The global ocean has been warming up as a consequence of anthropogenic, or human-made, climate change, with 90% of the anthropogenic warming stored in the world’s ocean, leading to an increase in ocean heat and sea level rise.
From 2003 to 2012, however, the surface temperature of the Earth experienced what is known as a global surface warming slowdown. Instead of heating up rapidly, as would be expected as a consequence of global warming, the global surface temperatures instead stayed flat.
Rather than this being proof that global warming isn’t happening, University of Delaware Professor Xiao-Hai Yan showed in previous research that the heat wasn’t simply disappearing and the ocean wasn’t magically cooling. Instead, the heat was being redistributed, specifically, to deeper layers of the ocean and especially the oceans in the Southern Hemisphere.