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Climate scientists face deluge of public-records requests about fossil-fuel studies
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Protestors demonstrate outside the US Supreme Court on 5 October, as justices hear a case whose outcome could determine whether fossil-fuel companies can be held responsible for global warming.Credit: Mehmet Eser/Anadolu via Getty
Last month, a climate scientist working in the University of California system received an unsettling message from her institution. University officials asked her to submit all correspondence related to a study she had published linking emissions from fossil fuels to environmental harms caused by climate change. The university had received a public-records request from a law firm representing the Patriots Foundation in Des Moines, Iowa, which describes itself on its website as a government watchdog.
It was the fifth such request connected to the organization that the scientist, who requested anonymity to avoid further demands, had received this year.
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The requests seem to be part of an expanding effort by groups with ties to the energy industry to discredit findings in the burgeoning field of climate attribution science, which estimates the extent to which extreme weather events, such as floods and heatwaves, are due to climate change. The demands come at a time when attribution science’s role in lawsuits against major industrial emitters is growing.
An investigation by Nature has identified at least 30 requests for correspondence relating to climate attribution science that researchers in the United States say they have received since 2024. These requests, involving the Patriots Foundation and other groups, have gone to 13 public universities and involved the correspondence of dozens of climate scientists, legal scholars and attorneys. Last month, the news outlet Politico reported that it had identified more than 100 open-records requests made to researchers since 2021, related more broadly to lawsuits about damages caused by climate change, rather than just to climate attribution research. It’s unclear how many of these requests overlap.
Neither the Patriots Foundation nor the law firm representing it responded to Nature’s queries about the reason for the requests, or about researchers’ concerns over them. Another organization that has submitted requests — called Government Accountability and Oversight, based in Sheridan, Wyoming — directed Nature to blog posts saying that attribution researchers are activists opposing the fossil-fuel industry and that, if they have the right to do “this sort of lobbying”, “the rest of us have a right to see the receipts under state transparency laws”.
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Recipients say that the timing of the requests and the information they ask for suggest that their purpose is to fish for conflicts of interest that could be used to discredit the scientists’ findings. A hypothetical example of such a conflict might be attorneys paying a climate scientist to conduct a particular study. The researchers think the requests might also be attempts to collect information about collaborators and contacts who are not subject to public-records laws, such as scientists and attorneys at private institutions.