Climate Change Has Doubled the Frequency of Ocean Heatwaves (nature.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: Scientists analyzed satellite-based measurements of sea surface temperature from 1982 to 2016 and found that the frequency of marine heatwaves had doubled. These extreme heat events in the ocean's surface waters can last from days to months and can occur across thousands of kilometers. If average global temperatures increase to 3.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, as researchers currently project, the frequency of ocean heatwaves could increase by a factor of 41. In other words, a one-in-one-hundred-day event at pre-industrial levels of warming could become a one-in-three-day event. The study has been published in the journal Nature.
As we came out of the latest ice age the earth has been warming up continuously and will keep doing so.
No, as we came out of the last glaciation temperatures hit a peak about 8,000 years ago during the Holocene climatic optimum as you would expect from an examination of Milankovitch cycles. Since then temperatures were slowly cooling toward the next glacial maximum. They stopped cooling when human emissions of greenhouse gases (primarily CO2) increased to the point of overriding the current cooling effects of Milankovitch cycles. The increase in ocean acidification shows that the oceans are still absorbing more CO2 than they release.