Every special interest group puts out “report cards” on presidential candidates, rating them as if whatever issue drives the activists was the most important issue in the world… no matter what the American people describe as their top priorities in poll after poll.

Climate alarmists are particularly fond of the report-card strategy because it fits into their egotistical delusions about SCIENCE! as a religion, of which they are the high priests. Treating dissent as heresy is a tremendous emotional rush, which is why heresy remains a popular charge among extremists after thousands of years. The terms of enlightened discourse require a certain degree of polite consideration for dissenters, but you can let your hair down and go nuts against heretics, who must be destroyed for the good of the faithful.

Thus we have the gang over at Climate Feedback giving the heretic Senator Ted Cruz a perfect “zero” rating on his “understanding” of climate science, rating him “very low” on the knowledge scale because he keeps asking questions they’d rather not answer, noticing facts they find inconvenient, and paying attention to data sets that must be summarily dismissed to hide the 18-year “global warming pause” that drives them nuts.

Naturally, the climate alarmists swoon over all the left-wing politicians, giving them soaring grades for their encyclopedic knowledge of global warming theory, while tastefully ignoring the gigantic carbon footprint and dodgy investments of a certain super-rich Democrat presidential candidate.

They really hate Cruz for accurately accusing the alarmist community of “cooking the books.” The greatest source of man-made global warming on Earth right now is the heat shimmer of scorched data rising from the books our friends in the Climate Cult can’t stop cooking, long after they’ve been burned to a crisp.

It’s getting bad enough to prompt some formerly supportive scientists to back away from the latest round of hysterical claims in embarrassment. In the course of noting several such examples recently, Dr. Richard Lindzen cited Secretary of State John Kerry as the paragon of climate folly: “John Kerry stands alone. Kerry expresses his ignorance of what science is.”

Lindzen threw in a humorous jab at EPA chief Gina McCarthy: “I don’t want to be snobbish, but U Mass Boston is not a very good school.”

Does anyone in the Climate Cult really want to lay out Kerry’s boneheaded statements, or McCarthy’s more embarrassing utterances (like when she admitted a round of economy-crushing coal regulations would have no measurable effect on the climate), and compare them to Ted Cruz’s statements about environmental policy? Would they care to defend the wisdom of Kerry picking a fight with India over climate change at this perilous moment in global affairs, when Barack Obama’s foreign policy has set the entire world ablaze?

Should we throw in President Obama’s blather about using climate conferences as a “rebuke” to ISIS, the frantic efforts to portray the crisis in Syria as a result of climate change – because there were never droughts in that part of the world until Americans started using air conditioning! – and the rest of the eye-rolling lunacy pouring from the climate alarmists in their sunset years?

For extra added fun, let’s dig up the alarmist predictions from 10, 20, and 30 years ago, match them against what actually happened, and then see how well the rhetoric of “skeptics” and “deniers” from past decades is holding up. In the bonus round of this contest, we can compare the agenda of global warming true believers, and of allegedly zero-knowledge skeptics like Cruz, to the expressed priorities of the American people, and see who matches up better. That should still matter, right? Isn’t the United States still a representative republic?

Sorry, those were trick questions – couldn’t resist having a bit of fun on the holiday weekend! The Climate Cult loathes the concepts of democracy, representation, and constitutionally-limited government, because they think the fate of Gaia is too important to leave in the hands of selfish, short-sighted voters. That’s why the pews at the Church of Global Warming are filled with so many exponents of other unsavory ideologies that hate self-government and economic liberty.

Physicist and consulting meteorologist Dr. Ed Berry has a terrific idea: challenging the alarmists to put some of their own money on the table and test their beliefs in the brutal arena of truth.

After dismissing the latest round of global-warming flapdoodle, Berry issued a challenge to climate alarmists who can refute a specific series of presentations asserting that “human carbon dioxide emissions are insignificant to climate change,” including:

Berry adds a discussion of the scientific method from Richard Feynman, and finishes up with a scathing review of climate models from Dr. David Evans, who “concludes added carbon dioxide can cause only about one-tenth the amount of warming climate alarmists claim,” and therefore asserts “an insignificant temperature change does not justify the economic cost to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions.”

“If you are a climate alarmist and you cannot show why these scientists are wrong, then I encourage you to take action,” Berry writes. “Admit your climate religion is wrong, because contained above is proof your climate religion is wrong.”

What’s great about this challenge is that it moves beyond the usual catty arguments about credentialism that obsess the Climate Cult – rather like the way clergy in any other religion argue about who has the authentic divine mandate, come to think of it.

Sneering “report cards” with zero-percent grades for politicians the Cult dislikes are of a piece with attempts to dismiss the work of every scientist who ever took a nickel from energy companies (as if the climate-industrial complex that favors global warming theory isn’t the biggest, richest special interest in the world.) It’s all about attacking people on a personal level, instead of dealing with what they say, and the quality of the work they present to back up their assertions.

Berry is putting cards and a stack of chips on the table and saying, “look at these specific challenges to the highly specific assertion about carbon dioxide causing disastrous, unnatural changes to the climate, and tell me where they are wrong.”

Much of the debate over politicized climate science is comparable to people locked in the belly of a submarine and arguing about their current location by attacking the personal character of everyone who says the sub is off course. Why not surface, pop the hatch open, take a look around, and see whose maps and projections bear the closest resemblance to the submarine’s surroundings

It’s a hard, cold, indisputable fact that none of the doomsday predictions that cost us billions of dollars over the past few decades were even remotely accurate. There is no reason to bet billions more on the same people revising their computer models and announcing updated doomsday predictions for 2115.

The usual overheated rhetoric and frenzied character assassinations amount to general hyperbole, but what we’re discussing is the investment of enormous resources, and reducing the quality of life for millions of people, based on a highly specific assertion that a particular byproduct of human industry is, or soon will be, causing the climate of the planet to change in harmful ways. If any part of that specific assertion is incorrect, the whole argument changes, and not in a direction the Climate Cult will like.