When the sizzle stops selling, hire better cooks
Exposing NASEM's newest litigation-friendly climate report.
Summary
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a major report on July 16 declaring that individual weather events can now be robustly attributed to climate change.
The report’s acknowledgments read like a Sher Edling holiday card: an of-counsel attorney at the firm suing the oil industry, researchers at Climate Central, and a Washington Post reporter who told the committee how to make attribution play better in the press.
Attribution science was not discovered; it was cooked up. The recipe was written at La Jolla in 2012, and the National Academies just delivered the product — eleven days before the plaintiffs’ Supreme Court merits brief in Suncor v. Boulder County came due.
The taxpayer picked up part of the tab.
On July 16, NASEM released its long-awaited assessment of extreme weather attribution, announcing that “major advancements” now permit robust assessments tying individual hurricanes, floods and heat waves to human-caused climate change. The mainstream media dutifully reported the conclusion. Almost nobody read the acknowledgments.
They should have. The acknowledgments are the story.
The Predatort in the Footnotes
Start with Michael Burger, thanked for his contributions and cited four times in the report. The report lists his affiliation as Columbia University, where he runs the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. What the report somehow forgot to mention is that Burger is also of counsel at Sher Edling — the San Francisco Predatort shop running the nationwide lawfare campaign against the oil industry on behalf of Democrat-run states and cities, with his name on the filings for New York City, Honolulu, and Delaware.
This was not a secret. When Burger presented to the Academies’ attribution committee in November 2024 — the video sits on the Academies’ own YouTube channel — he told the committee himself that he was “actively involved” in the firm’s cases. Committee member Deepti Singh, a climate professor at Washington State University Vancouver, then asked him on camera how researchers could do better at designing studies to inform the litigation. Burger’s answer, verbatim: “The science needs to keep evolving and that’s what’s going to inform the litigation.” And yes, he allowed, it will work the other way around a little bit — that, he explained, is how it all becomes most potent.
Read that again. A sitting committee of the National Academies asked a plaintiffs’ lawyer how they could help build the evidence his cases need. He told them. Then they built it, thanked him in the acknowledgments, cited his work four times, and scrubbed the law firm from his affiliation.
In any other field this would be called what it is. In climate science it is called peer review.
And Burger was not alone in the room. Delta Merner, who runs the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate Accountability Campaign, a program whose stated purpose is advancing climate litigation, sat on the committee guiding the report’s development into 2025. Two Climate Central researchers appear in the acknowledgments, and Climate Central studies appear in the citations. The same foundations that have poured $13.4 million into Climate Central since 2017 have poured twice that ($26.5 million) into the fund created to bankroll Sher Edling’s lawsuits. The Heising-Simons Foundation put direct grant money into the report itself; its co-founder Liz Simons wrote a maximum contribution to California Attorney General Rob Bonta shortly after he sued the oil companies, in a cycle when he wasn’t even on the ballot.
Sponsors, committee members, acknowledged contributors, cited sources: every layer of this report touches the same litigation network, funded by the same foundations, aimed at the same defendants. The Academies’ own policy promises advice free from the undue influence of interested parties. Perhaps they meant uninteresting parties.
Fourteen Years From Recipe to Finished Dish
None of this is improvisation. Attribution science is the one field of research that never pretended to be curiosity driven. Its own pioneers admit the discipline was conceived with the courts in mind: a scientific product developed to specification, the specification being “help plaintiffs win.”
And where was the specification written? You already know, because The Firebreak has documented it chapter and verse. In 2012, after cap-and-trade died in Congress, the tort bar, the activist academy, and the Rockefeller network convened at La Jolla to plot the tobacconization of the fossil fuel industry. The workshop identified the missing piece: you cannot sue an oil company for a hurricane until someone in a lab coat testifies that the oil company caused the hurricane. Attribution was the load-bearing wall of the entire La Jolla Playbook, the one product the movement could not buy off the shelf, because it did not exist yet.
So they built the supply chain. Climate Central incubated World Weather Attribution in 2014. The foundations funded it. The law firms filed suits that presumed its conclusions. The friendly reporters amplified every “study” that landed within hours of a storm making landfall. And now, fourteen years after coming up with the recipe, the National Academies has delivered the finished dish: an official-looking, taxpayer-subsidized imprimatur declaring the science settled — with a World Weather Attribution representative on the committee and the Bezos Earth Fund among the sponsors.
Adversarial regulation was always the point. Why endure the messy democratic business of persuading legislatures when you can commission the evidence, launder it through a prestige institution, and hand it to a judge?
The Osaka Connection
But perhaps the most telling name in the acknowledgments belongs neither to a scientist nor a lawyer. It belongs to Shannon Osaka, who presented to the committee under her actual, non-satirical Washington Post job title: Climate Zeitgeist Reporter. We did not invent that. We lack the imagination.
