Bo Christiansen has a guest post at Klimazwiebel looking at the way that traditional temperature reconstruction methods like RegEm and CPS underestimate past climate variability. He demonstrates a new method he has developed with Anders Moberg and shows that it is much better at capturing low-frequency variation - i.e. climate trends, although with a concurrent worsening of the high-frequency situation.
When he uses the new method on a previously used set of proxies he gets much higher variability, with a much more pronounced little ice age. THe proxy selection doesn't extend back to the medieval warm period, so we'll have to wait for further results to see what it looks like there.
As has been noted before, the advent of a more variable climate is not entirely good news for the sceptic cause. While one would expect the medieval warm period to be more pronounced, higher variability implies higher climate sensitivity and thus we would expect climate models to show much scarier projections of warming.
So we're sunk then?
Not exactly, because I think there's a sting in the tail. If projected warming is going to be even greater, then the IPCC forecasts that Lucia so carefully monitors for performance against reality, and which are on the cusp of being falsified already, will surely be shown to be unarguably wrong.