Fijian coral reveals new 627-year record of Pacific Ocean climate – 14th century temperatures similar to recent decades

Fijian coral [credit: Coral Reef Alliance]

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Natural climate variation does what it does, then and now. When they say: ‘The record also shows that present ocean temperature is the highest for the past 653 years’, that obviously means it was like the present, centuries before industrial-scale fuel-burning came along. The article here tries to frame modern warming as mainly human-caused, but vague assertions aren’t science.
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An international team of climate scientists have used a 627-year coral record from Fiji to reveal unprecedented insights into ocean temperatures and climate variability across the Pacific Ocean since 1370, says Phys.org.

The study published in Science Advances, co-authored by Dr. Ariaan Purich from Monash University and Professor Matthew England and Dr. Rishav Goyal from UNSW, shows how human-caused climate change is interacting with long-term patterns of climate variability in the Pacific. [Talkshop comment – assertion only].

The new coral record shows that the local ocean temperature was warm between 1380 and 1553, comparable to the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

However, when combined with other coral records, the Pacific-wide warming observed since 1920, largely attributed to human-derived emissions [Talkshop comment – attribution needs evidence], marks a significant departure from the natural variability recorded in earlier centuries.

The record also shows that present ocean temperature is the highest for the past 653 years.
. . .
The team used the Fijian coral record to reconstruct the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, a large-scale phenomenon that influences climate variability across the Pacific Ocean, nearly doubling the length of previous reconstructions.

This long reconstruction allowed the interplay of climate variability and change to be examined, revealing atypical basin-wide warming over the past century.

Dr. Ariaan Purich said that understanding the long-term climate variability in the Pacific is crucial for predicting future climate change.

Full article here.
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Image: Fijian coral [credit: Coral Reef Alliance]