Tomorrow, the D.C. Court of Appeals will hear arguments from carbon polluters and their political allies that the EPA scientific endangerment finding for greenhouse pollution should be overturned. This case — brought by the state of Virginia, the industry front-group Coalition for Responsible Regulation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Tea Party-industry front Southeastern Legal Foundation — is based on the right-wing myth that global warming is a hoax. Holland & Hart attorney Paul Phillips, representing the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, told InsideClimate News that “man-made climate change is not certain,” according to “a compelling amount of science and facts out there”:

There’s a compelling amount of science and facts out there that suggest man-made climate change is not certain. EPA needs to accurately and honestly those certainties as well as the uncertainties.

The Coalition for Responsible Regulation, established in 2009, has not disclosed who its member companies are.

The EPA endangerment finding, Inside Climate News notes, “is based on more than 100 published scientific studies and peer-reviewed syntheses of climate change research” by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program/U.S. Global Change Research Program, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Essentially every scientific society in the world — and every agency of the United States government — recognizes that the threat of man-made global warming is a fact. As the National Academy of Sciences wrote in 2010, man-made global warming is a “settled fact“:

From a philosophical perspective, science never proves anything—in the manner that mathematics or other formal logical systems prove things—because science is fundamentally based on observations.

Any scientific theory is thus, in principle, subject to being refined or overturned by new observations.

In practical terms, however, scientific uncertainties are not all the same. Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small.

Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.

Since 2010, the science attributing the unequivocal warming of the planet to fossil-fuel pollution has grown even stronger. It’s now considered “highly likely” that all of the observed warming since 1950 is manmade (and “extremely likely” that most of the warming is manmade).

ThinkProgress filed this report from Derry, New Hampshire.

It’s getting close to impossible to track Mitt Romney’s vacillating position on global warming. Appearing in Derry, New Hampshire, the Republican presidential candidate reversed last month’s stance on fighting greenhouse gases, telling a questioner that he didn’t think carbon emissions should be regulated as a pollutant:

QUESTIONER: Will you continue to support the EPA’s air quality standards that will protect all Americans from the burning of coal?

ROMNEY: I believe we should keep our air and our water clean. And that we don’t want to have pollutants that are interfering with our health and damaging the ability of our children to enjoy good health. So no question we have to have standards that improve the quality of our air. And I support reasonable standards. … Do I support the EPA? In much of its mission yes, but in some of its mission no. The EPA getting into carbon footprints, and… [APPLAUSE] I think we may have made a mistake, we have made a mistake is what I believe, in saying that the EPA should regulate carbon emissions. I don’t think that was the intent of the original legislation, and I don’t think carbon is a pollutant in the sense of harming our bodies. We can agree to disagree … My view is that the EPA getting into carbon and regulating carbon has gone beyond the original intent of the legislation. I do believe we should reduce the pollutants that harm our health.

ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron recorded the candidate at last Thursday’s town hall. Watch it:

In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Massachusetts vs. EPA in 2007 that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Before now, Romney had not publicly taken a position on the case, which was argued before the court while he was still governor of Massachusetts, the lead plaintiff in the case.

Last month, Romney told voters in New Hampshire that “it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases.”

There are, of course, many ways in which greenhouse emissions are pollutants “in the sense of harming our bodies” — worsening and causing deadly heat waves, floods, storms, droughts, wildfires; exacerbating the effects of other air pollution like smog that cause asthma attacks and other respiratory distress; and encouraging the spread of parasites and disease.

“Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century,” concluded the medical journal The Lancet in 2009.

Romney’s slogan is “Believe in America,” but he should also believe in facts.