Same Old Playbook: Climate Litigation Activists Are Writing Their Own Science, Again
The plaintiffs' attorney briefed the NAS committee on its new climate attribution report.
by Kyle Kohli July 16, 2026, 2:31 PM
UPDATE: Hours before the report is expected to be released, Pat Parenteau, a long-time advisor and business partner to Sher Edling, which represents dozens of plaintiffs in climate litigation, admitted to E&E News what they really want out of this report:
“A report with the kind of gravitas that the National Academies can bring will be a huge boost to the plantiffs’ cases.”
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) is preparing to release a major report on the state of climate attribution science – and once again, the fingerprints of climate litigation activists and plaintiffs’ attorneys are all over the process.
The people involved in the report’s development include Michael Burger, an academic and attorney for climate plaintiffs’ firm Sher Edling, as well as 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.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/nas-climate-attribution-report-litigation-ties/
