According to a post in Earth.org portal, a group of more than two dozen scientists has criticised the removal of a chapter on climate change from a manual that for decades has equipped US judges, prosecutors and defend attorneys to better interpret the scientific complexities of the cases before them.
Since it was first issued in 1994 by the Federal Judicial Center in collaboration with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence has assisted federal and state judges and attorneys in managing cases that involve complex scientific, technical, or forensic evidence. Its content has been cited more than 1,300 times.
The manual’s peer-reviewed chapters touch on topics spanning from engineering to forensic DNA, statistics to epidemiology, artificial intelligence to computer science. Until last month, the manual – now in its fourth edition – also included a chapter on climate science. But that chapter came under fire when 27 Republican state attorneys general claimed in a letter that the content was biased and threatened to undermine judicial impartiality.
The letter, led by West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey and dated January 29, said “the Fourth Edition places the judiciary firmly on one side of some of the most hotly disputed questions in current litigation: climate-related science and ‘attribution.’” The attorneys general called on the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) to “immediately” remove the chapter, while simultaneously accusing the authors of framing climate litigation against states and fossil fuel producers as a primary tool for addressing “pressing” environmental issues.
They went on to say that the authors omitted references to the Department of Energy’s (DOE) recent report on climate change in favor of bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose authority the attorneys general appeared to contest.
Read the rest here.
