Corals from the Eemian interglacial

At http://phys.org/print274439306.html … is a story from a paper peddling scary doomsaying to the CAGW heartbeat. In the Eemian interglacial, 125,000 years or so ago, it claims, pulse racing, the global temperatures increased and this had a remarkable effect – corals in equatorial oceans declined but corals in some temperate regions thrived. The scary bit is that this is interpreted as corals vacating the equatorial zone as a result of global warming and migrating to regions that may now be somewhat cool but were then agreeable to corals. In the consensus the equator never budges from its position and therefore, when they discovered corals had shifted location, they naturally assumed it was rising temperatures that caused this to happen. In temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, such as NW Europe, temperatures were warmer than they are today – but does this automatically mean global temperatures were higher? If corals were growing in places they do not in the modern world is this not evidence that the equator, and the poles, are not in the same positions. This is further suggested when the paper claims those reefs very often lie above modern high tide mark – which shows how much sea levels rose as a result of Eemian global warming. However, as pointed out on several occasions, a change in sea levels can also imply a change in the geoid, especially at the equatorial bulge.