A couple of important articles, First, at Real Clear Energy, A Quiet Rewrite That Could Shape a Thousand Climate Cases "Activists have injected agenda-driven consensus into rules of scientific evidence. Chief Justice Roberts has the power to change it back."
An under-the-radar legal switcheroo should concern every business leader, investor, and taxpayer in America. Now, 23 state attorneys general have taken notice and sent a letter to the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts that bolsters the efforts of three eminent scientists who sounded the alarm.
Climate activists have found a way to get their preferred evidence standards into the hands of roughly 6,000 federal and state judges—before those judges hear more than 1,000 pending climate cases that could reshape the American economy. They did it through a handbook.
The Federal Judicial Center (FJC) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) jointly publish the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Likely very few Americans realize Congress established the FJC in 1967 as the research and education arm of the federal courts and made the Chief Justice of the U.S. its chair. For decades, the FJC collaborated with the NAS to give judges objective, apolitical guidance on how to evaluate scientific claims in the courtroom. The motivation is obvious, if often taken for granted by the American public: give judges the tools and standards to admit scientific evidence that is objectively true, and reject quackery and scientifically invalid hypotheses that would bias the judicial proceedings.
The manual is that guidance, and the fourth edition has just been released.
Three eminent scientists who've read the manual immediately started ringing alarm bells. According to Richard Lindzen of MIT, William Happer of Princeton, and Steven Koonin of Stanford's Hoover Institution, its new chapter on "How Science Works" has a problem. In an April 1 letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, the three scientists argue that the chapter—which balloons from 18 pages in the prior edition to 65—quietly swaps out the scientific method for something inherently more political: "scientific consensus."
In so doing, the new version flies in the face of Supreme Court precedent that has shaped the legal evaluation of scientific evidence since 1993.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. The scientific method is a familiar process: form a hypothesis, design an experiment that could prove it wrong, and let the data speak. A claim that cannot in principle be falsified isn't science.
Consensus, by contrast, is a survey of opinion. It can reflect rigorous work, or it can reflect fashion, funding pressure, or institutional inertia. The two are not interchangeable. The Supreme Court has already said so.
Consensus is just a vehicle to bully people into accepting the views of the loudest advocates
At WUWT, What’s Up With The Endangerment Finding Litigation?
Have you heard of the “Endangerment Finding” (EF)? You have if you have been reading this blog for any period of time. The 2009 EF is likely the most consequential, expensive and destructive regulatory action ever put in place by the federal bureaucracy. In that action, EPA claimed to find that carbon dioxide and several other so-called “greenhouse gases” constitute a “danger” to human health and welfare. Using the EF as the predicate, the administrative state under the Obama and Biden presidencies implemented dozens of major regulations intended to transform the entire energy sector of the U.S. economy. Obama/Biden regulations based on the EF sought, for example, to force the closure of all fossil-fuel based power plants; to end the production of internal-combustion-based cars in favor of electric cars; to restrict drilling for oil and for natural gas; to halt construction of pipelines; and many, many other such things.
The total cost was heading well into the trillions when President Trump returned to office in 2025. One of Trump’s first day Executive Orders in his second term directed all agencies to “review” and then begin to “suspend, revise, or rescind” all agency actions “identified as unduly burdensome” to U.S. energy production. EPA promptly began a lengthy regulatory process to rescind the EF. The final rule doing away with the EF became final on February 13, 2026. I had a post reporting on the rescission on February 15.
If it withstands court challenges, the rescission of the EF is a death blow against the entire and vast climate grift industry. Obviously the rescission was going to unleash a tsunami of litigation. In case you are wondering what is going on in that litigation, I spent some time today reviewing the docket, and there are several things to report. The bottom line is that the court in question — here the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit — does not appear to be in any hurry to move things along. That is a major concern, because in my view the biggest risk to the Trump administration position is that the case does not reach decision in the Supreme Court before the end of Trump’s term.
I suppose it is good news in this instance that the relevant statutes force all the litigation challenging this regulatory action to go to one court, the DC Circuit. This is in contrast to various other litigation onslaughts against the Trump administration, where the government’s adversaries can shop around the country to find favorable District Court judges to hear the cases. (Example of this phenomenon: cases challenging immigration enforcement.). And thus, even though dozens of plaintiffs have filed cases challenging rescission of the EF, all these cases are getting consolidated, and will be heard together. Also good news is that the DC Circuit is already an appeals court, and only one level below the Supreme Court. Thus, there will not be an intervening level of appeal before the Supremes get the case.
But the bad news is that the DC Circuit is not a favorable forum for the Trump administration. Of its eleven active judges, seven were appointed by Democrats (either Obama or Biden) and only four by Republicans (three Trump and one George H.W. Bush). All of the seven Democratic appointees are reliable partisans.
So what has happened in the nearly four months since EPA finalized the rescission? Remarkably little. In particular, there does not appear to be any scheduling order to start the briefing.
Justices are not scientists. They shouldn't be having to make these decisions.
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