The Federal Judicial Center just deleted an entire chapter on climate science from its reference manual for judges. Why? Because a group of Republican state attorneys general didn’t like that it treated human-caused climate change as a fact.
Let that sink in for a moment. A document designed to help judges understand scientific evidence has been stripped of factual information because some politicians found those facts inconvenient.
When Facts Become “Contested”
The Federal Judicial Center exists to educate judges on complex topics that show up in courtrooms. Their “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence” covers everything from DNA identification to statistical analysis. It’s meant to be a trusted resource when Technology and science intersect with the legal system.
The fourth edition, released in December, included a chapter on climate science written by Columbia University experts. It stated things like human activities have “unequivocally warmed the climate” and that researchers are “virtually certain” about ocean acidification. You know, the scientific consensus that’s been established through decades of research.
But here’s where it gets absurd. The attorneys general argued that because some lawsuits have contested these facts, the manual shouldn’t treat them as settled science. By this logic, if someone files a lawsuit claiming the Earth is flat, we should start questioning geography textbooks too.
The Complaint That Worked
The letter from these state officials complained that the manual was taking sides on “hotly disputed questions.” They cited a conservative Canadian think tank to argue against calling the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change an “authoritative science body.”
Sure, they threw in some potentially reasonable critiques about legal guidance and the weight given to recent studies. But make no mistake about what they really wanted. The letter demanded the entire chapter be removed because it accurately reflected climate science.
And the Federal Judicial Center folded. The chapter is gone. Justice Elena Kagan’s foreword still mentions it, which is almost darkly comic. The only place you can read it now is on the RealClimate blog, where someone had the foresight to preserve it.
What This Actually Means
This isn’t just about one reference manual. It’s about whether scientific consensus matters when it becomes politically inconvenient. The manual still treats other scientific facts as facts without controversy. Nobody’s demanding they remove chapters on DNA evidence or chemical exposures as “contested.”
The attorneys general’s argument essentially says that ignorance-based lawsuits should determine what judges learn about science. If someone files a suit based on rejecting established science, then educational materials for judges must pretend that science is uncertain.
This creates a perverse incentive. Want to muddy the waters on any scientific topic? Just file enough lawsuits challenging it, and suddenly educational institutions have to treat your willful ignorance as a legitimate viewpoint worthy of equal consideration.
The Federal Judicial Center could have stood behind the work it commissioned from experts and the National Academies of Science. Instead, they chose the path of least political resistance, leaving judges without crucial reference material on one of the most significant issues likely to appear in courtrooms for decades to come.
Now when climate cases reach the courts, judges will have to navigate complex scientific questions without the very resource that was created to help them understand the evidence. All because someone decided that treating facts as facts was somehow taking sides.
