The light pink areas represent large geographical areas where the past Arctic climate, over the last 3,000 to 9,000 years, was warmer than today's.
Recently, 'C3' posted an article regarding 15 studies that determined the Medieval Arctic warming was greater than the current warming.
In addition, the adjacent bottom graphic depicts both past and modern tree lines and permafrost boundaries. This inconvenient empirical evidence confirms that in the past trees were able to grow farther north (due to a warmer northern climate) than our modern period; also, today's permafrost boundary stretches farther south due to a modern climate that is cooler.
Despite this preponderance of empirical evidence and multiple peer reviewed studies about the present and past Arctic climate, a new moss (lichen) study by Miller et al. 2013 makes a bogus claim that today's Arctic temperatures are warmer than the past 44,000 to 120,000 years.
This bogus claim has all sorts of scientific lameness, falsehoods and wild misrepresentations associated with it, as described by experts here, here, here and here.
The criticisms of this study are extensive. But the obvious criticism of blatant cherry-picking is indisputable. As one expert pointed out, this research focused on just four moss sample sites on Baffin Island and ignored the island's 135 other moss sites' samples that completely discredit the bogus "warmer than the last 44,000 to 120,000 years" claim.
As this latest study's bogus science affirms, anti-science cherry-picking remains alive and well in "scientific" circles pushing the discredited catastrophic global warming hypothesis. Just another example of 'the ends justify the means' style of agenda-science.
And BTW, the top graphic does not include the recent Baffin Island icecap study and another Island study using lake sediment cores, which both confirm that the modern Arctic temps are cooler than the past.
Additional climate-history and peer-reviewed articles.