A federal judge has issued a devastating peer review of a conservative legal group's latest findings, officially halting their multi-year experiment to extract a defense against climate superfund laws using raw data harvested from a University of Michigan law professor’s inbox.
The mechanism was theoretically elegant. By applying immense legal pressure to the personal communications of a single academic who helped draft legislation making oil companies pay for climate damage, researchers at the conservative think tank hoped to isolate a highly unstable isotope of political bias. If successfully extracted and refined, this material could have provided an impenetrable shielding for ExxonMobil and Chevron against billions of dollars in state-level liability.
However, the presiding judge found the group's methodology to be fatally flawed. In a ruling that read much like a scathing rejection from a major journal, the court concluded that the plaintiffs' sample size of one guy's faculty inbox was statistically insignificant, failing to demonstrate the existence of a vast, Earth-spanning conspiracy to make polluters pay for their pollution. The judge further noted that the group failed to control for basic variables, such as the fact that the professor was simply doing his job when advising lawmakers.
We built a model suggesting that if we sequenced enough of this professor's calendar invites, we could fundamentally alter the laws of thermodynamics to prove carbon dioxide is actually good for the economy.
Independent researchers not affiliated with the lawsuit cautioned that even if the conservative group had successfully accessed the emails, a replication of their desired results would be nearly impossible. A similar experiment conducted by a lab at MIT last year found that bombarding climate researchers with public records requests typically yields only high concentrations of exasperated sighing, faculty meeting agendas, and zero traces of actionable legal defense for the fossil fuel industry.
The conservative group has announced they will submit a revised preprint of their lawsuit to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, where they hope a more sympathetic panel of reviewers might finally allow them to observe the dark matter they believe is hiding inside the professor's spam folder.