- The Federal Judicial Center removed a climate science section from its reference manual after state attorneys general and House Republicans argued it was politically biased.
- Critics said the chapter encouraged judges to favor mainstream climate consensus.
- The move aligns with the Trump administration’s broader skepticism of climate science, citing uncertainty in human-caused warming and alleged gaps in data.
The Federal Judicial Center scrapped a climate change-related section from its updated scientific reference manual, which is designed to assist judges by summarizing “unequivocal” scientific consensus.
Attorneys general from 27 states, including Utah, formed a coalition last month, calling for the Federal Judicial Center to remove its “Reference Manual on Climate Science” section, which it did last week.
That chapter was “written by authors who are connected to university climate studies programs that promote legal warfare against States and energy producers to push their left leaning political agendas,” the attorneys general wrote.
The letter also came after the federal House Judiciary Committee wrote to the Judicial Conference of the U.S., saying the climate section “appear(s) to have the underlying goal of predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs alleging injuries from manufacturing, marketing, use or sale of fossil fuel products.”
What did the climate change section say?
At several points in the 1,682-page manual, its critics said the authors demonstrated several moments of bias.
The manual offered the following advice for judges when they find two scientific experts disagreeing: “seek clarification on how representative of the scientific community the two views are.”
It added, “Note that public perception of the certainty of a scientific concept or hypothesis may differ from the actual state of consensus building within the scientific community. This sometimes occurs as a result of strategic manipulation from stakeholders who stand to be harmed if the public were to understand the true state of scientific consensus surrounding the hypothesis, as has occurred with, for example, the health effects of tobacco, ozone depletion and climate change.”
In addition to likening climate science to the certainty of cigarettes’ effect on health, the guide encouraged judges to question scientists’ authority when “weighing in on a scientific question outside their area of expertise.”
It said instances of this happening have “affected public acceptance of science and policy on issues such as climate change and tobacco exposure.”
The chapters’ co-authors are environmental lawyer Jessica Wentz and environmental scientist Radley Horton of Columbia University. It also cites Michael Mann’s, “The New Climate War,” and Naomi Oreskes’ “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.”
The Trump administration’s stance on climate science
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin published a study on greenhouse gas emissions in July 2025, concluding that the extent to which humans contribute to long-term global warming is uncertain based on current climate science.
One of the study’s authors, former DOE adviser to President Barack Obama, Steven Koonin, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s data, which the recent reference manual cites, is missing data.
“There’s a table in there in the back of the (R6) report, certainly not in the front of it, which shows about 30 different kinds of extreme weather events: droughts, floods, storms, et cetera. And the table says whether we have seen a trend in that particular event, and almost all of the entries in the table are blank. And the IPCC cannot find an observable trend in almost all kinds of weather events,” Koonin said in an interview following July’s report.
The attorneys general letter about the manual cites similar concerns about climate science, especially over the manual’s authors.
“The chapter presents this science as authoritative without acknowledging contrary views or disclosing the many conflicts of the authors, reviewers, and sources. Ethics experts have noted that these issues raise serious ethics concerns,” they wrote.