Who was surprised when, in her opening statement, Figueres invoked an ancient Mayan jaguar moon goddess? Admittedly, the divine Ixchel has no actual followers left, and, besides, the Mayan pantheon was an unpleasant one (step-sided pyramids, as Terry Pratchett once observed, always bringing out the worst in a god). But Figueres's point was that Ixchel isn't Western. She isn't us, and thus she confirms us in our warm, fuzzy feeling of belonging to a sinning civilisation.

As Marxism did. As the bohemians did. As the hippies did. As the campaign against nuclear power plants did. As every left-leaning campaign of the last 150 years has done. The morphology and the teleology — the shape and the goal — are always the same. 

I'll abandon my scepticism the day climate change ceases to have the origins and solutions of every other progressive cause, the day it seems more than merely another vehicle for world government, social control and Western self-flagellation.

Actually, I'd also like to see a data dump that doesn't reveal scientific fraud at quite the level of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. And the movement's celebrity supporters behaving as though they believed what they say, the contrails of their private jets no longer stretching off toward sunny Cancún. And all the dishonest language about it somehow eliminated. 

A ban on invocations of Mayan jaguar goddesses seems a likely place to start.