Why is it?
The project's reason for being begins with the claim of many scientists - and essentially all of the world's radical environmentalists - that earth's near-surface air temperature over the last two decades of the 20th century (and continuing to the present) was higher than it has been during any similar period of the past millennium or more.  This claim is of utmost importance to these climate alarmists; for it allows them to further claim there is something unnatural about recent and possibly ongoing warming, which allows them to claim that the warming has its origins in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, which allows them to claim that if humanity will abandon the burning of fossil fuels, we can slow and ultimately stop the warming of the modern era and thereby save the planet's fragile ecosystems from being destroyed by catastrophic climate changes that they claim will otherwise drive a goodly percentage of earth's plants and animals to extinction.  Believing all of these claims to be false, we felt that disproving the first of them was the best way of refuting all the rest, or at least making them moot.  The course of action we therefore take in this endeavor is to demonstrate that approximately one thousand years ago, when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was approximately 25% lower than it is currently, earth's near-surface air temperature was equally as warm as, or even warmer than, it is today, demonstrating that today's temperatures are not unnatural and need not be due to the historical rise in the air's CO2 content.  Indeed, these and other data covering a much longer timespan suggest that a more logical cause of our present warmth is the recurrence of whatever cyclical phenomenon produced the higher temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period.

How is the project conducted?
As we discover new peer-reviewed scientific journal articles pertaining to the Medieval Warm Period, we briefly describe their most pertinent findings in the Study Descriptions and Results section of the project.  The locations of all such studies are then plotted on a map of the globe, and the intervals of time they associate with the Medieval Warm Period are incorporated into a graph of the frequency distribution of all such time intervals, which is located just beneath the map in the project's Interactive Map and Time Domain Plot feature.  In extremely rare cases where only a single year is specified for the MWP, we assign it a 100-year timespan centered on the year reported by the study's authors.  For studies that allow the determination of an actual temperature difference between the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Current Warm Period (CWP), this number is incorporated into the frequency distribution of all such differentials in the project's MWP-CWP Quantitative Temperature Differentials section.  For studies that allow only a qualitative determination of the temperature difference between the MWP and CWP to be made, results are presented in the project's MWP-CWP Qualitative Temperature Differentials section.  Last of all, the names of all scientists and research institutions associated with the MWP Project studies we cite are included in our List of Scientists Whose Work We Cite and List of Research Institutions Associated With the Work We Cite.

When will the project end?
We believe there are enough pertinent studies already published, in the pipeline to be published, currently in progress and yet to be conceived to enable us to continue to add to the project on a weekly basis for a long enough time to truly convince most rational people that the Medieval Warm Period was indeed both longer and warmer than the portion of the Current Warm Period experienced to date.  When this degree of realization occurs, it will undercut the only foundation in real-world data upon which the world's climate alarmists are able to build an edifice to support their many doom-and-gloom predictions of catastrophic global warming and biospheric breakdown based on theoretical computer-based and scenario-driven simulations.  Only at that time, when we have achieved our ultimate goal, will the project end.

How can you help?
You can help by alerting us to new (and old) research papers documenting the Medieval Warm Period that have not yet been posted on our website.  When doing so, please send us a copy of the paper either by email (preferably in pdf format), fax or by post.  Our contact information can be found here.