NEW YORK — Climate scientists pledged this week to keep plugging away at research that shows how fossil fuel companies supercharge extreme weather — even as they detailed the federal and industry efforts to deter them.
“Science is under a coordinated assault right now,” Carly Phillips, a senior scientist with the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Thursday. “We’re up against powerful actors and they are coordinating their efforts on a very specific type of research that can be used to hold polluters accountable and threaten that power.”
Phillips was among the speakers at a two-day climate law conference at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. The conference drew scientists from across the globe who focus on so-called attribution science.
The fossil fuel industry has targeted attribution science for nearly a decade, claiming it is solely designed to help propel lawsuits that seek compensation from polluters for the costs of climate change.
Blocking those lawsuits has emerged as a priority for the Trump administration as part of a broader effort to stifle climate initiatives, including cutting climate research funding and federal programs.
The executive branch onslaught comes as congressional Republicans propose legislation that would grant the fossil fuel industry immunity from the climate lawsuits that have been filed by nearly two dozen local governments.
Phillips pointed to the Senate version of the legislation, which claims that “efforts to attribute local weather patterns” to energy companies “lack scientific credibility.”
Lawmakers, she said, are “coming for attribution science in a very clear, direct, and targeted way.”
Republican attorneys general also successfully forced the removal of a climate science chapter from a reference manual for federal judges — and individual scientists are increasingly being targeted, she said.
POLITICO reported Thursday on a secretive opposition research group that is filing public records requests and scouring scientists’ emails in an effort to weaken the credibility of an upcoming National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on attribution science.
The effort to discredit the science echoes the tobacco industry’s attempts in the 1960s to muddy studies showing links between cancer and smoking, said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist and director of Texas A&M University’s Texas Center for Climate Studies.
“You don’t have to prove that cigarettes are safe, you just have to introduce doubt,” he said.
Dessler argued for pushing back. He noted climate science scored a recent win when the Trump administration abandoned a scientific paper written by five climate contrarians convened by Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
Dessler helped convene more than 85 scientists to organize a 450-page rebuttal to the climate report.
“People wanted to drop whatever they were doing and work on it because people were offended,” he said. “This was a mockery of science, and if you love science, if you respect science, the working group was offensive.”
The same lesson, he said, could be applied to the push back against attribution science.
“The goal of fossil fuel interests is to generate reasonable doubt,” he said. “They know they can’t win, they’re just trying to make it an argument, and it’s not an argument with scientists, it’s an argument carried on in front of the public.”
An ‘unrelentingly bleak situation’
Speakers at the conference challenged the assertion that attribution science only has implications for lawsuits, noting the science can be used to track climate-fueled health issues and help communities particularly vulnerable to climate change.
They also acknowledged the limits to the science when it comes to challenging fossil fuel producers. Sabin Center Director Michael Gerrard noted the science hasn’t been a factor in the array of lawsuits against the industry, which have largely been stalled by procedural disputes.
“The emerging science of climate attribution will be very helpful in these cases, but it’s not enough,” Gerrard said. “Many key decisions will hinge on purely legal issues.”
Dina Lupin, an associate law professor at the University of Southampton’s Law School, echoed his remarks, saying the challenge facing the field “isn’t the science, it’s the law. The science keeps getting better and the lawyers find a way to work around it — especially in our current complex political climate.”
Lupin suggested a hypothetical fix: a small claims court “in which there are no lawyers needed, in which people can take major emitters to court, immediately put some science on the table, and claim the costs of the immediate effects on their homes.”
Outside the lecture halls, scientists said their fears extend well beyond climate as the Trump administration throttles publicly funded scientific research. Most recently, the Office of Management and Budget — in a move it said would promote transparency — proposed exerting political control over the federal scientific grantmaking process that spans across the government to public and private universities.
“Climate’s certainly part of it, but when you talk to people in physics or chemistry, they’re just as worried,” said Dessler, the Texas A&M climate scientist. “The U.S. had — maybe still has — the gold standard for research universities. And they’re taking this valuable public institution and smashing it.”
Dessler said he fears the cuts to research will do permanent harm.
“If we continue down this road, we’re going to be a country that doesn’t have science,” Dessler said. “And people have to understand, if you go to a company and they’re doing research, where did those people get their degrees? They got them from U.S. research institutions. It’s the pipeline.”
Scientists are pursuing truth and that pursuit is “under assault,” said Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth College. “If you are in a truth-seeking endeavor, this is a very challenging time.”
Mankin noted U.S. investment in scientific research since World War II has led to achievements including progress in treating diseases, as well as the development of cell phones and artificial intelligence.
“You’re seeing the private sector ask for people with this expertise and they may not exist anymore,” Mankin said. “The reinsurance industry wants climate scientists, the private analytics firms want climate scientists. All these financial institutions want climate scientists. Where does the money for training those people come from? It comes from public investment, and that pipeline is gone.”
Paul Rink, an associate law professor at Seton Hall University’s Law School, said he’s looking for positive angles, including using the administration’s hostility to climate change to look at ways that progress can still happen. He’s writing a paper that explores the theory that odd coalitions with shared interests can reach common ground.
Rink said the farm bill, for example, works because it teams Republicans from rural areas with Democrats who back food aid programs.
“I’m trying to find a silver lining in an otherwise unrelentingly bleak situation,” Rink said. “I think this is one way that we can approach climate advocacy now that doesn’t require us to either file litigation against the Trump administration or other actors antagonistic to climate change, and that doesn’t require us to wait until the situation is less adverse to our interests.”
He said the stress was palpable at another recent conference he attended with colleagues who also teach natural resources law.
“There’s definitely a feeling of discouragement, but because we’re all law professors, we’re looking for ways to keep our students from feeling nihilistic at this time,” Rink said.
Like Dessler, Rink contributed to a paper that criticized the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group and took some satisfaction when EPA backed away from the report.
“It was definitely a win that we can count on,” Rink said. “We don’t know what it’s going to look like when it comes to the court proceedings around the endangerment finding repeal, but there’s a lot of active movement against the administration’s policies, and I think that gives us hope.”
