One of the nation’s most respected scientific institutions said Friday it will conduct a review of a disputed climate education chapter in a judicial manual, weeks after President Donald Trump ordered his administration to investigate the matter.
In a post, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said it will review the process involved in producing the climate science chapter for the fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. That review should conclude by the fall, a spokesperson for the academies said.
The Federal Judicial Center, which published the manual, removed the climate science section in January following complaints from Republican attorneys general who accused the authors of siding with efforts to hold oil and gas companies financially responsible for climate change.
The academies at the time declined to also remove the chapter from its website but said Friday the chapter will not appear on its website during the review. Trump had amplified complaints about the chapter last month, writing in a Truth Social post that he was ordering federal officials with authority over contracts and grants to look at funding for the National Academies.
The National Academies noted that the chapter has “received considerable scrutiny” and has found that “questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review.”
It did not say who will conduct the review but added that the assessment “is about the process used to produce the chapter and not about the validity of climate science.”
The National Academies said the focus of the review will be the group’s “own procedures and whether they were adequate to ensure the highest standard of objectivity that this institution requires and our nation deserves.”
It had said last month after Trump’s order that the academies “remain committed to our mission to provide independent, objective scientific advice. Our activities are conducted to ensure scientific rigor, transparency and independence. Those enduring values remain our commitment.”
The Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence was issued in December and included new guidelines on topics such as eyewitness identification, computer science, artificial intelligence and climate science.
After the education arm of the federal judiciary agreed in January to remove the climate science section, another group of Republican attorneys general escalated the assault in March, asking the Trump administration to revoke federal grants received by both groups, saying they had “violated their public commitments” by engaging in a “biased process.”
House Republicans sent a similar letter to the administration in May, saying the climate chapter violated “Gold Standard Science” by not including a “fully independent, meaningful peer review from scientists with differing views on climate science.” They asked the White House’s budget director, Russ Vought, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to “investigate” whether the academies should be “suspended or debarred from all federal funding.”
Efforts to discredit the climate science chapter have emerged as part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration and Republicans across the country to scuttle the nearly two dozen climate lawsuits that could put the fossil fuel industry on the hook for potentially billions of dollars.
The Supreme Court will hear a case challenging those lawsuits in October and conservative groups have called for a probe of whether Justice Elena Kagan — a member of the high court’s liberal wing — violated ethics rules by writing the forward to the judicial reference manual.
Kagan testified last month that she hadn’t read the chapter in question.
Republicans have asserted that the authors of the manual’s climate chapter, Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton, who are affiliated with climate studies programs at Columbia University, had “applauded litigation as a tool to advance their preferred political objectives.”
Wentz and Horton have refuted that characterization. Democratic attorneys general and members of Congress have called on the Federal Judicial Center to restore the climate chapter, saying “partisan actors should have no input into the substantive determination of what constitutes accurate and reliable information.”
Democrats say the peer-reviewed chapter drew from a variety of expert climate sources and provided context to help courts assess the “credibility, weight, and admissibility of those different sources.”
Justice Samuel Alito, who was appointed by a President George W. Bush and holds stock in oil companies, has also faced calls to step back from the Suncor climate case.
A court spokesperson has said the justice is not required to recuse himself because he does not have financial interests in the companies directly named in the case. Alito has declined to participate in earlier versions of the climate case that have come before the Supreme Court.
