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Instead I would like to address the concerns that you raised in post 140 by presenting the paper Climatic Fluctuations in the Central Region of Argentina in the last 1000 years by Marcela A. Cioccale.

Fine with me. I haven't found the paper so if you have a link please post it.

It's better to debate these source papers than reviews like Mann's or Soon's so we don't get caught up in "what he said" games. I am interested in the facts not in reparsing Soon's words. But try to keep in mind there are a lot of papers representing a lot of climate anomalies including a fair number pointing to warming for MWP equal to or greater than today's. You are more than welcome to point out any that point to less warming or cooling in the MWP anywhere on earth, but naturally those should be source analyses of temperature proxies. In other words reread WOSG's post 101 and answer his points without evading the issue like you did in post #105.

In other words you have yet to show ANY evidence that temperatures were cooler in the MWP anywhere than they are today.

I could not find a link to it, but I was able to find it in the Quaternary International Journal Volume 62 (1999) pages 35 to 47. It required a quick trip to the library but I was glad of the excuse (I never seem to have enough time for good old fashioned digging in the library these days).

Your comment about me "evading" his questions wounds me deeply and thus requires a detailed response from me. In my opinion, WOSG post the questions as rhetorical since he went ahead and answered them with an reference to S&B. However he did not leave it as simply a reference, he refers to it as the "Authority" (something I believe you might have said about me). He had read Mann, M&M and S&B in the last few days and thought that the S&B paper was the best - to quote him "It's solid". Since he had obviously gotten the three questions from the Soon paper I figured the best start was to show that Soon's paper was not all that he claimed it was. Thus I evaded nothing! Although I do notice that you do love to get the little debating jabs in!

However since you asked directly I will be pleased to answer them.

1) There was a period of warming during the time of the Medieval Warming Period. I believe that it was global but that it was more predominant in some areas such as Europe. That could be somewhat due to our culture's Euro-centric history. However I do not believe that the MWP was as warm as current temperatures.

2) There is no question that there is was a Little Ice Age. The best climate reconstruction that I have come across is a look at Europe based on a 1/2 degree grid (published last year but the name escapes me, I can dig it up if anyone is interested). I was amazed that they could get that fine resolution but they used historical records as well as proxies. However it was only for the last 500 years. They were able to show the LIA on both yearly and how it effected the seasons.

3) Yes and No. I believe that the MWP may well be warmer than the early part of the 20th century, roughly on par with the average temperature of the 20th century and slightly cooler than the recent decades (say 1985 onwards).

In regards to looking for papers that show cooling during the MWP, I don't know of any offhand, but quoting from Cioccale "In the first part of the present millennium, between 1100 and 1400 AD, sometimes called the Medieval Warm Period, the global temperatures rose around 0.3C in comparison to the norm of reference, the year 1900 (Riccardi, 1995)." Of course the current temperature is about 0.5 C warmer than it was in 1900 so that puts the MWP cooler than current times.