If any climate change model is showing a temperature stabilization or decline, it is because the ocean has been absorbing that heat, according to a Rutgers University scientist's recent work.

According to a press release, Yair Rosenthal does not believe global warming is slowing down or going away and said the ocean has just been acting as a buffer for the Earth while the climate continues to change. He said the oceans have been absorbing heat at a rate 15 times faster than it has even been doing so in the last 10,000 years.

While this may give some the illusion that global warming is slowing down, Rosenthal said this is an important time to address the real issue.

"We may have underestimated the efficiency of the oceans as a storehouse for heat and energy," Rosenthal said. "It may buy us some time - how much time, I don't really know - to come to terms with climate change. But it's not going to stop climate change."

Rosenthal, a professor of marine and coastal sciences at Rutgers' School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, and his research team published their work in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The researchers examined marine sediment from the waters of Indonesia, an area where the Pacific and Indian oceans overlap. They measured levels of calcium in the shells of a specific species of foraminifera. Warmer waters at the time the organism calcified meant the greater the calcium to magnesium ratio would be.

The tiny creature's shells provided the researchers with a 10,000-year history of Pacific water temperatures.

"Our work showed that intermediate waters in the Pacific had been cooling steadily from about 10,000 years ago," Braddock Linsley, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said. "This places the recent warming of Pacific intermediate waters in temporal context. The trend has now reversed in a big way and the deep ocean is warming."