For the nation’s left-leaning entertainers, the most interesting thing about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz this week is his callous willingness to scare toddlers for fleeting political gain. In fact, beyond Cruz’s apparent intention to run for the White House in 2016, this latest craze was of singular interest to Late Night host Seth Meyers.

Meyers welcomed Cruz on to the show on Tuesday night, and the pair had a rather jovial exchange. Things got a little tense, though, when Meyers engaged in a tortured and contrived effort to put Cruz in a corner on the issue of global warming (starting at the 3:20 mark):

At a recent speech, Cruz had warned an audience which included a three-year-old girl that the world was “on fire.” The cliché to which Cruz appealed is universally applied to armed conflicts, and the increasing proliferation of interstate wars and insurgencies around the globe demonstrates that Cruz’s observation was self-evidently correct. Meyers tried to take Cruz’s comments literally when he averred that he, as a faithful member of the church of climate change, believes the world is, indeed, actually on fire. Because it’s extremely hot, you see.

“I think he world’s on fire literally,” Meyers said. “Hottest year on record. But, you’re not there, right?”

To this contention, Meyer’s audience whooped and hollered in a manner that would have made Jon Stewart feel right at home.

Cruz’s response was clever insofar as it undermined the canard to which the left’s climate alarmists cling: That they are wholly rational and data-driven, and their opponents refuse to accept consensus scientific opinion in the parochial service of their political values. Cruz noted that, for 17 years, satellite data has demonstrated that there has been no appreciable warming trend whereas climate models continue to predict catastrophic warming in the near-term. Cruz implied that it was safer to trust empiricism rather than the climate models that have yielded erroneous predictions for decades.

“So, you trust satellites more than computers?” Meyers asked, pivoting back to a joke. Cruz followed suit, and the conversation veered back toward a humorous direction.

This was a great moment for Cruz and for conservatism generally.

I’ve written on multiple occasions on the fact that public opinion data shows that the obsession over climate change is a fad primarily limited to the left. Moreover, it has become an article of faith so central to the progressive identity that the left would compel its candidates and elected leaders to declare that global warming is a more pressing threat to life and liberty than even irredentist foreign regimes or Islamist terrorist organizations. That is an opinion so wildly out of step with the public that Republicans are virtually guaranteed to benefit from their opponents’ myopia.

This clip showed that this left-leaning audience, which was fully primed and ready to cheer for yet another sermon on climate change, was disappointed when they discovered that there were cogent counterarguments that had the capacity to dispel their faith. Of course, no semi-religious conviction dies easy and moments like these are sure to be repeated in the coming months. For conservatives, that might be the best news they’ve heard since, well, last night.