Late last evening, while observing the Orion Nebula from the private telescope array of a very dear friend in the petrochemical industry, I was struck by the sheer scale of what we do not know. The cosmos is a tapestry of infinite unknowns. And yet, there are those among us who seek to strip this glorious mystery from the human experience, replacing the majestic void of the universe with the dreary, limiting confines of empirical data. I am speaking, of course, of the National Academies of Sciences.
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump and a chorus of visionary Republican officials were forced to take the extraordinary step of attacking the Academies for a truly grotesque overreach. The institution’s crime? Sneaking a chapter entirely composed of settled climate science into an educational manual meant for federal judges. On the surface, the layperson might ask: shouldn’t the people adjudicating the future of our planet have access to accurate atmospheric measurements? But as a scientist, I must tell you that this fundamentally misunderstands the fragile ecosystem of the courtroom.
When a federal judge sits on the bench to preside over a multi-billion-dollar liability suit against an oil major, they are engaging in a sacred ritual of discovery. They should be gazing into the great unknown of the docket with profound, childlike wonder. They should be looking at a plume of industrial methane and asking the cosmos, "What are you? Where do you come from? Are you perhaps entirely natural, a mere exhalation of the Earth mother herself?"
By handing that judge a peer-reviewed textbook explaining exactly what the methane is and exactly what it is doing to the polar ice caps, the National Academies are collapsing the wave function of judicial possibility. In a very real sense, they are committing an act of intellectual vandalism against the human spirit.
I recently had the privilege of sharing a long, illuminating lunch with several prominent legal theorists and a lobbyist for a major pipeline consortium. Over a sublime Chilean sea bass, we discussed the chilling effect that undeniable, statistically significant evidence has on the creative legal mind. True jurisprudence, much like theoretical physics, requires a frictionless vacuum. If you clutter a judge’s chamber with the findings of global climate consensus, you rob them of the awe required to rule that a corporation has a First Amendment right to boil the ocean.
If a judge is simply told that sea levels will rise, they are deprived of the majestic scientific journey of demanding that the plaintiff personally replicate the melting of the Greenland ice sheet inside the courtroom before granting standing. The legal community is, thankfully, beginning to recognize the danger of this forced indoctrination into reality.
If I am forced to read a definitive consensus report on atmospheric thermodynamics, my mind is no longer open to the infinite cosmos of alternative realities provided by defense counsel.
What happened to the National Academies? This was an institution chartered by Abraham Lincoln to gaze into the heavens and expand the frontiers of human imagination. Now, they have reduced themselves to petty hall monitors of the biosphere, aggressively distributing educational guides that leave absolutely no room for a judge to spiritually commune with the defense's motion to dismiss.
A true scientist understands that an assertion is meant to be challenged, endlessly, preferably in appellate court, over the course of decades, until the plaintiffs run out of funding. To simply print the answers in a manual and hand it to a magistrate is to deny the very process of inquiry. It is anti-science. It is anti-wonder.
President Trump understands this. He recognizes that our federal judiciary is one of the last bastions of pure, unadulterated innocence in a cynical world. We must protect that innocence. We must allow our legal system to remain a place where the laws of thermodynamics are treated not as a binding constraint, but as a beautiful, optional suggestion. Let us leave the empirical consensus where it belongs: in the cold, unfeeling vacuum of space, far away from the majestic, profitable poetry of the American courtroom.