Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Over in the X-Twitterverse, I see that Roger Hallam (@RogerHallamCS21) is doing his very best to scare people. Here’s his xtweet:
If ever there was one datapoint which proved that humanity is inevitably moving into a period of revolutionary social disruption, it is the top right hand point of this chart.
The global sea level temperature for the first 5 months of 2024 is literally off the chart. The super exponential hypothesis is alive and kicking.
Meaning, in everyday language, things are going to get so bad so quickly political regimes are going to collapse like dominoes.
As I keep saying – the key question of our time is this: WHAT COMES NEXT? – Fascism or Radical Democracy?
Figure 1. Roger Coppock’s graph referred to in Roger Hallam’s tweet.
So what’s not to like about this chart?
Well, first off, every dot in the chart represents a full year of data … except for the dot at the top right, which only has 5 months of data, from January to May. If memory serves, this is known as “comparing apples to orange peels” or something similar. And in any case, under any name … it’s not done.
Next, they’ve thrown away about 90% of the data by averaging it into years. Why not use monthly data, since we have it?
Next, the idea that a few months of warmer-than-usual sea levels “proves that humanity is inevitably moving into a period of revolutionary social disruption” is a joke. It assumes that we’ve never seen rapid sea surface temperature increases before.
So, what would a real graph of the ERSST data look like? To answer that, as is my habit, I went and got the underlying data and graphed it up. Here’s the result.
![](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/ersst-sea-surface-temperature-202405-plus.png?resize=720%2C684&ssl=1)
Figure 2. Graph of the full ERSST.V5 monthly sea surface temperature (SST) dataset. Periods with red line and blue background are times of rapid warming or cooling.
Now, there are several interesting things about this dataset. First, there were two times in the past, around 1878 and around 1942, when we saw similar large jumps in the sea surface temperature. I’ve highlighted those two anomalies, along with the current warming, in red. Curiously, neither of them led to, what was it … “a period of revolutionary social disruption“. In fact, were it not for thermometers, nobody would even have known they occurred.
I mean, when’s the last time you woke up and thought “Wow, it certainly feels like the global ocean surface temperature is a quarter of a degree C warmer than a couple of months ago!”?
So what caused the jumps in 1878 and 1942? And more than that, in both cases why did the temperature return quite quickly to the status quo ante?
As we used to say during the many seasons I spent commercial fishing, “More unsolved mysteries of the sea.”
Next, although the CO2 levels were rising during the half-century from 1860 to 1910, sea surface temperatures were dropping over that time… go figure. Another unsolved mystery of the sea …
Next, there’s a relatively strong cycle with a period of about 9.1 years in the data … too short to be sunspot-related. Why nine+ years? Dang those mysteries!
Finally, we come to the question mark in the upper right corner in Figure 1—what will tomorrow bring? My first guess would be that it would do what it did in the past, go up and come down again. However, to get a better sense of where it’s going, Figure 2 shows a closer look at the recent part of the same data shown in Figure 1, with the same yellow/red smoothed lines as in Figure 1.
![](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/ersst-sea-surface-temperature-2016-202405.png?resize=720%2C684&ssl=1)
Figure 2. Same data as in Figure 1, but only showing the recent sea surface temperature since 2016. Yellow/red lines are the same CEEMD smooth of the data as shown in Figure 1
And this reveals a curious fact … sea surface temperatures are not skyrocketing as Hallam and Coppock claim. Quite the opposite—the temperature peaked in August of last year, 2023, and has generally dropped in the nine months since then.
And finally, we can see why in the Hallam / Coppock graph the average of the first five months of the 2024 temperature data is so much higher than the average of the full twelve months of 2023 data, despite the fact that sea surface temperatures have been dropping for nine months.
TL;DR Version: We may indeed be “moving into a period of revolutionary social disruption”, but it’s not because of one very misleading dot on a graph of global sea surface temperatures …
My very best wishes to all, now I gotta go mow the lawn.
w.
Yeah, you’ve heard it before: When you comment, please quote the exact words you’re discussing. I can defend my words, but I can’t defend your interpretation of my words.
And if you want to show I’m wrong, here are instructions on How To Show Willis Is Wrong.
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