This is the best summary I could come up with:

Now those sponges are at the centre of a bold and controversial claim made in a leading scientific journal that, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the planet may have already warmed by 1.7C – half a degree more than estimates used by the United Nation’s climate panel.

But Prof Malcolm McCulloch of the University of Western Australia, who led the research published in the journal Nature Climate Change, said the results were robust.

With the help of deep-sea divers, six specimens of Ceratoporella nicholsoni – a sponge that can take hundreds of years to grow between 10cm and 15cm – were removed from areas off the coast of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Prof Michael Mann, a climate scientist from the University of Pennsylvania, said: “I’m extremely sceptical of the idea we can overrule the instrumental global surface temperature record based on paleo-sponges from one region.

Prof Yadvinder Malhi, at the University of Oxford, said the way the findings had been communicated in the journal was flawed and could confuse the public about the status of efforts to keep global heating to 1.5C.

Dr Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, said the study “does not tell us anything about whether we have exceeded the 1.5C temperature limit set in the Paris Agreement”.

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