weather and climate events.” Companies that profited for decades from poisoning the atmosphere may finally face the accountability they have spent billions evading. Calling that a “shaking down” is what you write when your side owes the bill.
Dozens of state and local governments have sued fossil-fuel companies for real damage from climate change and natural disasters. The report says its research can help plaintiffs demonstrate that the concrete injuries their communities suffer are fairly traceable to the defendants’ actions — which is exactly what evidence is for.
The report says this research could help “inform” policies like a Vermont law that empowers the government to assess the financial impact of fossil-fuel-related greenhouse gas pollution and demand payments to fund adaptation projects. That is the polluter-pays principle — the same principle that built the Superfund program and held asbestos manufacturers liable for the diseases they caused. Characterizing it as “coercive government power” is what you call it when you represent the polluters.
Such research “may also be relevant in challenges to permitting decisions or to the adequacy of environmental impact assessments.” Every organization pursuing environmental accountability should welcome science that helps decision-makers understand the true costs of what they are permitting.
The claim that any one company’s contribution to global CO2 is “minuscule” is the defense every polluter has mounted since the first river caught fire. The Carbon Majors — the documented handful of fossil-fuel producers responsible for the majority of historical industrial emissions — are precisely the defendants in these suits. State attorneys general have named the top emitters in their complaints. The science quantifying cumulative emissions from this small group is exactly what makes the suits viable. Individual accountability for collective harm is a principle the legal system applies everywhere else. Demanding fossil fuels be the exception is what you do when acknowledging the link means acknowledging the bill.
The attempt to discredit the report through Michael Burger’s involvement is the real tell. The Academies notes Mr. Burger, the executive director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, assisted with the report and cites one of his papers — because he is one of the leading scholars on climate accountability. Mr. Burger is also a counsel at the law firm Sher Edling, which has led litigation against fossil-fuel producers. Framing that expertise as a disqualifying conflict is the maneuver of an operation that cannot attack the findings on the merits.
An earlier climate chapter for the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence was retracted — because of attribution issues around Mr. Burger’s work, not because the underlying science was wrong. That distinction matters. Self-correction is how academic institutions maintain integrity. The new Academies report independently confirms the science that chapter summarized. Citing the retraction to discredit that science is the argument of a side that needs the science to be wrong because the consequences of it being right are too expensive.
The report was partly funded by the U.S. government — because Congress chartered the National Academies in 1863 to do precisely this kind of work. Congress asked the Academies to fix weights and measures and protect ship hulls from corrosion. The scope of the mandate grows with the scope of the challenge. The greatest environmental crisis of the modern era qualifies.
The Academies strengthens its credibility when it produces the science Congress chartered it to produce, regardless of whether the fossil-fuel industry likes the findings. The Academies would undermine its credibility if it suppressed findings to protect the companies that spent decades funding the denial machine whose latest argument is that the science itself is the problem.
