Yet Another Embarrassment From The National Academy Of Pseudoscience

In my own professional life, I was not a scientist, and therefore I never much paid attention to the kinds of rewards and honors that practicing scientists pass out to each other. But at some point I became aware that there was something called the National Academy of Sciences, and that among scientists it was considered a big deal to get selected to become a member. This membership is one of those things that you cannot apply for; rather, one day you get “tapped” by some committee of super-elite gurus who invite you to come learn the secret handshake. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about membership:

Membership of the National Academy of Sciences is an award granted to scientists that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States judges to have made “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research”. Membership is a mark of excellence in science and one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.

(At some point in the 2010s, the NAS got somehow consolidated with comparable “academies” of engineering and medicine, to become a combined organization going by the name of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, or NASEM. This post only concerns the Science part of the combined entity, although I have no reason to think that the other parts are any better.)

There are only around 2000+ members of the NAS, out of a universe of some 2 million + people who do some kind of scientifically-related research. So only about one in a thousand gets in. Needless to say, these people must be really, really smart.

I last wrote about the NAS in February of this year, in a post titled “Would You Trust The National Academies Of Science To Tell You How Science Works?” The occasion for that post was that something called the Federal Judicial Center had just issued a new edition of its Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Recognizing that this subject went outside the core of its own expertise, the FJC had called on the NAS to take the main role in the drafting. In the new edition, a chapter from prior editions of the Manual titled “How Science Works” had been taken over by new authors, and substantially re-written and greatly expanded (from 18 to 61 pages). In the process, the new authors had inserted a series of howlers that not only did not fairly describe how science works, but actually got the whole process wrong by 180 degrees. I cited several examples in the February post, but this is the one that goes closest to the heart of the craziness: “While the often-stated maxim that correlation does not imply causation is true, in fact, correlation is the only means that we have of establishing causation in science.” That statement is just flatly wrong. Instead, the process for establishing causation in science operates through the falsification of alternative (“null”) hypotheses of causation. I do not know how anyone could even think to call themselves a “scientist” without basic understanding of that logical process.

And yet here was the NAS, supposedly a collection of the most elite among elite scientists, putting together a chapter of an official court Manual to tell non-scientists (lawyers and judges) “how science works,” and getting it 180 degrees wrong on the single most important point.

Which of course begs for a necessary consideration of the next question: Was this an innocent mistake by ignorant people, or was it an intentional distortion intended to further a political agenda?

Now, just last week, the National Academies have released their latest embarrassment, taking this fundamental fallacy and expanding and running with it. The event at issue was the release of a new Report called “Attribution of Extreme Weather Events and Their Impacts.” Here is the July 15 press release from NASEM, and here is another link to the body of the Report itself. The Report runs to some 175 pages, plus appendices.

The gist of the Report is that now, based on some sort of new research, we suddenly have the tools to “attribute” any extreme weather event of our choosing (hurricane, tornado, drought, flood, whatever) to “human activities.” “Human activities” in this context means the release of “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere. With that, you can see where they are ultimately going, although this final piece is not mentioned in the Report: the basic idea is that every extreme weather event is the fault of the oil companies.

The very first line of the “Summary”reveals that they knew the conclusion before they started:

“Earth system changes driven by rising greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities are affecting characteristics of extreme weather and climate events, such as frequency and intensity.”

That’s nice. An how exactly do you know it? Here are the two fundamental questions that need to be addressed: (1) What are the alternative hypotheses that you have considered, and how have those been ruled out as the causes of the recent extreme weather events? And (2) what has been your consideration of the evidence, if any, that might contradict or undermine the hypothesis that “human activities” and increased greenhouse gas concentrations are the cause of these extreme weather events?

Get ready: In a Report of 175 pages, they don’t expend even one word to address either of those two questions.

