Yes, please, let's have hearings on the evidence of climate change

The Atlantic's Marc Armbinder notes that the new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives "plans to hold high profile hearings examining the alleged 'scientific fraud' behind global warming, a sleeper issue in this election that motivated the base quite a bit."

OK, then, let's do that. Let's have just exactly that conversation in that forum. Please.

Yes, I understand that the intent of such hearings would be to create a circus of misdirection and misinformation and that the ringmasters arranging these hearings are quite good at that sort of thing.

But no matter how they spin it it would still boil down to a hearing before Congress, involving expert testimony given under oath. And the facts of this matter are steeply stacked against even the most skilled spinmeisters.

So let's do it. Let's have a national conversation about the facts and the evidence. Let's have hearings to allow that evidence to be heard.

Bring in all the top scientists from NASA and NOAA and the IPCC. Swear in the heads of all the property insurance companies and reinsurers (the greedy capitalists screaming bloody murder over climate change because they know it's real and that doing nothing about it will be very, very expensive). Fly in conservative ministers from Canada and Micronesia, from the Netherlands and Bangladesh. Bring in the chemists and climatologists, the botanists and oceanographers. Print up the hand-outs and blow up the display-sized photographs and charts and graphs. Subpoena everyone from Bill Nye to Steven Chu and let them answer every question that Michelle Bachmann or Jim Sensenbrenner or Mike Pence can think to ask.

Then go ahead and call in the so-called "skeptics" — the deniers, the sun-spot kooks, the chem-trail conspiracy theorists and cornucopian fantasists. Call in the lobbyists and the Luntzian focus-group warriors who believe that reality is a semantic construct. Please. I want to hear from them. I want to know if any of them has some magic phrase or theory that will change the heat-trapping properties of carbon, or some wonderful slogan that will prevent sea levels from rising. Swear in the head of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity and invite him to repeat his previous statements under oath. See if he chooses to do so when it might mean someday sharing a cell with Roger Clemens.

And please let's televise the whole thing. Let's stream the video live on the Internet — with files available for download so the choicest bits can be reposted as viral videos.

And let's not stop with the House — why should one chamber of Congress have all the fun? Let's also convene hearings in the Senate, where mad old James Inhofe can test his mettle against reality and people who know what they're talking about.

Heck, let's take this show on the road. How about a multi-city tour? I'm picturing a traveling show featuring the distinguished gentlewoman from Minnesota's 6th District and the honorable secretary of energy in a series of Lincoln-Douglass style debates on the evidence for climate change. I'd camp out for tickets to see that.

The facts are the facts are the facts. I'm sure the idea of these Republican show-trial hearings is to spin and obfuscate and set a trap to portray those facts as a "fraud" or an alarmist fascistsocialist conspiracy involving secret Muslim Alinskyites and almost the entire scientific community, but the facts are too solid and too substantial to be so easily dismissed or disguised. I remember the last time House Republicans attempted to set this kind of trap. It didn't go so well for them.

So let's have hearings. Let the facts have a hearing and let the evidence be heard. The sooner the better.