By Jo Nova

Stop Storms with Censorship!

The UN Chief reminds us that we are babies who need an unelected tribal chieftain to protect us from seeing naughty persuasive words. Lord help us if grown up doctors, dentists, economists and people who keep planes-in-the-sky are accidentally exposed to The Word Of Exxon, or Shell, or BP. They might vote the wrong way, or buy the wrong car. They might influence their own children. (They might wonder why they pay money to The UN?)

What looks acts and smells like a global government in waiting? The United Nations wants your money and control over what you read and see. They also want control over the voices of the industry they are proposing to destroy.

The latest science decree from the Experts: Fossil Fuels are the “Godfathers of climate chaos”. They’re probably sneaking around behind you like the mafia, dropping flood bombs on your children’s school and raining on your Pride Parade.  Fossil fuels are just like tobacco now — apart from how they harvest the fields and feed the children and fly us to Barbados for beachy weekends. Marlboro only did that in the adverts…

The UN need an enemy to blame for everything, and the best kind of enemy is one that can’t speak:

BBC “News”

UN Secretary General António Guterres called coal, oil and gas corporations the “godfathers of climate chaos” who had distorted the truth and deceived the public for decades.

Just as tobacco advertising was banned because of the threat to health, the same should now apply to fossil fuels, he said.

His remarks were his most damning condemnation yet of the industries responsible for the bulk of global warming. They came as new studies showed the rate of warming is increasing and that global heat records have continued to tumble.

Oh Woe, if only the UN could persuade the people not to buy oil, gas and coal to avoid the oceans boiling off the space. That would end the power of the fossil fuel giants right then and there. But after 30 years of trying, the UN, the bankers, and the sycophant cowards in academia all failed to convince the average driver to ride a bike or catch a bus.

Let’s face it, they failed to even convince themselves to use Zoom instead of flying 100,000 planes to UN parties in Dubai or Azerbaijan.

So the tar-and-feathering must continue:

He said many in the oil, gas and coal industries had “shamelessly greenwashed” with lobbying, legal action and massive advertising campaigns.

“I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies,” he told an audience in New York.

“And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising.”

They must be afraid that one day the captive fossil fuels giants will wake up and fight back.

Not that there is much sign of that yet:

In response, representatives of fossil fuel groups said they were committed to reducing their emissions.

“Our industry is focused on continuing to produce affordable, reliable energy while tackling the climate challenge, and any allegations to the contrary are false,” said Megan Bloomgren, Senior Vice President of Communications at the American Petroleum Foundation.

Though the warning flares must be popping on the horizon. BP lost $1 billion trying to make wind power work, and changed policies from cutting oil to increasing it. Shareholders and investors like Bluebell Capital are openly knocking a few heads together on boards of sitting-duck gas and oil giants — explaining how their Net Zero targets are helping their competitors, and hurting their investors. Bluebell are buying the dips as it were — taking over dippy boards and reaping (hopefully) the financial rewards.  As a money making strategy, that might light a fire under some old fossils.

The UN is a threat to democracy.

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.

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 2010, 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.

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.