With the growth of interest in global warming in the 1980s came renewed interest in the past temperature record as well as the question of whether past times had been warmer or colder than "present". However, available records were then few. In Chapter 7 "Observed Climate Variations and Change", the Executive Summary on page 199 noted that palaeo-climatic evidence indicated surface temperature "fluctuations including the Holocene Optimum around 5,000-6,000 years ago, the shorter Medieval Warm Period around 1000 AD (which may not have been global) and the Little Ice Age which ended only in the middle to late nineteenth century. Details are often poorly known because palaeo-climatic data are frequently sparse."