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The Federal Judicial Center’s (FJC) Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition, was quietly released in late 2025. The FJC science manual is a reference guide used by judges nationwide on scientific subjects they have no special expertise in, explaining the state of science and evidence. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) coauthors and assembles the document. For background, although the NAS receives no direct appropriations from government, in some years as much as 70% of its more than $360 million in annual total revenue comes through federal contracts. Without that money, the NAS would shrink considerably or have to close up shop entirely. As a result, the threat to the NAS’s continued federal funding got its attention, in contrast to the threat to its reputation as an unbiased research organization within the broader scientific community.

The problem with that chapter centered on the fact it was not neutral or unbiased, as the science manual is supposed to be, but was written by activist lawyers and academics actively involved in climate lawsuits filed across the nation, plus plaintiffs, advisors, and climate experts participating in those trials. Being written by public advocates of climate lawsuits, while citing materials and using whole sections written by attorneys and academics testifying for the plaintiffs in those lawsuits, doesn’t just tiptoe along the line of the appearance of impropriety. It is flat-out improper and should have been sufficient by itself to disqualify the climate science document from inclusion in the FJC science manual. It represents a direct conflict of interest: judges using one side’s point of view about climate change as a reference guide for how to decide cases where science is at issue.

The NAS announced it was pulling the climate chapter from its website and initiating a formal investigation into the process by which it was written. Expect the NAS review to result in a complete vindication of its actions—although the reviewers might not come to that conclusion until after the midterm elections, in the hope that left-wing/democrats will then control Congress and ease the pressure. The best we can hope for is a tepid admission of a lapse in the internal review process with inadequate understanding of the biases of the authors involved in the writing and cited in the chapter by the reviewers. In other words, the NAS will claim it didn’t know those writing and cited in the chapters were intimately involved in ongoing litigation. 

Meanwhile, peer-reviewed research indicates the much-ballyhooed “permanent” sea ice loss in the Arctic and around Greenland has been overstated or exaggerated. A sharp and rapid decline in sea ice was touted by some scientists and the left-wing media as 1 of the most certain and visible signs of climate change. Some even predicted summers without sea ice would be a common occurrence or regular state of affairs by now. Mounting evidence indicates nature had a different future in store. Instead of the continual warming predicted by climate models and forecast by climate alarmists, large parts of Greenland cooled by about 1℃ between 2016 and 2024. That was accompanied by a substantial increase in annual mean sea ice in the region: sea ice extent in the Greenland Sea was 8.4 times greater in 2023 than in 2019, with January sea ice 6.4 times greater than in 2017. These are, of course, short-term measurements, but then so was the sharp decline in sea ice measured earlier in the century that was touted as showing a long-term decline and proof of ongoing damage by human-caused climate change. These findings are published in the September 2026 journal Polar Science. The researchers used remote sensing data from the Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite operated by NASA in cooperation with Copernicus. The reversal is consistent research published last year in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), that indicated there has been no statistically significant September sea ice loss in the Arctic since 2005. For 20 years, amid an ongoing rise in human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, there has been no measurable decline in sea ice at the nadir of the Arctic’s annual summer season. This stable sea ice trend is not a blip or an anomaly measured at one or a few locations across the Arctic. It: “is robust across observational data sets, metrics, and seasons...The modeling evidence suggests that internal variability has substantially offset anthropogenically forced sea ice loss in recent decades. Overall, this observed pause in Arctic sea ice decline is consistent with simulated internal variability superimposed on the long-term trend according to the bulk of the climate modeling evidence,”



Different but related:
https://thefederalist.com/2026/08/28/after-climate-activism-scandal-25-state-ags-push-feds-to-suspend-grants-to-national-science-org/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=after-climate-activism-scandal-25-state-ags-push-feds-to-suspend-grants-to-national-science-org&utm_term=2026-08-28