By Gary Abernathy
August 04, 2026
Earlier this year, the Trump administration removed a chapter on climate change from a manual used by judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys “to better interpret the scientific complexities of the cases before them.” For those of us who don’t believe in coincidence, the response to that removal offers a textbook case of how liberal climate crusaders and their media allies spring into action to rescue a struggling leftwing cause.
First, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a non-governmental institution, soon issued a report designed to advance the cause of “extreme event attribution,” a questionable scientific premise designed to point fingers at specific corporations and activities based on how much they contribute to worsening weather calamities.
Second, left-wing media, led, as usual, by the Democratic Party’s top communications tools such as the New York Times, produced stories on the report, kicking off the echo chamber of coverage designed to legitimize the finding, alarm the public and amplify the call to arms.
“The nation’s top scientific advisory body issued a report on Thursday backing a growing field of science that could help governments hold oil, gas and coal companies responsible for the damage caused by extreme weather,” the Times breathlessly announced.
While the Times was careful to say that the new report “doesn’t make recommendations on how attribution science should be used in policy and the law,” the fact remains that for many on the left, a primary reason for the report is in fact to use it as a weapon in policy and the law.
Unintentionally humorous is the Times’ own follow-up line acknowledging that “attribution findings could be relevant in several types of legal cases.”
Any examples?
“In a $50 billion lawsuit against oil companies,” the story reported, “Multnomah County in Oregon cited an attribution study that concluded that a record-shattering 2021 summer heat wave in the Pacific Northwest would have been ‘virtually impossible’ without human-caused climate change.”
According to the story, computer models studying weather events now allow scientists to “estimate the likelihood of similar events in a hypothetical world that industrialized nations hadn’t warmed by emitting heat-trapping gases. They can scour historical records for past instances in which atmospheric patterns lined up a certain way, then examine how much hotter or rainier the weather was when those same patterns appear today.”