Firebreak readers will remember Ms. Osaka. She is the Post’s reliable amplifier of activist campaign literature, the reporter with Leonardo Trasande on speed dial, the journalist who warned her readers that some products may not be “chemical-free.” When the NGOs need a scare story placed, Shannon delivers, roughly monthly, no questions asked, least of all scientific ones.
So what was a zeitgeist reporter doing briefing a National Academies scientific committee? Her talk was titled “How do journalists portray extreme events and climate change?” Her slides answer a question no honest scientific body should ever ask: how do we make the product sell?
Osaka helpfully periodized climate journalism into three phases, and the periodization is a confession. In Phase 1, her own exhibits show, the prestige press told readers that single weather events simply could not be pinned on warming — she displays the New York Times’ Paul Krugman and the Post’s own Brad Plumer saying exactly that, circa 2011. In Phase 2, attribution arrived as exciting new science, but smothered in caveats: her own 2020 study found roughly 85 percent of attribution articles carried disagreement or uncertainty framing. In Phase 3 (now) rapid attribution is mainstream, blasted out within days of every storm.
And then comes the slide titled “But ...”, which belongs in a museum. Direct quote: “For our audience, attribution alone no longer attracts much reader engagement or interest.”
There it is. Attribution, she told the committee, now works only as an ingredient in bigger stories, not as a story itself; journalists are hunting for conflict and new frames, and the plain made-2.3-times-more-likely formula no longer fits. Her closing prescriptions follow accordingly: rapid, collaborative studies to shrink the uncertainty framing — that is, science engineered to produce fewer caveats in print — and impact attribution, the attribution of specific damages, to supply readers with those new frames.
Translate from Zeitgeist into English. The customer base has built a tolerance. The old product no longer delivers the high. The readers need a stronger dose (harder claims, fewer disclaimers, named events, named damages) or they’ll stop clicking.
In sum, a reporter told the nation’s premier scientific institution that its flagship product was losing potency in the marketplace and that the caveats were hurting sales. The committee then produced a report concluding — what a coincidence — that the science now supports more robust assessments of extreme events and their impacts. The dealer reported the street feedback; the chemists went back to the lab and cooked a purer batch. Walter White at least had the decency to work out of an RV rather than a congressionally chartered academy.
And note that “impact attribution” is not merely a new frame for bored subscribers. Attribution of impacts, this hurricane with these damages and dollars attached, is precisely the evidentiary product Sher Edling’s complaints require. The reader-engagement problem and the litigation problem turn out to have the identical solution, and the committee delivered it to both customers in a single report.
Osaka even notes that conservative-leaning outlets almost never cover attribution studies. Duly logged by the committee. Even the market segmentation analysis was provided free of charge.
The Calendar Never Lies
If you still believe this was disinterested scholarship on an independent timetable, consult the docket. The Supreme Court hears the Boulder climate case, Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, in the October term, the case that will decide whether the entire state-tort climate lawfare campaign lives or dies. Boulder’s merits brief is due July 27.
The report landed July 16. Eleven days of lead time, just enough for the plaintiffs to staple the Academies’ gravitas to their filing. As of this writing the brief has not yet hit the docket, so we will learn within days whether the citation appears. But the litigants’ advisers aren’t waiting to celebrate: one law professor who counsels the plaintiffs’ lawyers predicted to E&E News that a National Academies report of this gravitas would be “a huge boost to the plaintiffs’ cases.” Whether or not the citation shows up on page one, the timing service has been rendered.
The Academies has run this play before. Earlier this year it inserted a climate chapter — built on Burger’s undisclosed handiwork — into the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, the handbook federal judges use to evaluate expert testimony. When twenty-seven state attorneys general objected, the Federal Judicial Center pulled the chapter. The Academies kept it. An institution that will pre-bias the judges’ own manual is not going to blush at timing a report to a briefing deadline.
The Bill
Here is what actually happened, stripped of the letterhead. A litigation campaign, designed at La Jolla and financed by a closed loop of foundations, needed one thing it could not manufacture in-house: institutional credibility. So it acquired some. The committee took money from interested sponsors, seated interested members, solicited strategy from an interested plaintiffs’ lawyer, took market research from an interested newspaper’s reporter, and delivered its product on the litigation’s schedule — all while the federal government supplied the Academies with $200 million a year of your money.
The tragedy is not that the activists did this. Extorting industries through commissioned science is simply what the post-La Jolla movement is; the passion for the planet gave way to the passion for winning a long time ago. The tragedy is that the National Academies — Lincoln’s academy — volunteered for the supply chain.
Institutions spend centuries accumulating trust and one report spending it. When the Suncor plaintiffs stand before the justices this fall waving the Academies’ seal, remember what’s under the seal: a lawyer in the footnotes, a reporter in the acknowledgments, a foundation in the sponsors’ list, and a purchase order from La Jolla, fourteen years old, finally stamped delivered.
The science was never the product. The verdict was. And the bill, as always, arrives at your address: on your utility statement, at the pump, and in a scientific establishment you can no longer take at its word.