Beckel, unfortunately, did not qualify his statement with “for the United States”, so, technically, the host was right and Beckel was wrong. If you’re going to go into the Lion’s Den, best go armed with the exact details of what you’re going to say.

The derisive and preemptive manner of the response is telling, but when people go to the transcript, what will show is that Beckel made a claim of fact that was wrong, and the host had the item of fact right. The news item is that 2012 was the warmest year on record for the United States.

Now that’s still a point relevant to the case for thinking that global warming is real. And it is also true that the past decade was the warmest on record, world wide. But in the nature of things, even during a general rise in temperatures, there’s enough noise in the system that very few years will be the worldwide warmest evah. Most of the time, that record year will be 2, or 7, or 16 years in the past. Until a new all time high is set. And that new high will have had factors other than the global trend that contributed to it, so even then, there’s no way to prove to a hardened skeptic that global warming was the cause.

The math-challenged crowd, which includes hundreds of millions, is invincibly ignorant on the topic. Most of these hundreds of millions are not rich and not particularly greedy. They just don’t get it.

They’re not fated to remain forever ignorant. Reality can be cruel in how it chooses to be educational. A few more years of storms like Sandy, wildfires like Waldo Canyon, and droughts that drive food prices sharply higher will bring this crowd around.