The European Geophysical Union is going to be discussing paleoclimate at its annual meeting at the start of next month. The papers to be presented look pretty interesting.
Do have a look through and let us know if there is anything exciting in there. I just peeked at Ljungqvist et al which looks at the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age to see if they were really localised, as is argued by those on the other side of this debate. While the paper only looks at Northern Hemisphere proxies, the authors seem to have reached a rather different conclusion.
We find evidence of a widespread medieval warming culminating in the 10–11th centuries, followed by a gradual cooling into the 17th century, succeeded by a warming from the 18th century that accelerated in the 20th century. Our result also indicate that the warmth in the 10th and 11th centuries was as uniform as in the 20th century. However, with a resolution of only 100 years it is not possible to assess whether any decade in the past was as warm as any in the late 20th or early 21st century.