Number Theory: Sea surface temperatures may break another record on March 28

At least three temperature datasets – those produced by Berkeley Earth, NASA, and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) -- have shown that the 12-month running mean of global temperature breached the 1.5°C warming threshold for the first time at some point in the past year. While this does not mean that the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming within 1.5°C (over pre-industrial levels) has been breached, the past year is definitely a big leap towards that. If that were not bad enough for global climate, the world is on the cusp of another temperature milestone on March 28. It is almost certain that by March 28, the world’s daily sea surface temperature (SST) would have stayed the warmest (compared to the same day in other years) for 364 of the past 365 days. Here are three charts that describe how unprecedented SST warming was in the past year and how that happened.