Instead, it’s all about whatever confirming evidence they can find about correlation between extreme weather events and (slightly) increasing global temperatures. They claim to have a “foundational understanding” of the relationship between increasing greenhouse gases and extreme weather events. How they have achieved this “foundational understanding” without ever entertaining any alternative hypothesis is never mentioned. But the “foundational understanding” has supposedly been “strengthened” by the accumulation of evidence consistent with it (while deliberately ignoring all inconsistent evidence). Here is a lengthy quote from the Summary as to how the “foundational understanding” has been strengthened:

Over the past decade, advances in three key scientific pillars have continued to strengthen this foundation. First, physical understanding has matured through accumulation of observational and modeling evidence supporting long-standing theoretical expectations, so that increases in extreme heat and heavy rainfall events across much of the globe can be more confidently and precisely attributed to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Second, the length and quality of observational data have improved in some regions with another decade of data collection . . . , new satellite-based Earth-observing missions, and the development and improvement of homogenized, high-resolution data sets. Third, climate models continue to improve in their representation of critical processes. . . .

Consideration of alternative hypotheses or potentially conflicting evidence? Hey, we don’t do that, we’re scientists!

Readers of this blog and of many skeptic websites know well that the real evidence out there is that extreme weather events are not increasing at all. How dozens of these supposedly top “scientists” from the NAS could write this Report without mentioning or discussing any of this evidence is beyond me. It’s completely humiliating for them.

I won’t try in this post to give any comprehensive set of links here to data sets showing that extreme weather events are not increasing. But, as an example, here is a page at Watts Up With That with data on hurricanes. From that page, here is a chart compiled by Ryan Maue with annual data since the early 1970s on accumulated cyclonic energy:

Can you spot the increasing trend? Neither can I. These clowns from the NAS are claiming that even though ACE has not gone up overall, and has gone down in the most recent years, they just know that whatever hurricane comes through next is the fault of Exxon. That’s the level of quality of this work.

On July 14, the day before this Report was released, a guy named Pat Parenteau, gave an interview to Politico’s E&E News on this subject. Parenteau is a long-time advisor to a law firm called Sher Edling, which is known for representing dozens of plaintiffs in lawsuits against fossil fuel producers claiming harm from climate change. The E&E News article is behind paywall, but Energy in Depth here has the key quote from Parenteau:

“A report with the kind of gravitas that the National Academies can bring will be a huge boost to the plantiffs’ cases.”

The people involved in the report’s development include Michael Burger, an academic and attorney for climate plaintiffs’ firm Sher Edling, as well Delta Merner, who leads the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate Accountability Campaign and served on the NAS committee guiding the report’s development until January 2025. Both Burger and Merner have publicly discussed the critical relationship between attribution science and climate litigation.

The federal government needs to completely defund the NAS today, if not sooner. Also, I call on every member of the NAS to resign. If you stay in, you are complicit in this total scam.

UPDATE, July 24: John Christy sends along links to two of his recent papers. The first, published in April 2026, is titled “Declines in hot and cold daily temperature extremes in the conterminous US, 1899–2025.” That’s right, it’s declines rather than increases. The second, from November 2019, co-authored with Ross McKitrick, is titled “Assessing changes in US regional precipitation on multiple time scales.” From the abstract of the second paper: “We show that 2000-year proxy-based reconstructions of the Palmer Modified Drought Index for the US Southeast (SE) and Pacific Coast (PC) regions exhibit LTP and reveal post- 1900 changes to be within the range of longer-term natural fluctuations.” John says that an updated version of the second paper is currently under review pending publication. Needless to say, the NAS Report did not cite and completely ignored both of these two papers (along with all other adverse evidence).

Message from Jim Robinson:

Dear FRiends,

We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.

If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:

Click here: to donate by Credit Card

Or here: to donate by PayPal

Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794

Thank you very much and God bless you,

Jim

..The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed … by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary...

H.L Mencken 1917

H.L. Mencken beat Ayn Rand to the punch. In Atlas Shrugs her biggest villain is the collectivist scientist running the state science Institute . Ayn Rand actually based her character on Robert Oppenhiemer. She interviewed him extensively for a movie project that never got made.

If there is anything to worry about concerning Carbon , it is all the Carbon Civilization has been taking out of the Carbon cycle ! By turning Carbon into plastic compounds you lock Carbon out of rotting , which is the normal way it returns to the cycle! Carbon is essential for ALL life on Earth!

***“While the often-stated maxim that correlation does not imply causation is true, in fact, correlation is the only means that we have of establishing causation in science.” That statement is just flatly wrong. Instead, the process for establishing causation in science operates through the falsification of alternative (“null”) hypotheses of causation.***

Do they start the falsification process with what correlates or with what doesn't?

