US Chamber of Commerce seeks "Scopes trial" on climate change

The long-running cold war between the scientific and political consensus on climate change and largely discredited climate sceptics could be about to go nuclear, after one of the most powerful business groups in the US said it is seeking an official public hearing on the evidence for man-made global warming.

According to reports in the LA Times yesterday, the US Chamber of Commerce is lobbying the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to hold a hearing on climate change evidence reminiscent of the famous 1925 Scopes trial on the validity of the theory of evolution.

William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs, told the LA Times that the group was seeking a full trial of the consensus on man-made climate change.

"It would be evolution versus creationism," said Kovacs, drawing parallels with the Scopes trial. "It would be the science of climate change on trial."

The move is part of a wider campaign from the Chamber to challenge the EPA's recent decision that global warming represents a threat to human health – a decision that could be used to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act if current proposals for a US Climate Change Act fail.

The LA Times reported that the Chamber, which represents three million US businesses, is likely to take the fight for a hearing to federal court if, as expected, the EPA rejects calls for a public hearing.

An official for the EPA dismissed the calls, telling the paper that the Agency had based its proposed endangerment finding "on the soundest peer-reviewed science available, which overwhelmingly indicates that climate change presents a threat to human health and welfare".

Green groups also rushed to the EPA's defence, accusing the Chamber of Commerce of adopting the tried and tested climate sceptic tactic of seeking to undermine efforts to tackle climate change by promoting unfounded doubts about the validity of the science.

Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist for the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists, said that any hearing would be reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts and would be guilty of "ignoring decades of publicly accessible evidence".

Writing on the Chamber of Commerce blog, Brad Peck confirmed that the group would continue to push for "transparency" from the EPA on how it reached the conclusion that climate change is a threat to public health, and accused the agency of ignoring studies that challenged the consensus on global warming.

"To be specific, in order to ensure that regulations which re-engineer our economy are needed and would ultimately be effective, we are pushing the EPA to reveal the data they used to justify their endangerment proposal," he wrote. " We need to drop the articles of faith and use the entirety of scientific study on the effects of climate change, not a sub-set, chosen by the EPA not for its validity but rather for its ability to forward its policy goal – the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions."

He also questioned the scientific studies that the EPA had used, arguing that it "used secondary scientific sources, studies that largely weren't adequately peer-reviewed and the selective use of scientific studies to justify a policy decision they wanted to make".

However, Peck's comments run counter to the views of most climate scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which in its most recent summation of climate science studies concluded that mankind was 90 per cent certain to be the main cause of global warming and that on current trends, average temperatures would rise by between two and six degrees by the end of the century.

More recent peer-reviewed studies, such as those presented at the Bonn Climate Change Conference earlier this year, have warned that we are currently in line with the IPCC's worst-case scenario and that sea level rises of up to a metre are now possible by 2100.