A debate over climate change could be a very productive thing. Let's debate how best to deal with the effects of human-caused climate change. Let's debate how best to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, how to encourage energy conservation, how to make electric cars more affordable and electricity cleaner.

But arguing over whether the Earth's climate is warming and whether humans are the cause is useless. That debate is over. It continues only in the minds of doubters like Gov. Gary Herbert and Utah legislators like Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab.

If Herbert puts his "climate panel" to work trying to find credible scientists to stack up against the thousands who have been convinced for years of the reality and the dangers of global warming, he will be wasting time. Time we don't have before we begin taking serious steps to limit the poison spewed into our air by vehicles, coal-fired power plants and other polluting industries.

The governor has yet to announce who he will invite to a climate forum in April, but if he does his homework on the topic, reading the reams of research available online for starters, the "debate" will be one-sided.

In order to bring together representative numbers of climate-change deniers and climatologists who believe the evidence, he'd need dozens of chairs on one side of the room and maybe one on the other. That's because 97 percent of legitimate climate scientists warn of warming and rising seas, continued polar

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ice melt, intense drought, floods, wildfires and severe weather caused by increasing carbon emissions. All the major scientific associations are in agreement -- all of them.

Scientists at Brigham Young University, University of Utah and Utah State University could testify on the science. Some of them have already tried.

There is no doubt there are a few climate scientists who dispute the mounting evidence that the Earth is warming and that the rate is accelerating. Similarly, there are some doctors who doubt that chemotherapy is the best treatment we have for some forms of cancer. Still, it seems likely that most of us, faced with a huge consensus that an unpleasant remedy is the best way to save us from a painful death, will choose to rely on accepted science.

It would be wrong to invite alternative-medicine practitioners to debate trained oncologists about the benefits of cancer treatments. And, in the same way, it would be counterproductive for Herbert to try to "balance" a meaningless debate over climate change.