A brazen effort to incrementally chip away at the medieval warming period, which period in and of itself provides sufficient variation to destroy Mann’s hockey stick.
Explain away the mwp, because people can’t forget it, and you can justify treating it as noise and not normal variation.
Of course they can’t explain the little ice age either, but they like to include it because it lowers the baseline and skews normal temperatures to look warmer.
Hear, hear!!
It is accepted by some that the Little Ice Age was correlated with a major decrease in sunspots. There were apparently 3 such incidents starting with the LIA called the Maunder Minimum, then the Sporer Minimum, and I forget the third one’s name. The article linked has a number of interesting comments. A popular theory is that as conditions changed they failed to adapt and use the kinds of foods that served the Inuit well. Also, it has been suggested that with cold, Atlantic storms increased and fewer ships came to Greenland. Some probably died, others might have been kidnapped, and finally some probably went back east.