"An international team that includes scientists from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has published a reconstruction of the climate in northern Europe over the last 2,000 years based on the information provided by tree-rings... The researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling... Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun."

-- Science Daily