 Despite these challenges, climate scientists have produced paleoclimatic reconstructions covering various regions, time periods and climate-related variables, including temperature, precipitation, streamflow, vegetation and more. Temperature reconstructions in particular have been a source of controversy (see  Section 5.3),  in part because they underwrite conclusions like this one, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report: the period 1983–2012 was very likely (i.e., probability &gt;0.95) the warmest 30-year period of the last 800 years (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2013: 386). Vezér (2016a) suggests that inferences to such conclusions can be characterized as a form of variety-of-evidence reasoning, insofar as they involve multiple temperature reconstructions informed by different proxies, methodological assumptions and statistical techniques (see also Oreskes 2007).