Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the analysis by Liang Chen et. al. ‘Another Year of Record Heat for the Oceans’, published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on 11 January; and in particular, the claim that it is likely that the oceans are now at their hottest for 1,000 years and heating faster than any time in the last 2,000 years.

The Government has not made an assessment of the specific Cheng et al. (2023) paper. The Government has considered the conclusions of the 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which assessed the latest literature in this area and found that, “The global ocean has warmed faster over the past century than since the end of the last deglacial transition (around 11,000 years ago) (medium confidence).”