A New Climate History for Europe

A team of European researchers has just released this graph of Europe's climate history over the past 2000 years, claiming that it is the most accurate yet.

One interesting thing about this graph is that it is really quite smooth; the largest variations are less than 1 degree Celsius from the mean. Look at the bars in the background, though, which represent actual data points with their error bars, and you see that there is a lot more variation there. The method used in this study results in a lot of averaging, and some places in Europe no doubt experienced more extreme changes.