A year on from his bold decision to quit the UN Paris Accord, President Trump has been praised for having “broken the spell of climate change mania.”

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore hails Trump’s exit from Paris as the moment when the “global warmists” lost “the levers of control”.

Since Mr Trump walked out, it has been fascinating to watch the decline of media interest in “saving the planet”. There was the most tremendous rumpus when he made his announcement, but the End-Of-The-World-Is-Nigh-Unless feeling that made headlines before Rio, Kyoto, Copenhagen, Paris, and numerous other gatherings, has gone. This feeling was essential to achieve the “Everybody’s doing it, so we must do it” effect the organisers sought.

The media barely noticed the recent Bonn meeting. I doubt if they will get apocalyptic about the next big show, “COP24” in Katowice, Poland, this December. The Poles are among the nations emerging as “climate realists” – people with their own coal and a very strong wish not to depend on the Russians. Climate-change zealotry is looking like CND after the installation of cruise and Pershing missiles in the 1980s – a bit beside the point.

Moore is absolutely right about the symbolic significance of Trump’s decision. Of course it was of great practical service to the U.S. economy – freeing it from the shackles of European-Union-driven carbon reduction targets which would have hamstrung U.S. business and driven up costs for consumers. But its worldwide impact will be greater still.

Trump has performed the same service as the little boy who pointed out that the Emperor was wearing no clothes. Man-made global warming is the biggest lie of our age and the only reason it survived so long is that all the world’s nations politely agreed to pretend, for various reasons ranging from self-interest to moral posturing, that it was true.

With the U.S. no longer playing that game it’s much, much harder for everyone else to go on pretending there’s a consensus.

But not, unfortunately, impossible.

As Moore goes on to suggest, the apparatus of the climate ‘consensus’ is so vast and all-encompassing that it will take years, if not decades, to dismantle:

The great guardians of this attempt at government by global conferencing will continue to make their speeches and write their reports, usually paid for out of public funds. The frameworks and panels, the COPs and ARs, the climate-change organisations that fill 168 pages of Wikipedia, all these will continue, though with diminished status. Priesthoods usually find ways to survive longer than the belief systems they represent.

Again, Moore is bang-on about the religious nature of the climate change scare. Like all religions, climate change is a matter of faith not of science. This is no basis on which to build policies which cost taxpayers trillions of dollars and which usually end up doing more harm than good. Trump deserves our eternal thanks for having the bad manners to point out this basic truth when so many lesser politicians preferred to go along with the convenient lie.