The report might aid litigation seeking billions in damages from oil companies over climate-related disasters such as hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and tornadoes.

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 field, known as extreme event attribution, seeks to answer an increasingly common question: How much was the latest heat wave, downpour, drought or wildfire worsened by climate change?

Scientists have long understood that global warming, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, is making certain kinds of extreme weather more intense and more likely. But only in the past two decades have they developed the tools for estimating precisely how much worldwide warming is shaping particular weather events in particular places.

The new report, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, doesn’t make recommendations on how attribution science should be used in policy and the law, though it notes that attribution findings could be relevant in several types of legal cases. In a $50 billion lawsuit against oil companies, 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.

As it turns out, the Washington Free Beacon reveals NASEM report credits legal scholar Michael Burger for his input and references his work on four occasions. Burger works as of counsel at Sher Edling, a California firm that has filed climate-damage suits against oil companies including Chevron and ExxonMobil on behalf of Democrat-led states and cities representing about a quarter of the U.S. population. The Free Beacon also points out, he is named in the firm’s cases brought for New York City, Honolulu, and Delaware. Sher Edling’s website states that Burger assists public agencies [in holding] fossil fuel companies accountable for the climate change related damage they knowingly caused.

Burger’s involvement in the report included a November 2024 presentation to the NASEM Committee on Attribution of Extreme Weather in which he outlined the progress of litigation against oil companies. The report lists Burger’s affiliation solely as Columbia University, the Free Beacon reports, where he is executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. It does not disclose his role with Sher Edling, despite his statement to NASEM leaders during the 2024 presentation that he was “actively involved” in the firm’s litigation.

The NASEM report’s authors also acknowledge Arielle Tannenbaum and Shel Winkley, researchers at the progressive nonprofit Climate Central, and reference Climate Central studies that attribute extreme weather to human-caused climate change. For years, Climate Central has aimed to connect recent or current extreme weather to climate change through a method that critics have described as entirely political.

At least 10 Democrat-controlled states, the District of Columbia, and over a dozen Democrat-led cities and counties have brought comparable lawsuits. These cases generally charge oil companies with driving global warming, misleading the public about the dangers of fossil fuels, and thus being liable for the costs of extreme weather.

Not only is NASEM being used as ammunition in litigation in Oregon, as The Times points out, it will likely be the ongoing and future lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. The municipalities involved in litigation against fossil fuel companies have openly said they want to destroy fossil fuel corporations which will undermine America’s energy independence. They cannot be stopped a moment too soon and, hopefully, attorneys for the defense can undermine its use as proof in court by highlighting the political and fraudulent effort behind manuscript.