They've Done It! They've Eliminated The Medieval Warm Period

A point raised by global warming skeptics again and again is AGW Theory's apparent inability to explain the Medieval Climate Optimum, a time of unusually warm climate in the North Atlantic region, lasting from about the tenth century to about the fourteenth century. One of the graphics that frequently turns up in the denialist "Litterature" is from Climate Change Record in Subsurface Temperatures: A Global Perspective (Science 9 October 1998: 279-281) by Henry N. Pollack, Shaopeng Huang, Po-Yu Shen.

Look back about 800-1,000 before present. Pretty warm, right? Way warmer than today. Except that Pollack, Huang, and Shen apparently got a little bit sloppy in labelling their figure. The "0" or present above actually represents about 1900. In their new paper they provide an updated figure:

Here "0.0" stands for (roughly) the present, and temperatures, represented by the line at right, are clearly higher than during the MWP. In fact, the graph resembles Mann's Hockey Stick.

But, as a special bonus, it isn't. It is derived from a seperate line of evidence--specifically, from the drilling of bore-holes.

H/T Stoat.