Somebody help me out here. Manny? RandomGuy?
Northern European summer temperature variations over the Common Era from integrated tree-ring density records
So, I am reliably informed and, as the above graph demonstrates, an august team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland (a consensus?) describe their finding as depicting "a long-term cooling trend of -0.30°C per 1,000 years over the Common Era in northern Europe”. That's a lot of cooling during a period when we've been told the planet was warming, wouldn't you say? Coincidentally, they note that their temperature reconstruction “has centennial-scale variations superimposed on this trend,” which indicate that “conditions during Medieval and Roman times were probably warmer than in the late 20th century,” when the previously-rising post-Little Ice Age mean global air temperature hit a ceiling of sorts above which it has yet to penetrate.
Interesting. What does it all mean?
I think it means that when you put the modest temperature rise, of the latter part of the 20th century (because that's the period we're told is drop dead proof we're headed for catastrophe), into the context of, say, the past 2,000 years, the whole AGCC argument kind of goes soft,eh? Context is key -- even in science.