While the Little Ice Age is called "regional" by one scientist in the BBC report and basically a wash temperature wise, there is a tremendous amount of peer reviewed data that refutes that notion. It's pretty obvious the period was global. I'm not sure how anyone could ignore it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Asia
In China, warm-weather crops, such as oranges, were abandoned in Jiangxi Province, where they had been grown for centuries.[41] Also, two periods of most frequent typhoon strikes in Guangdong coincide with two of the coldest and driest periods in northern and central China (AD 1660-1680, 1850–1880).[42]
Mesoamerica
An analysis of several proxies undertaken in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, linked by its authors to Mayan and Aztec chronicles relating periods of cold and drought, supports the existence of the Little Ice Age in the region.[43]
Southern Hemisphere
Since the discovery of the Little Ice Age, there have been doubts about whether it was a global phenomenon or a cold spell restricted to the Northern Hemisphere. In recent years, several scientific works have pointed out the existence of cold spells and climate changes in areas of the Southern Hemisphere and their correlation to the Little Ice Age.
Africa
In Southern Africa, sediment cores retrieved from Lake Malawi show colder conditions between 1570 and 1820, suggesting the Lake Malawi records "further support, and extend, the global expanse of the Little Ice Age."[44]
A novel 3,000-year temperature reconstruction method based on the rate of stalagmite growth in a cold cave in South Africa suggests a cold period from 1500 to 1800 "characterizing the South African Little Ice age."[45]
In Ethiopia and Mauritania, permanent snow was reported on mountain peaks at levels where it does not occur today.[41] Timbuktu, an important city on the trans-Saharan caravan route, was flooded at least 13 times by the Niger River; there are no records of similar flooding before or since.[41]
Antarctica
Kreutz et al. (1997) compared results from studies of West Antarctic ice cores with the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) and suggested a synchronous global Little Ice Age.[46] An ocean sediment core from the eastern Bransfield Basin in the Antarctic Peninsula shows centennial events that the authors link to the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period.[47] The authors note "other unexplained climatic events comparable in duration and amplitude to the LIA and MWP events also appear."
CO2 mixing ratios at Law Dome
The Siple Dome (SD) has a climate event with an onset time that is coincident with that of the LIA in the North Atlantic based on a correlation with the GISP2 record. This event is the most dramatic climate event seen in the SD Holocene glaciochemical record.[48] The Siple Dome ice core also contained its highest rate of melt layers (up to 8%) between 1550 and 1700, most likely because of warm summers during the LIA.[49]
Law Dome ice cores show lower levels of CO2 mixing ratios during 1550–1800 AD, leading investigators Etheridge and Steele to conjecture "probably as a result of colder global climate."[50]
Sediment cores in Bransfield Basin, Antarctic Peninsula, have neoglacial indicators by diatom and sea-ice taxa variations during the period of the LIA.[51]
The MES stable isotope record suggests that the Ross Sea region experienced 1.6 ± 1.4 °C cooler average temperatures during the LIA in comparison to the last 150 yr [52]
Australia
There is limited evidence about conditions in Australia, though lake records in Victoria suggest that conditions, at least in the south of the state, were wet and/or unusually cool. In the north of the continent, the limited evidence suggests fairly dry conditions, while coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef show similar rainfall as today but with less variability. A study that analyzed isotopes in Great Barrier Reef corals suggested that increased water vapor transport from southern tropical oceans to the poles contributed to the LIA.[53] Borehole reconstructions from Australia suggest that, over the last 500 years, the seventeenth century was the coldest in that continent, although the borehole temperature reconstruction method does not show good agreement between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.[54]
Pacific Islands
Sea-level data for the Pacific Islands suggest that sea level in the region fell, possibly in two stages, between AD 1270 and 1475. This was associated with a 1.5 °C fall in temperature (determined from oxygen-isotope analysis) and an observed increase in El Niño frequency.[55]
New Zealand
On the west coast of the Southern Alps of New Zealand, the Franz Josef glacier advanced rapidly during the Little Ice Age, reaching its maximum extent in the early eighteenth century, in one of the few places where a glacier thrust into a rain forest.[33] Based on dating of a yellow-green lichen of the Rhizocarpon subgenus, the Mueller Glacier, on the eastern flank of the Southern Alps within Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park, is considered to have been at its maximum extent between 1725 and 1730.[56]
South America
Tree-ring data from Patagonia show cold episodes between 1270 and 1380 and from 1520 to 1670, periods contemporary with LIA events in the Northern Hemisphere.[57][58] Eight sediment cores taken from Puyehue Lake have been interpreted as showing a humid period from 1470 to 1700, which the authors describe as a regional marker of LIA onset.[59] A 2009 paper details cooler and wetter conditions in southeastern South America between 1550 and 1800 AD, citing evidence obtained via several proxies and models.[60]
18O records from three Andean ice cores show a cool period from 1600-1800 [61]
Although it only provides anecdotal evidence, in 1675, the Spanish explorer Antonio de Vea entered San Rafael Lagoon through Río Témpanos (Spanish for "Ice Floe River") without mentioning any ice floe and stated that the San Rafael Glacier did not reach far into the lagoon. In 1766, another expedition noticed that the glacier did reach the lagoon and calved into large icebergs. Hans Steffen visited the area in 1898, noticing that the glacier penetrated far into the lagoon. Such historical records indicate a general cooling in the area between 1675 and 1898, and "The recognition of the LIA in northern Patagonia, through the use of documentary sources, provides important, independent evidence for the occurrence of this phenomenon in the region."[62] As of 2001, the border of the glacier has significantly retreated compared to the borders of 1675.[62]