Research showing steeper increases in ocean heat is not exactly new. So what's up with all those headlines?

The trend in the amount of heat in the oceans is shown for the period 1993 to 2015. Yellow, orange and red tones show locations where ocean heat has increased. (Source: Lijing Cheng & NCAR. Retrieved from https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/ocean-temperature-analysis-and-heat-content-estimate-institute-atmospheric-physics.) So this morning, as I'm drinking my coffee and perusing news headlines, I see this in the New York Times: "Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds." The story was about a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science titled, "How fast are the oceans warming?" This is a big deal, because human-caused global warming doesn't affect just the land surface. In fact, more than 90 percent of global warming's heat is absorbed in the oceans. That has helped prevent much steeper increases in temperature on land. But all that heat going into the oceans isn't really a benign phenomenon. By causing ocean waters to expand, it contributes ...