I used to attend the National Academy of Science’s Neuroscience symposiums in NYC. I have never seen so many old men acting like children.

They interrupted each other’s presentations, shouting and yelling obscenities at each other. One, who had received a Nobel Prize was the worst.

They owned their knowledge as a possession of their ego and fought with each other as though their life depended upon it.

I had previously read “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn and saw it in action. It accurately describes the process of people defending their status quo theories as though their life depends upon winning the argument.

The only time I had observed worse was at a conference at the University of Leuven in Belgium. The university had split along linguistic lines after a period of civil unrest in 1967–68 commonly known as the “Leuven Affair” in French and “Walloons out”, based on a contemporary slogan, in Dutch. The faculty hostility was so extreme that they split the university, even dividing the university library. The majority of works were just divided by shelfmark: Odds numbered books stayed in Leuven, even numbered books left for Louvain-la-Neuve.

I was there for a conference years after the split and the faculty of both universities attended, continuing their war at our conference. It was far worse than any collegiate sports rivalry between universities. (And I’ve attended many where both Duke and UNC faculty were in attendance!)

This caused me to study what I refer to as “Intellectual Delusion.” This is where very intelligent and educated people hold onto the belief in delusional nonsense. I first encountered this in professional people who I had known for years, and they had the death of a child. Ten years later they would speak of the event as though it happened yesterday.

The ego plays tricks upon our perception of reality in order to protect itself from being diminished, even to the point of not believing what they actually observe.

It seems to me that while we can ADAPT to the change in climate, we are only fooling ourselves thinking we can CHANGE our climate. If we could change our climate, HOW would we change it in such a way as to suit everyone? Point is this...what ever the climate is on any given day, it will never suit everyone. On the very hot days that some of us are living through,I am thankful I can at least partially adapt to it, but I sure can’t change it. There is always news about some misfits somewhere who think we shouldn’t be doing that & would rather prohibit A/C or heating because of “climate change”.

...Sounds like we need more trash boilers, so that plastic gets returned to the atmosphere as a combustion product...

Imagine the howling from the Left if that were put into action! They want to broadcast to the World how noble and wise they are by joining their comrades in goosestepping to the official narrative! Virtue signalers on steroids who foolishly march to their own destruction and taking the rest of us off the cliff with them!

Motivated reasoning is probably an innate human tendency, probably hard wired into us. “Intellectuals” and scientists are as prone to it as anyone else.

In fact, very smart people may be at especially high risk. Their powers of rationalization are greater. And they have more ego invested in their own opinions.

Socrates made a great point of emphasizing the importance of knowing what one doesn’t know.

“And they have more ego invested in their own opinions.”

Developing egos have a dependency identity, which often is a dependency upon a group. This is why teenagers turn to gangs for their identity.

This is also why fraternities and sororities go after freshmen in college, soon after the student is removed from the protective environment of the parents.

This is also the common link of people with Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The ego is masculine consciousness. It is formed as a stepping stone in consciousness development as people are coming out of childhood emotional dependency.

I call it a stepping stone as a person must take power of their will away from others and think they are in charge, before they enter mid-life-crisis and hopefully surrender their will to God within themselves.

If someone else is holding a person’s individual will, that person cannot surrender to God as they don’t have individual authority over their will. I spent many years studying this by traveling and visiting charismatic religious services, observing how stage hypnosis techniques are used to manipulate the attendees consciousness.

Many intelligent people have encapsulated bubbles of emotional consciousness that are created by childhood emotional trauma. This creates what I call “Loopy Logic.”

No amount of education can heal this wound in the soul. It can only be resolved by owning the emotional trauma and resolving it.

I spent years studying very intelligent individuals who had their PhD’s from major universities and were devout followers of Messianic Jewish religious groups. It helped me to understand how the Heaven’s Gate Cult developed their following. They are intelligent, but have no discernment.

“Motivated reasoning is probably an innate human tendency, probably hard wired into us.”

It certainly is hardwired in all of us. The thing that motivates all of us is our perceived self interest. And each one of us has particular self interests, though there’s a fair amount of commonality among people’s interests (money is one of them).

So, to know where someone you interact with “is coming from”, first try to decipher his self interests, ie, his “hidden agenda”.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.