The climate-change cult is a full-on witch hunt now, and very little else. Bereft of any actual climate change, desperately seeking to avoid tough questions about why none of its sacred computer models has borne even the slightest resemblance to reality, forced to watch its every attempt to grab a headline debunked within hours, and facing new studies that might deal a death blow to its core beliefs regarding “greenhouse gas,” the Church of Global Warming can do nothing except attack its critics as heretics – or “deniers,” to use the term they haven’t yet realized isn’t scaring anyone.

A running Inquisition is the only way our mandatory State religion can keep the faithful in line. Remember, we’re not talking about anything resembling “science” any more – the scientific method says that when real-world data fails to confirm your hypothesis, you change the hypothesis, and the theory we’re talking about was supposed to be civilization-smashing climate apocalypse brought about by human industry, not naturally-occurring variances in global temperature so tiny that odds must be laid on whether they’ve occurred at all. The climate cult is scrambling to explain why there hasn’t been any significant global temperature variation for two decades, and has been reduced to screaming “GOTCHA!” when someone says the amount of climate change has been exactly zero when there’s a chance it might have changed by some tiny fraction of a degree, maybe, depending on how the data is compiled.

Thus we have a piece at Slate attempting to work up a little burn-the-witch political enthusiasm by sobbing that the best-case scenario for the climate cult from the 2016 is preservation of the status quo, “leaving us with a climate-conscious president, if a Democrat wins, still stymied by a climate change-denying Congress.” The worst case, of course, would be some Republican heretic who accurately points out that nothing even vaguely resembling the crisis we’ve been taxed billions of dollars to prevent has occurred, so maybe it’s time to cut into the Church of Global Warming’s lavish funding a bit.

There follows a side-splittngly funny “voters’ guide” rating random Republicans – not just likely White House contestants or even long shots, but senators – on their level of heresy (er, excuse me, “denialism.”) How funny is it? The first category of “We’re Ready to… Talk,” rated “as good as it gets,” includes only two “White House hopefuls:” Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham. You need a heart of stone not to laugh at a broken movement that thinks Lindsey Graham is (a) the best-case scenario and (b) a viable candidate.

Also hilarious: what gets a Republican into that best-case “ready to talk” category was voting for symbolic language in the Keystone pipeline bill which “acknowledged man plays a ‘significant’ role in climate change.” Forget what you learned in school, kids, “science” has nothing to do with testing theories against hard data. It’s all about signing symbolic political attachments to bills that get vetoed because influential Green fanatics don’t give a hoot about all the science that proves the Keystone pipeline is a good idea – they need it killed because their movement would be emotionally incapable of handling defeat after so many years of fighting the project, and some of their leaders make a lot of money by keeping that pipeline down.

Even signing that ritual confession of possible climate sin wasn’t good enough to keep poor Senator Rand Paul from getting bumped into the next category down, “It’s Just Not Worth It,” because he dares to make reasonable concessions to the short-term economic health of American citizens, instead of destroying everything Church elders point a trembling finger at, no question asked. His supposedly damning quote comes from an interview with Bill Maher on HBO: “I’m not against regulation. I think the environment has been cleaned up dramatically through regulations on emissions as well as clean water over the last 40 or 50 years, but I don’t want to shut down all forms of energy such that thousands and thousands of people lose their jobs.”

He’s in favor of sensible environmental regulation that produced detectable gains in clean air and water, but doesn’t want to shut down all forms of energy and wantonly destroy thousands of jobs because of a long-shot theory? BURN THE WITCH! Well, okay, just burn his feet, or something. The carbon emissions of burning witches haven’t been studied carefully enough yet.

The lower categories of this dopey “voters’ guide” are reserved for people with enough common sense to notice that our “international partners” love to give lip service to treaties that cripple the U.S. economy without requiring anything but vague commitments from them (Carly Fiorina), those who note that the data isn’t lining up with the Church of Global Warming’s predictions (Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry), and those who believe – with copious evidence, such as the Climategate emails and the “hockey stick graph” debunking – that the climate cult has been deliberately lying to retain their money and power. That lowest circle of climate hell is reserved for Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee, and of course the infamous heretic James Inhofe in the Senate category. Basically, if you’ve ever made a public statement about the Climategate emails that proved certain researchers were deliberate fudging the data to make it look like global warming was happening, you’re the worst.

Last up is the “unclassifiable” Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who “has attacked Obama’s proposed power plant rules and pledged to oppose any climate bill that includes a tax or fee of any kind,” but has “nonetheless routinely refused to answer specific climate science questions—even when they are posed by a second-grader.” A politician who thinks science should be left to (non-politicized) scientists? What a strange creature! Let’s burn him at the stake anyway, just to be sure. After all, if he’s opposed to punitive taxation, he’s guilty of the heresy that our dying climate cult really cares about.

Given that polls show the American people are weary of climate alarmism, and can’t help noticing that none of its predictions have been coming true, the Slate guide is useful if you turn it upside down and take the toughest skeptics as your best bet. Skepticism is the essence of true science, not a perversion. People are generally willing to entertain the theory that industrial emissions can affect the environment, and possibly alter the climate – remember that most voters today grew up with non-stop indoctrination about “greenhouse gas” in both school and popular culture, and they’re not generally up to speed on the latest news about how the effects of man-made carbon may have been dramatically overestimated.

But people can also see what’s right in front of their faces, and if they’re old enough to remember the early days of global warming hysteria, they know 2015 looks nothing like what the doomsday prophets of the Eighties predicted. They’re also rightly skeptical of international deals that think the planetary climate can be fixed by hammering clean U.S. industry ever harder, while the rest of the world goes right on polluting.

They also know enormous sacrifices have been made in the name of environmentalism, and they can see tangible results from the more sensible policies, so they resist the demands for a few hundred billion more, especially at a time when the American economy is too shaky for such hysteria. The successful Republican candidate will work with that skepticism, and has little to fear from desperate fanatics screaming “DENIER!”