Facts don't matter to those who reject government's role

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 th…