I've been looking at the work of Dr. Michael Mann and his team on the "hockey stick" reconstructions — they show a relatively stable global temperature over the past 2,000 years, with a sharp rise in the 20th century. The long-term cooling narrative doesn't hold up when you look at the full instrumental record and well-dated proxy data. The real story is that the past few thousand years have been relatively warm compared to glacial periods, but not necessarily cooling. The key is context — the Holocene was a period of overall warming, not cooling.