In November 2024, a man named Michael Burger presented to the National Academies of Science committee on climate attribution. He spoke as an expert. He shaped the findings. What the NAS report didn't mention is that Burger is of counsel at Sher Edling — the law firm leading the litigation raid on fossil-fuel producers.
That's not a conflict of interest. That's the plaintiff drafting the verdict.
The NAS report on "attribution of extreme weather and climate events" was supposed to settle the science on whether specific storms, droughts, and heat waves can be pinned on climate change. It's funded by federal agencies — NOAA, NASA — to the tune of $200 million annually that NAS receives from the federal government. The report's conclusions, unsurprisingly, are now being cited in courtrooms across the country.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board flagged the arrangement directly: "The report omits that Mr. Burger is a counsel at the law firm Sher Edling, which has led the litigation raid on fossil-fuel producers." Burger's work was cited four times in a separate judicial science manual co-developed with the Federal Judiciary Center — sections covering climate litigation frameworks, attribution of responsibility, judicial treatment of climate science, and the role of courts in addressing climate harms.
Four sections. All written or shaped by a man whose firm profits when courts rule against oil companies.
Roger Pielke Jr., senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the most cited climate researchers in the country, didn't mince words: "The failures of scientific integrity here are profound, obvious, and completely out in public."
He's right, and the origin story makes it worse. The entire field of "attribution science" — linking individual weather events to long-term climate trends — was designed with courtrooms in mind from the start. Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution, told Politico back in 2019: "Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind." The group was created in 2014 by Climate Central specifically to produce findings useful in litigation.
So the science was built for lawsuits. The report was shaped by litigators. And the judicial manual citing that report was co-authored by the same people. Twenty-seven Republican attorneys general have already criticized the judicial manual for exactly this reason.
Defenders of the NAS process will point to peer review and established methodology. Which is an interesting defense of a committee that invited a fossil-fuel plaintiff's lawyer to present as a neutral expert and then failed to disclose his affiliation in the final report. Peer review works when the peers aren't billing hours on the same docket.
The timing matters, too. The Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments in Boulder v. Suncor — Colorado's landmark climate lawsuit — for the first week of October 2026. That case will determine whether state courts can hold energy companies liable for climate damages. The NAS report and the judicial manual it feeds are the evidentiary backbone of those claims.
Delta Merner, who leads the Union of Concerned Scientists' climate accountability campaign, helped shape the attribution framework. The Bezos Earth Fund bankrolls adjacent research. The Washington Post — owned by Jeff Bezos — covers the findings as settled science. President Trump posted on Truth Social that "The Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change."
Build the science for the courtroom. Staff the committee with the lawyers. Publish the report with federal funds. Cite the report in the judicial manual. Use the manual in the trial.
That's not a research pipeline. That's a litigation assembly line.
