Record warmth in Europe

Fake snow in Alps, Moscow blooms: green Christmas?�|�Tech&Sci�|�Science�|�Reuters.com:
"One historian says that Europe has just had its warmest autumn in 500 years. Experts say the mildness might be just a natural freak but many suspect it may be linked to greenhouse gases caused by human burning of fossil fuels."

Stories like this always crack me up. The paragraph quoted above - number three in the story - proposes anthropogenic global warming caused by burning fossil fuels and the concomitant greenhouse gases as a reason for the warmest autumn in 500 years in Europe.

No other reason is proposed with any conviction - "just a natural freak" is hardly a seriously intended alternative. Moreover, no evidence is given regarding high temperatures anywhere else; and we are left to wonder what explanation would be offered for that warm autumn 500 years ago.

If you are cursed with even a little knowledge of climate history, you will recall that fully a thousand years ago there was a period called the Midieval Climate Optimum - at that time, Vikings colonized Greenland where they raised cattle and grew wheat and made at least some forays into what we now call the Canadian Maritimes and New England. The global warming gloom and doomers never bother to explain how that warm period of two to three centuries was caused nor why it was not accompanied by all the horrors they predict for us if temperatures return to that level in our own century.