Two of the faiths trying to take over the world believe in hidden things. Of the two, Islam is the more venerable with its sacred texts over a thousand years old. Global warming’s faithful are still writing their sacred texts with adaptation to actual results -- that the world stopped warming neigh on a generation ago. 

Hidden Imam

The Shi’ite strand of Islam believes in the Twelfth Imam, also known as the Hidden Imam and the Mahdi. The Hidden Imam is an historical figure born in 869 A.D. who disappeared in 941 A.D. His disappearance is referred to as the Occultation. Twelver Shi’ites believe that the Hidden Imam will appear, with Jesus Christ as his sidekick, to bring justice to the world. They also contend that they should hasten the return of the Hidden Imam by creating the proper conditions. This mainly involves slaughtering non-Moslems or forcing them to convert to Islam. 

Jesus provides some crossover to the dominant Sunni brand of Islam which has re-established its caliphate in the Euphrates Valley. In this branch of the belief system, the caliphate will win a battle in the town of Dabiq in northern Syria and then goes on to sack Istanbul. An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus -- the second-most-revered prophet in Islam -- will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.

Hidden Heat

Rational people abandon ideas when facts prove them wrong, as per John Maynard Keynes, who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Unfortunately for warmers, they cannot do that because they would have to abandon their whole Weltanschauung. If they abandoned belief in global warming, their lives would become shallow and meaningless. So to avoid the mental distress of cognitive dissonance, warmers have to believe that the absence of the heat that their climate models have predicted is due to that heat being “hidden”. 

The high priests of the warmers have told their faithful that the hidden heat is in the deep oceans. It is so well hidden that it can’t be measured properly. Furthermore, the priests contend that the lack of detected temperature rise means that our measuring system is faulty and the way we look at the world is wrong. Roger Pielke Sr. of the University of Colorado in Boulder, is quoted as saying: “This means this heat is not being sampled by the global average surface temperature trend. Since that metric is being used as the icon to report to policymakers on climate change, it illustrates a defect in using the two-dimensional field of surface temperature to diagnose global warming.”

Warmers believe that the hidden heat will eventually come out of wherever it is hiding with a rush, making conditions far more dire than they had previously predicted. 

Discussion

Unfortunately we live on the same planet as a couple of apocalyptic cults which find the existence of non-believers an affront to their particular belief system. One cult fantasises about executing non-believers, the other does it in imaginative ways. Both cults need to believe in hidden things. Both are best avoided.

David Archibald, a visiting fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery, 2014)