new and 'green' land), etc. All that is too imprecise to infer a mean seasonal or annual temperature for whole Greenland, and of course for the whole Arctic circle (recall that we are speaking of sea-ice extent, not the Southern coast of Greenland). Anyway, it seems that Europe, and particularly Northern Europe, have known warm summer conditions one millenia ago. For example this work of Goosse et el 2006 ('al' including M. Mann) : 'Proxy records and results of a three dimensional climate model show that European summer temperatures roughly a millennium ago were comparable to those of the last 25 years of the 20th century, supporting the existence of a summer "Medieval Warm Period" in Europe.' Nope , the 1500 year (+/- 500 years!) only holds in ice cores from the Northern Hemisphere, while the opposite pattern is seen in the Southern Hemisphere. In other words, it's a polar see-saw, not global warming. They're called Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Today, both hemispheres are warming. Lars #19, I'd be very careful about quoting events from Landnamabok or other Icelandic sagas as if they are perfect historical records. Undoubtedly they often contain a grain of truth, and many events, such as the settlement of Greenland clearly happened much as weere told, but individual events may have some storytelling alteration. Add to that, in this case, the story was written down a century after it was supposed to have happened. Fancy trusting exactly what happened in a single event to your great-great-grandfather around the