Rediscovering a little ice age

Doug Hoffman:

In the year 536 AD the sun dimmed, and the gloom lasted for more than an entire year. There were frosts and snows in the middle of summer and observers reported that winter never really ended. The sudden shift in climate lead to famine, plague and the fall of empires. What was worse, that year was only the beginning of a shift in climate that brought misery to the entire Northern Hemisphere for more than a century. Yet this well documented period of global cooling was smoothed away by climate change alarmists in works of fabricated data like the infamous “hockey stick” tree ring history. A new analysis has rediscovered this dark period in recent human history, fittingly made possible by new tree-ring measurements from the Altai mountains in Russia. The results help complete a climatological history stretching back 2,500 years. Climate history is a pesky thing, it just won't go away and can't be changed to fit some scientists pet theories.

Most people have heard of the Little Ice Age, the prolonged period of cold weather that afflicted the world for centuries and didn't end until just prior to the American Civil War. Many scientists have been speculating that the marked lack of solar activity may indicate the start of a new period of global cooling. Interestingly, this period that preceded the Medieval Warm Period has been all but ignored by the more vocal proponents of global warming, many publishing charts that show no sign of this dramatic and desperate time in human history. Feats of climatic legerdemain not withstanding, scientists have documented this period before, starting with ice core data.
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The sun began to be darkened by day and the moon by night, while the ocean was tumultuous with spray from the 24th of March in this year till the 24th of June in the following year… And, as the winter was a severe one, so much so that from the large and unwonted quantity of snow the birds perished… there was distress… among men… from the evil things.

The above was recorded by Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea, while traveling in Italy around 536 AD. But Italy was not the only land feeling the freeze. From Italy to Ireland, from China to Central America, the year 536 was the beginning of a century-long cold period that spelled misery for most of mankind. How bad was it? The lead author put it this way: “This was the most dramatic cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the past 2,000 years.”
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It seems pretty clear that solar activity, or lack thereof, had a lot to do with the cold period.  I think many of the current climate studies ignore this period because it does not fit their models.