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. 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...
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