Guest article by Willis Eschenbach
In the X-Twitterverse, I see Roger Hallam (@RogerHallamCS21) doing his best to scare people. Here is his Xtweet:
If there was ever a data point proving that humanity is inevitably entering a period of revolutionary societal upheaval, it is the upper right point on this graph.
Global sea level temperature for the first 5 months of 2024 is literally beyond good and evil. The superexponential hypothesis is alive and active.
In everyday life, this means that the situation will become so bad that political regimes will collapse so quickly that they will fall like dominoes.
I say it again and again: The key question of our time is: WHAT COMES NEXT? Fascism or radical democracy?
Figure 1. Roger Coppock's diagram referenced in Roger Hallam's tweet.
So what's not to like about this chart?
Well, first of all, each point on the graph represents a full year of data… except for the point on the top right, which only has 5 months of data, from January to May. If I remember correctly, this is called “comparing apples to orange peels” or something like that. And in any case, under whatever name… this is not done.
Also, by averaging over several years, they threw away about 90% of the data. Why don't we use monthly data if we have it?
And the idea that a few months of higher-than-average sea levels “prove that humanity is inevitably entering a period of revolutionary social upheaval” is also a joke. It assumes that we have never experienced such a rapid rise in sea surface temperatures before.
So what would a real graph of the ERSST data look like? To answer this question, as usual, I got the underlying data and plotted it. Here is the result.
Figure 2. Plot of the complete ERSST.V5 monthly sea surface temperature (SST) dataset. Periods with red line and blue background are times of rapid warming or cooling.
Well, there are several interesting things about this dataset. First, there were two times in the past, around 1878 and around 1942, when we observed similarly large jumps in sea surface temperature. I've highlighted both of these anomalies in red, along with the current warming. Oddly, neither of them led to, what was it… “a period of revolutionary social unrest.” In fact, no one would have known about these events if there had been no thermometers.
I mean, when was the last time you woke up and thought, “Wow, it actually feels like the global sea surface temperature is a quarter of a degree Celsius warmer than it was a few months ago!”?
So what caused the temperature jumps of 1878 and 1942? And more importantly, why did the temperature return to the status quo ante so quickly in both cases?
As we always said during the many seasons I spent as a commercial fisherman, “More unsolved mysteries of the sea.”
And although CO2 levels rose in the half century between 1860 and 1910, sea surface temperatures fell during that time… just imagine. Another unsolved mystery of the ocean…
Next, there is a relatively strong cycle with a period of about 9.1 years in the data… too short to be related to sunspots. Why nine+ years? Damn these mysteries!
Finally, we come to the question mark in the top right corner of Figure 1 – what will tomorrow bring? My first guess would be that it will do the same as it has in the past: rise and fall again. However, to get a better sense of where it's headed, Figure 2 shows a closer look at the most recent portion of the same data as in Figure 1, with the same yellow/red smoothed lines as in Figure 1.
Figure 2. The same data as in Figure 1, but only showing the current sea surface temperature since 2016. The yellow/red lines are the same CEEMD smoothing of the data as in Figure 1
And that reveals a curious fact… ocean surface temperatures are not rising as Hallam and Coppock claim. Quite the opposite – temperatures peaked in August of last year, 2023, and have generally been falling in the nine months since then.
Finally, we can see why, in the Hallam/Coppock graph, the average of the temperature data for the first five months of 2024 is so much higher than the average for the entire twelve months of 2023, even though sea surface temperatures have been falling for nine months.
TL;DR version: We may indeed be heading into a “period of revolutionary social change,” but it is not because of a single, very misleading point on the global sea surface temperature graph…
Best wishes to everyone, now I have to mow the lawn.
w.
Yes, you have heard it before: When commenting, please quote the exact words you are debating. I can defend my words, but I cannot defend your interpretation of my words.
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