Editing Little Ice Age (section)

==Areas involved==
The [[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]] [[IPCC Third Assessment Report|Third Assessment Report]] (TAR) of 2001 described the areas that were affected:

{{blockquote|Evidence from mountain glaciers does suggest increased glaciation in a number of widely spread regions outside Europe prior to the twentieth century, including Alaska, New Zealand and [[Patagonia]]. However, the timing of maximum glacial advances in these regions differs considerably, suggesting that they may represent largely independent regional [[Climate variability and change|climate changes]], not a globally-synchronous increased glaciation. Thus current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this interval, and the conventional terms of "Little Ice Age" and "[[Medieval Warm Period]]" appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries.&nbsp;... [Viewed] hemispherically, the "Little Ice Age" can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C relative to late twentieth century levels.<ref name="Was there a 'Little Ice Age' and a 'Medieval Warm Period'?"/>}}

The [[IPCC Fourth Assessment Report]] (AR4) of 2007 discusses more recent research and gives particular attention to the Medieval Warm Period:

{{quote|...&nbsp;when viewed together, the currently available reconstructions indicate generally greater variability in centennial time scale trends over the last [[millennium|1 kyr]] than was apparent in the TAR.&nbsp;... The result is a picture of relatively cool conditions in the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries and warmth in the eleventh and early fifteenth centuries, but the warmest conditions are apparent in the twentieth century. Given that the confidence levels surrounding all of the reconstructions are wide, virtually all reconstructions are effectively encompassed within the uncertainty previously indicated in the TAR. The major differences between the various proxy reconstructions relate to the magnitude of past cool excursions, principally during the twelfth to fourteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.<ref name="AR4 2k years">{{Cite web |date=2007 |title=6.6 The Last 2,000 Years – AR4 WGI Chapter 6: Palaeoclimate |url=https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6s6-6.html |access-date=2023-12-17 |publisher=Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change}}</ref>}}