Areas involved

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report (TAR) of 2001
described the areas that were affected:

Evidence from mountain glaciers does suggest increased glaciation in a number of widely spread
regions outside Europe prior to the twentieth century, including Alaska, New Zealand and
Patagonia. However, the timing of maximum glacial advances in these regions differs
considerably, suggesting that they may represent largely independent regional climate changes,
not a globally-synchronous increased glaciation. Thus current evidence does not support globally
synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this interval, and the conventional terms
of "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period" appear to have limited utility in describing
trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries.... [Viewed]
hemispherically, the "Little Ice Age" can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern
Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C relative to late twentieth century levels.[3]

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of 2007 discusses more recent research and gives
particular attention to the Medieval Warm Period:

...when viewed together, the currently available reconstructions indicate generally greater
variability in centennial time scale trends over the last 1 kyr than was apparent in the TAR.... The
result is a picture of relatively cool conditions in the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries
and warmth in the eleventh and early fifteenth centuries, but the warmest conditions are apparent
in the twentieth century. Given that the confidence levels surrounding all of the reconstructions
are wide, virtually all reconstructions are effectively encompassed within the uncertainty
previously indicated in the TAR. The major differences between the various proxy
reconstructions relate to the magnitude of past cool excursions, principally during the twelfth to
fourteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.[13]

Dating

The last written records of the Norse Greenlanders are from a 1408 marriage at Hvalsey Church, which is
now the best-preserved Norse ruin.

There is no consensus on when the Little Ice Age began,[14][15] but a series of events before the
known climatic minima have often been referenced. In the 13th century, pack ice began
advancing southwards in the North Atlantic, as did glaciers in Greenland. Anecdotal evidence
suggests expanding glaciers almost worldwide. Based on radiocarbon dating of roughly 150
samples of dead plant material with roots intact that were collected from beneath ice caps on
Baffin Island and Iceland, Miller et al. (2012)[8] state that cold summers and ice growth began
abruptly between 1275 and 1300, followed by "a substantial intensification" from 1430 to 1455.
[8]

In contrast, a climate reconstruction based on glacial length[16][17] shows no great variation from
1600 to 1850 but a strong retreat thereafter.

Therefore, any of several dates ranging over 400 years may indicate the beginning of the Little
Ice Age:

 1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow, a cold period that was possibly triggered or
enhanced by the massive eruption of Samalas volcano in 1257[18] and the associated volcanic
winter.
 1275 to 1300 for when the radiocarbon dating of plants shows that they were killed by
glaciation
 1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
 1315 for when rains and the Great Famine of 1315–1317 occurred