Chamber of Commerce: Put Global Warming Claims on Trial

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is taking on a new role: scientific skeptic.

The L.A. Times reports that the organization is calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to put climate change evidence up for a public hearing -- and says it will take the EPA to court if it refuses. The EPA, however, seems unimpressed by the demand, responding that such hearings would be "a waste of time."

"It would be evolution versus creationism. It would be the science of climate change on trial," William Kovacs, a senior vice president at the Chamber of Commerce, told the Times. Kovacs was presumably referencing the famous trial of John Scopes, a high school science teacher tried for teaching evolution in his classroom, in 1925. Perhaps not the most fortunate analogy, as the Scopes case was eventually thrown out, and a later case overturned bans on teaching evolution.

Based on the best scientific evidence and consensus -- a recent poll by the University of Illinois found that 97 percent of climatologists agree that human activity has affected global temperatures -- global climate change is a widely accepted reality. But I get it, Chamber of Commerce -- sometimes the laws of science are just a drag. I'm not terribly fond of gravity, for instance. Unfortunately, hauling all the physicists I know to court still won't make me fly.