It’s Official: The South China Sea Has Not Warmed In The Last 40 Years

Yet another new study documents the lack of regional cooperation with the “global” warming narrative.

Since 1979 there has been no net warming in the South China Sea and no evidence of a hiatus or “growth discontinuity” in this region’s coral development (Tan et al., 2022). Natural ENSO variation leads changes in the sea surface temperature by about 5-6 months.

Image Source: Tan et al., 2022

Other recent South China Sea (SCS) studies also find temperature records that do not align with the narrative that humans drive sea surface temperature variations.

Liao et al. (2020) report cooling by 2-3°C in recent decades (“from 19.3°C to 16.5°C after 1982 AD”) relative to the mid-20th century.

Image Source: Liao et al., 2020

Jiang et al. (2021) also report no net warming in the northern SCS since 1979. They suggest El Niño and La Niña (ENSO) variability have been driving sea surface temperature changes in the SCS since Medieval times, and “internal dynamics of the climate system play a prominent role in modulating ENSO variability.”

Image Source: Jiang et al., 2021

And for a longer-term perspective, Zhou and colleagues (2022) report the SCS was several degrees warmer than today throughout all of the last 6000 years, as the 1994-2004 temperatures (the green square in the chart below) are the coldest of the Holocene.

Image Source: Zhou et al., 2022

5 responses to “It’s Official: The South China Sea Has Not Warmed In The Last 40 Years”

  1. RoHa

    OK, so there is no sign of warming there. Or there. Or that other place. But there is plenty of warming somewhere. You just have to find it, and then you will know that we are doomed.

  2. oebele bruinsma

    We are doomed indeed, as the sun will eventually swell to a “Red Giant”. But that’s for a next government to worry about.

  3. Ben Vorlich

    All these reports of no warming explain why places that are showing a bit of warming are doing it three times faster than average! If you keep finding them then it won’t three times it’ll be four then five.

  4. Doug Proctor

    Why do you put a linear trend in something that the eye can see has several trends? If we are to work with the activist we need to show things that are more complex than a straight linear trend. That’s our point: there are ither factors going in.

    The last 1500 is its own beast and separate from what went before. You can argue there has been a minor cooling and certainly not a warming. But it is not a consistent trend for 6000 years.

    The value of this data is in showing the temperature complexity that is incompatible with CO2 theory and the stable temperature narrative.

  5. eclecticmn

    Over the past several decades there has been a 15x increase in money to climate research etc. If there is no climate crisis there is no climate crisis money. Want to see your 15 person dept go back to 1 person? If no then you better pump out the climate alarms.

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