Up-to-Date on Climate Change

Here are some notes related to climate change. I have have rechecked or updated these notes since I made them, but they are the best I have here and now:

• World temperatures rose a bit the 1400s and then dropped into the "Little Ice Age" beginning in the 1500s.
• In the 1500s sea levels were higher than they are now.
• Looking at fairly recent world temperatures, it looks as though they last peaked in about 1000 BC.
• Those interested in global temperatures tend to think in geological time.
• What's geological time?
• How do 'experts' take the temperature of the world?
• How do sea levels move up and down in relation to average temperatures?
• What were the average global temperatures in 500 BC, 1100 AD, 1400?
• The slide into our most recent drop in world temperatures lasted for about 100 years from 1500 to 1600.
• Right now, geologically speaking, it looks as though the earth has entered on of the warmest periods in the last 400,000 years.
• The last time average global temperature was as high as it is now may well have been 125,000 years ago.
• The last temperature low was about 21,000 years ago.
• What's a temperature low?
• There are a significant number of good climatologists who see a general warming trend from about 16,000 years ago.
• What is  significant number?
• How do you recognize a good climatologist?
• I got to thinking tat the earth has been on a general cooling trend for the last 350,000 years.
• Does that mean that I should forget about a warming earth?
• I'm gong to get my cooler started this month.
• Children of today may love to see strong evidence that the earth has been on a cooling trend for 4,000,000 years.
• They may be pleased that their is fair evidence that the earth has been in a cooling trend for 60,000,000 years.
• What is strong evidence?
• What is fair evidence?
• What is the evidence?
• In the larger picture, global warming looks like a small blip.
• How well a human may live through a geological blip may be worthy of our attention.
• As you educate me a bit here, I'll pass on what I learn.

Hopewell Exchange System

American Indians had peaceful interaction spheres among a variety of peoples going back as far as perhaps 8000 BC.
In this little post I intend to say  a bit  about  trade spheres centered on the Mississippi River and relative to peoples called Mound Builders.
The earliest European visitors and explorers of what is now the US found the ones extent when they arrived, notable. By that time the Indian trade systems were far below their peak. Still, before the end if the 1500s the Spanish had begun to write of them. Before the end of the 1600s the French were participating in them. Even though by then many of the Indians' mounds and earthworks were already grown-over. By the 1700s, the English were finding the Indians a bit degenerate, but  still worthy of manipulation. By the time Americans got to the upper Mississippi in the early 1800s a great many of them thought the Indians were worthless, incapable of mound or earthwork building. Few Americans, even intelligent and imaginative ones, saw any Indians as capable of managing long range interaction spheres.
Still, it was those same Americans who began looking into what some now call the Hopewell Culture.

I intend to write more of these things a later date. I look forward to your comments.