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Raw Story has printed a letter sent to Congress from thousands of US scientists and experts.

In it, our scientific community expresses unconditional recognition of the real dangers of global warming, the impact it’s already had on our planet, and the urgent need for government action to reduce our fossil fuel consumption. Though the EPA has left our planet for dead, at least a huge number of American scientists are trying to do something about it.

My one complaint about the letter is that it occasionally uses the term “climate change,” which is a Republican frame that attempts to make global warming seem more like a pleasant seasonal alteration and less like a potential devastator of modern society.

But that’s a minor issue, and probably one that feeds into their plan. As we all know, whenever the right wants to distract us from their failings, they manufacture absurd definitional arguments. In Iraq, we’re debating over whether the violence constitutes “civil war.” By refusing to acknowledge that it does, Republicans have moved the debate away from the war and the bloodshed (plus the fact that it’s all their fault) and into the realm of semantics. The same thing is true for reproductive freedom. We spend loads of time arguing over whether a zygote is a person or not, but it really doesn’t matter.

Whatever they choose to call it, any time a conservative pulls the “we can’t be sure” card when it comes to global warming, or whenever one chooses to play semantic games about the environment and what warming “really means for the planet,” we should simply refer them to something like this letter. The unanimity from environmental experts is further proof that the debate is over.