Fossil Fuel Industry Disinformation Attack Ahead of National Academy of Sciences Climate Attribution Report

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is releasing, "Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts," an update to their 2016 report, later this week. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is closely monitoring ongoing efforts by the fossil fuel industry to discredit attribution science, including the forthcoming NAS report, despite its robust scientific backing. UCS experts are available to discuss the discipline of attribution science and its significance, as well as defending it against attacks by the fossil fuel industry and how to accurately communicate about the science.

Extreme event attribution science uses climate models to quantify the role of climate change in contributing to increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme events, offering policymakers, elected officials and legal experts valuable scientific insights. Fossil fuel companies including BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell recognize this science as a threat to their destructive business model and have spent decades sowing climate disinformation to avoid accountability for the harms caused by their products.

Fossil fuel industry talking points will likely be used to attack individual report contributors, and/or the NAS committee in an effort to undermine the report's authoritative status. Yet attribution science is a well-established and growing discipline with a vast body of peer-reviewed studies evaluated by and integrated into Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the global authority on consensus climate science.

As reported by Politico, Argus Insights, a secretive opposition research firm with a history of working for fossil fuel companies, has been collecting hundreds of emails and other documents from researchers involved in the NAS report in the lead-up to release. This effort to find information that could be taken out of context and used in a smear campaign to cast doubt on attribution science has been pursued by Republicans lawmakers, think tank analysts allied with energy companies and offshoots of the industry itself.

"Attribution science is a critical piece of scientific evidence for holding big polluters accountable for their role in the climate crisis," said Dr. Carly Phillips, senior scientist with the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at UCS. "Fossil fuel corporations and their lobbyists recognize accountability as a threat to their bottom lines, which is why they are attacking attribution science just like they've attacked peer-reviewed climate science for decades. Congress must not grant Big Oil immunity from the climate harms attribution science makes clear."

This attack on science is part of a larger effort supported by the Trump administration to eliminate states' and communities' ability to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in the climate crisis, particularly through the courts. In April, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman introduced a bill to grant sweeping immunity to Big Oil. Earlier this year, industry-aligned attorneys general pressured the Federal Judicial Center-the independent research arm of the federal counts, responsible for educating judges on complex scientific issues-into removing the entire chapter on climate science from its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The Department of Justice under President Trump has also sued states considering or pursuing lawsuits against fossil fuel companies and sought to strike down or pre-empt science-backed state Climate Superfund bills.

EPA Administrator Zeldin's attack on the Endangerment Finding, a foundational scientific finding that global warming emissions endanger public health and the environment and thus must be regulated by the EPA, also relies on baseless attacks on attribution science.

UCS has published multiple peer-reviewed articles on attribution science, including on: sea-level rise, forest fires in the western United States, ocean acidification and global warming.