In 2015, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., was excoriated as a “climate denier” after he held up a snowball on the floor of the Senate to dispute global warming. Critics of the stunt, such as the activist publication Grist, argued that the senator was mistaking weather for climate.

“Climate change is about long-term warming trends, not individual weather events,” the Grist’s Katie Herzog wrote.

Climate advocates have been quick to respond to those who point to individual weather events to dispute the “climate crisis” narrative with the argument that “weather is not climate.”

A new report from the National Academies of Science (NAS) now finds weather is in fact climate change, and “major advancements” in climate science make it possible “for more robust assessments” to determine how climate change is directly responsible for individual weather events.

The report is receiving considerable pushback due to the close association the committee that developed the report has with people directly involved with climate litigation and climate advocacy, including Michael Burger, who is of counsel with Sher Edling, a firm heading up the nationwide climate litigation campaign against oil companies.

The NAS’s stated goal is to develop and communicate its advice “free from undue influence from sponsors, donors, or other interested parties,” so critics of the report are asking how this objective squares with a report that excludes any dissenting perspectives.

The NAS is a nonprofit organization, but the bulk of its funding comes from government contracts. It received $200 million from federal agencies in 2024 alone. This adds another layer of concern among critics, considering taxpayers are supporting an organization that’s developing scientific research to help plaintiffs in climate litigation cases.

Just the News reached out to the National Academies of Science to ask for its response to the allegations of conflict of interest in the report and did not receive a response.

This is not the first time the NAS has been accused of letting its objectivity be clouded by conflicts of interest from climate activists.

Earlier this year, the NAS partnered with the Federal Judiciary Center (FJC) to insert a chapter on climate science into an influential manual that’s used by thousands of judges and likely some involved in climate litigation.

Burger’s work is cited four times in sections addressing climate litigation frameworks, attribution of responsibility, judicial treatment of climate science and the role of the courts in addressing alleged climate harms. The manual does not disclose that the cited material comes from a lawyer working for a firm involved in climate litigation.

After a coalition of 27 Republican attorneys general joined a chorus of criticism over what they said were conflicts of interest – and not just the use of Burger’s research – undermining the objectivity of the science presented in the manual, the FJC agreed to remove it.

The NAS, however, stood by the chapter, and it remains on the organization’s version of the judicial science manual.

As with the climate chapter, Burger influenced the NAS report. In November 2024, he provided a presentation to the NAS attribution committee. In the presentation, he stated he was “actively involved” in Sher Edling’s cases, and he explained how attribution science could be beneficial to plaintiffs in climate cases.

In a 2020 webinar hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, Burger described climate litigation as a “key part of the overall solution” to global warming.

Besides Burger’s influence, Delta Merner, who leads the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate accountability campaign, served on the NAS attribution committee that developed the report. The campaign seeks to advance climate litigation and advance anti-fossil fuel climate policies.

The NAS report promotes what’s called “attribution science,” which is a field of research that itself was developed specifically to win climate lawsuits.

The World Weather Attribution (WWA), one of the leading organizations developing the methodology, was founded to help climate activists trying to win lawsuits against fossil fuel companies.

“Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind,” ground co-founder and climatologist Friederike Otto told Politico in 2019.

Otto said in a Concordia University interview last year that this field of science is part of a legal strategy to arm plaintiffs in lawsuits against oil companies with a scientific basis for their complaints.

Climate researcher Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, has criticized WWA’s methods and compared its conclusions to the ancient pseudo-scientific practice of alchemy.

Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, has pointed out that attribution science looks only at how global warming impacts destructive weather events.

For example, such science doesn’t look at how droughts are made less intense as a result of increased evaporation from higher temperatures or how they could make a cold snap more mild. It’s deliberately biased only on events that produce damages, which are what climate litigants want oil companies to pay for, Lomborg argues.

On his “The Honest Broker” Substack, Pielke also documents what he sees as conflicts of interest within the NAS attribution committee that guided the development of the report.

The committee is sponsored by NOAA, NASA, the Bezos Earth Fund, and a private individual who sits on the board of the Climate Central advocacy group.

In 2014, Climate Central led the creation of and housed the WWA. The WWA is funded by Bezos Earth Fund, and one of the members of the NAS attribution committee is a representative of the WWA.

“The failures of scientific integrity here are profound, obvious, and completely out in public,” Pielke wrote.

The Bezos Earth Fund is a philanthropic organization set up by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. Shannon Osaka, a climate reporter at the Post, was listed in the acknowledgments of the NAS report. Osaka provided the committee with a presentation titled, “How do journalists portray extreme events and climate change?”

The allegations that the NAS’s report was developed without proper safeguards against conflicts of interest are growing and coming from more directions.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board last week criticized the way the report was developed to help advance climate litigation, and specifically called out the failure of the report to disclose Burger’s stake in climate litigation.

“The report omits that Mr. Burger is a counsel at the law firm Sher Edling, which has led the litigation raid on fossil-fuel producers,” the board wrote.

Prior to the NAS report’s release, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee sent a letter to Dr. Marcia McNutt, then-president of the National Academies of Sciences, raising concerns that members of the committee developing the report “are affiliated with nonprofits that support climate accountability lawsuits, raising the appearance of impropriety and member bias.”

The letter also points out that the involvement of people with a financial stake in specific scientific outcomes is in opposition to NAS’s own policies. The letter also proposes oversight mechanisms similar to those found in the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which contains provisions to “ensure that diverse scientific perspectives are represented, that the public can observe committee work, and that the basis for conclusions is subject to scrutiny.”

President Donald Trump also chimed in on the controversy, specifically commenting last week in a post on Truth Social on the climate chapter in the judicial science manual.

“The Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change,” Trump said.

The timing of the NAS report could be related to a climate lawsuit filed by Boulder, Colorado. Oral arguments before the Supreme Court in that case are scheduled for the first week of the October 2026 term. The justices will decide whether the cases can continue under state tort law.

A ruling favorable to the defendants will have far-reaching implications for all climate litigation.

Meanwhile, critics of the campaign, which includes people concerned with how settlements could drive up energy costs and how it’s pushing climate policies through the courts rather than legislatures, are filing briefs in support of the defendants.

Regardless of the outcome of that case, criticisms of the way in which NAS dismissed concerns about conflicts of interest in the development of the report could do lasting damage to trust in science in general, which is already eroding at a rapid pace, polls show.

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