With Republicans in the US House of Representatives preparing to advance a bill to block the federal climate regulations this week, Democrats at last secured a hearing on the underlying science. The result was yet another seemingly fruitless debate between skeptics and mainstream climate scientists, playing out before lawmakers who by all indications had already made up their minds on the subject (The Guardian, The Hill).

The focus of the Energy and Commerce hearing was a bill that would overturn a finding by the US Environmental Protection Agency that global warming poses a threat to human welfare (for more on that, see our earlier coverage). In doing so, the bill would prevent the agency from moving forward with climate regulations. Republicans are planning to bring the bill up for a subcommittee vote on Thursday.

Scientists on the witness list (available here, with written testimony) walked lawmakers through some of the basic scientific findings, and their testimony was quickly countered by notable skeptics. Many such hearings have been held over the years, including one organized by Democrats on the Science Committee last year.

Evidence of progress is hard to come by. “Elitist” and “arrogant”. That’s how Republican Steve Scalise of Louisiana described scientists.

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“It’s clear that the science is not settled,” Scalise said. “There are these armies of thousands of scientists somewhere that hide behind these organizations that themselves have been discredited.”

Those organizations would include the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. House Republicans voted to zero out funding for the IPCC in their continuing resolution last month, and at the hearing on Tuesday skeptics raised the idea of funding a kind of anti-IPCC to write a minority report.

One of the scientists testifying on Tuesday was Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Global Ecology Department and co-chair of the IPCC’s second working group. In a telephone conversation afterword he said he wished there were a way to effectively communicate the way the scientific assessment process works. It isn’t easy delivering useful reports to policymakers, he said, and the process will always be open to criticism from individual scientists who feel their work isn’t adequately represented. “I wish that my work were featured more,” he says.

As for the hearing, Field says he is happy that scientists were at least able to address the committee. “I would hope that it’s in the spirit of a genuine dialogue that is in the best interests of the country,” he added. “I guess time will tell if that’s true or not.”