Breaking!!!! NASA Temperature Reading Infinitesimally Different!1!!! Must Credit D-Day!!1!!!

Wingnuts have got themselves in a good lather over a .03 degree change in the US temperature reading for 1998. Not the entire globe, but just the United States. This somehow proves that global warming isn't real. For a time there was a major wingnut attempt to look for other reasons for recent temperature increases (like sunspot activity), a tacit acknowledgement that the Earth is indeed getting hotter. Now they've swung back to denying its existence altogether, with "facts" that are the thinnest of gruel:

But how big an error was it? Well, 1998 went from being listed as 0.01 degrees warmer than 1934 to being listed as 0.02 degrees cooler. That means 1934 is back to being the "official" hottest U.S. year on record, although it's still a statistical tie. Some of the other U.S. years in this decade were also downgraded slightly. This all had virtually no bearing on the global temperature record, in which 2005 still appears to be the hottest year on record, and Al Gore's claim that nine of the ten warmest years in history have occurred since 1995 is still operative. Check out RealClimate for some graphs.

Nothing's really changed. But there are a few things to note here. One, I'm not sure what the "fraud" is. Conservatives keep claiming that (James) Hansen is being secretive about his "algorithms," although the methods for NASA's analysis are all laid out in painstaking detail here. Two, it's interesting that Hansen himself--the man who apparently needs to be "frog-marched out of his office"--doesn't seem to have ever claimed that 1998 was unequivocally the hottest U.S. year ever.

You're of course assuming that the right-wing blogosphere is interested in facts instead of just having something to whine about. This is illustrative of what Matt Yglesias has called the Hack Gap, the willingness for wingnuts to obsess over completely meaningless bits of information and to turn them into quelle scandal! while the progressive blogosphere doesn't usually get so wrapped up in such minutiae. The problem is that these kind of scandals are ready-made for the traditional media, who can just say "bloggers are on fire about X" and invite some maniac to yell about it for a while and provide instant drama without having to do a lot of work. This is why they jumped on "Macaca," because it was easy, but those of us on the left just don't sustain outrage over things that are meaningless with the same fervor (I would argue that Macaca wasn't meaningless because it spoke to a candidate's real views. Point-zero-three changes in temperature, um, are meaningless.)

The nature of two-party democracy is that elections are decided by the small minority of the public too confused or too ill-informed to realize that there are persistent, substantial differences between the two federal political parties. As a result, the issues (or, more likely, pseudo-issues) that are most important in deciding elections tend to be the issues that are least important in substantive terms.

As a writer, though, I'd rather spend my time writing about things that I think are important or at least interesting. Harping away on haircuts, Bykofsky's appalling column, the way George W. Bush lied to the American public about what kind of cheese he likes on his cheesesteak (really!), etc. doesn't seem like an appealing way to spend my time. But the fact that the right has an army of people willing to pretend that this sort of thing is the most important thing in the world is a massive, massive impediment to having sensible policies about national security, taxes, health care, global warming, etc.

Indeed.