IT'S now official: 2014 was the warmest year on record. You might expect this to be a politically important milestone. After all, climate change deniers have long used the blip of 1998 - an unusually hot year, mainly due to an upwelling of warm water in the Pacific - to claim that the planet has stopped warming. This claim involves a complete misunderstanding of how one goes about identifying underlying trends. (Hint: Don't cherry-pick your observations.) But now even that bogus argument has collapsed. So will the deniers now concede that climate change is real?

Of course not. Evidence doesn't matter for the "debate" over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around "debate" because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it's not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it's hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it's unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.

Before I get into that, let me remind you of some other news that won't matter. First, consider the Kansas experiment. Back in 2012 Sam Brownback, the state's right-wing governor, went all in on supply-side economics: He drastically cut taxes, assuring everyone that the resulting boom would make up for the initial loss in revenues. Unfortunately for his constituents, his experiment has been a resounding failure. The economy of Kansas, far from booming, has lagged the economies of neighbouring states; and Kansas is now in fiscal crisis.