After reading the article more careful, it seems that it is about the cooling of the Atlantic near the equator. I understand that articles on site like the New Scientist do not include links to the original scientific reports or data, but at most links to the people they are quoting. This makes it difficult to verify the statements or to even precisely understand what it is about. The Atlantic is a large ocean reaching from almost the arctic to antarctic, an averages of some parts of it could only have a weak correlation with each other even if they are partly overlapping.