This post is Part 2 in the ongoing THB series on extreme event attribution — Weather Attribution Alchemy. You can find Part 1 here.
Don’t worry. I’m on guard.
In my college classes I occasionally kick things off by introducing a provocative, even fantastical, thought experiment to get the students thinking and discussing. Here is one focused on science advice to kick off our discussions at THB today:
Imagine a future where the U.S. president is opposed to climate policy.1 Difficult, I know, but please humor me. The administration justifies its opposition based on the notion of an ultra-low social cost of carbon (ULSCC). The media and political advocates also emphasize the ULSCC to such a degree that it has pushed aside much of the public discussion of scientific work on the same subject.
Because the idea of an ULSCC is so prevalent and directly relevant to policy, the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) creates a committee to assess the topic. The committee has four funders: (1) NOAA, (2) NASA, (3) a new group funded by billionaire Elon Musk — named Worldwide Low or WWL, and (4) a wealthy individual who sits on the board of the group that originally created WWL and continues to advocate against climate policy based on the idea of an ultra-low SCC.
There is more. The new committee includes among its academics and scientists a member of the WWL advocacy group. Also on the committee is an employee of another anti-climate policy advocacy group, which promotes the argument that a ULSCC makes climate policy unnecessary. At the committee’s first meeting, members are briefed by a lawyer involved in lawsuits seeking to stop climate policy implementation based on the idea of a ULSCC.
What, if anything, might be problematic about this hypothetical approach to science advice through a NAS committee?
Well, I can think of a few:
The committee is funded by a group and an individual with a direct interest in the committee’s work. Drug companies do not fund federal drug approval committees for fairly obvious reasons.
The committee has among its members several individuals who have professional and financial connections to the funders of the committee. These connections generally fall under the concept of conflict of interest.
As well, those several individuals also have a professional stake in the outcome of the committee’s work — to advance the political agenda of the organizations that they are affiliated with and legitimizing their own science advocacy work within those organizations. These professional stakes generally fall under the concept of bias.
The committee’s first meeting focuses on policy advocacy to thwart climate policy, far removed from anything resembling assessment.
At this point in the class, I typically pull a fast one on the students — This is actually not a thought experiment! It is a fictional case that I invented that actually exactly mirrors a real world situation. The only changes I made were to flip the politics.
The new NAS 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.2
In 2014, Climate Central led the creation3 of and housed another advocacy group called World Weather Attribution (WWA) which, according to its founder, was to create studies of “event attribution” that connect climate change to individual weather events to support climate lawsuits:
“"Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind," she [Friederike Otto] said.
Otto drew a comparison between the climate liability lawsuits and earlier litigation against major tobacco companies, which relied on science showing the harmful health effects of smoking (Climatewire, March 10).
"You can say that smoking cigarettes increases the likelihood of developing cancer, and you can actually quantify how much, and therefore those who sell tobacco and say it’s wonderful for you are liable," she said. "And this is the same idea behind the event attribution."“
According to Climate Central, the creation of WWA and its promotional activities have resulted in a narrative shift on climate:
“From 2014 - 2017, with Climate Central as Secretariat, WWA conducted more than 20 analyses around the globe, drawing worldwide coverage from hundreds of media outlets, big and small. The narrative of not being able to link climate change to an individual weather disaster had changed.”
There can be no doubt about the incredible successes of Climate Central and WWA in promoting the idea that climate change caused — or more cagily, is linked to, connected to, fueling — the extreme weather event that just happened.4 As advocacy groups, they are doing exactly what advocacy groups do, organizing around a cause and promoting it. That is democracy 101 and more power to them — Bravo.
At the same time, scientific research and assessment are not the same things as political advocacy. Efforts to turn the former into the latter represent significant risks to the scientific integrity of important institutions, like the IPCC and NAS. Arguably, extreme weather event attribution has in public discussions already supplanted the careful assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the detection and attribution of changes in the climatology of extreme weather.5
Today, WWA is funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, which — remarkably — is also funding the new NAS Attribution committee. Sitting on that new NAS Attribution committee is a representative of WWA.
We are not done yet. The NAS Attribution committee also includes another representative of a climate advocacy group — the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). This committee member leads a group within UCS called, “The UCS Science Hub for Climate Litigation.” The Hub describes its work as follows:
“We work to connect scientists and legal experts advancing climate litigation. We create legally relevant scientific research, provide legal teams with research, and introduce them to experts.”
Just like the executive and legislative branches, the judicial system also has a pressing need for expertise. There is of course no problem with advocacy groups organizing experts or even “creat[ing] legally relevant scientific research” in support of lawsuits. Lawyers and judges need science advice also, and the adversarial nature of the legal system implies different approaches to science advice than we find in other areas of policy and regulation. The work of WWA and UCS is perfectly legitimate and necessary.
But is it appropriate to include such legal advocates on a NAS study committee focused on evaluating and legitimizing the information that they produce in support of the litigation that these advocates are involved in?
Of course not.
The failures of scientific integrity here are profound, obvious, and completely out in public. Of course, as always here at THB, I’d love to hear opposing arguments.
Given all this, it would be fair to ask whether the NAS Attribution committee is about science advice at all, or instead, a not-so-subtle form of institutionalized stealth advocacy in support of climate litigation. Has the integrity of the nation’s leading institution of science advice been compromised? That couldn’t be the case, could it?
The first public meeting of the NAS Attribution committee will take place a few weeks from now. On that agenda is a litigator from Sher Edling, LLC, a firm that is litigating almost two dozen climate cases that depend up claims of extreme event attribution.6 Somehow, that litigator’s role as a counsel-of-record in these various lawsuits was left off of the NAS public meeting agenda.
I welcome your comments and critique. In particular, I invite those in the climate research and assessment community who may hold different views to make a case for why a NAS committee with conflicts, biases, and an overt political agenda is in fact appropriate. Climate science — across various contexts documented here at THB — plays by special rules, contrary to the typical norms and policies that we see in the scientific community. Of course other areas of science see integrity issues arise, but climate science seems very unique in its inability to self-correct when it gets off course.
This series will soon return to nerdy issues of climate variability, the meaning of climate causality, and the inner workings of event attribution methodologies.
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Climate Central explains that one motivation was to win the daily news cycle on climate: “We [Climate Central] initiated conversations with leading researchers and key journalists about bringing attribution science into the news cycle. We pulled together an international group of the world’s elite attribution scientists and with them launched World Weather Attribution (WWA).”
The “narrative shift” is the result of a brilliant propaganda campaign. In coming months, I will reintroduce my propaganda syllabus in a future series. Propaganda — as conceptualized in the academic field of political science — offers a much more useful framing for understanding debates over “facts” than does misinformation.
Climate advocates are pushing for extreme event attribution to replace the IPCC framework for detection and attribution within the IPCC and scientific community. So far at least, the IPCC Working group 1 has held fast to scientific integrity. Will that continue? — Watch this space. I’ll discuss this dynamic in a future post this series.
I cannot emphasize how unusual it is to have a litigator briefing a NAS committee on how their work can help support his firm’s work. Absolutely bonkers.
This is dynamite. Thank you, Roger, for an essay which brings to mind Emile Zola's J'Accuse in the Dreyfus Affair.
Bravo to you Roger. Your critique is devastating. THB is indeed THB.