Anyone who takes global warming as anything more than an attempt to mobilize all idiots in the world into a leftist monoworld camp is for the large part deluded.  I will enjoy the benefits of slight warming until nature interposes its countermeasure.  I rarely give the pronouncements weight or validity and find them boring with all their statistical data and presumptions.  If you enjoy that type of thing, there is an article at the Crusader website:
 
http://lighthorse.blogspot.com/
 
It takes a contra position and is supported with data.
 
 

Surely the Sumerians, Assyrians, Aegyptians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks and Mesoamericans (Inca, Mayans, Aztecs), endured very hot conditions; even native Iranians develop nose bleeds during the summer. The aforementioned civilizations suffered both humid heat, due to several's proximity to water, and the dry heat found only inland. How the West and South Africans had it "worse" or did not embrace the agrarian revolution are still unanswered. While the Mesoamericans were conquered by the Europeans, they had still built a respectable civilization in a climate that is blamed constantly for laziness...Nor did the Boer farmers, European landowners and adventurers, colonial states, or Afrikaaners succumb to this numbing heat...

I'm afraid that the Aegyptian Empire, though geographically located in Northeastern Africa, was a Mediterranean civilization. Like the Phoenicians and Moors,  the Aegyptians were most likely of Semitic origin; even the Aethiopians and Nubians are majorily Caucasoid and derived their civilizations from contact with the Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula. By Africans I am referring to West Africans (Negroids) and Sub-Saharan Africans (Capoids), both of which are advancing Afrocentrist claims to Caucasoid historical communities. In fact, despite relatively recent mixing, North Africans continue to be Caucasian, specifically Semitic (Arab), which is the reason why Egypt and Libya are included in "the Middle East."

"why wasn't African civilization more advanced than Europe's?"

- In Greenland, the weather was too cold. The Eskimos did not have any papyrus to write things down, and most of their time went into seal hunting.

- In Africa, life is easier. They don't have to build igloos. They don't need to work so much. But, the weather is somewhat too hot to go about building great civilizations.

- In Europe, the weather is just right.

If global warming accelerates, Africa will do even worse than now, but the Eskimos may catch up with European civilization.

Kap. Andre: "why wasn't African civilization more advanced than Europe's?"

It was. Especially for a few thousand years under the Pharoahs.

The shores of the Mediterranean can be called a major cradle of civilization*, and were home to many of antiquity's great empires and polities. Why? Firstly, the advent of agriculture occurred in nearby Mesopotamia; secondly, the Mediterranean came to be encircled by natural breadbaskets such as Sicily and the Italian plains, and man-made ones such as the Nile River delta. Political and military power rests upon an economic base: in the ancient world, this was farming. Due to natural climatic conditions, it was almost impossible to have crop surpluses in Northern Europe, which explains why aside from animal husbandry, the Germanic tribes were largely nomadic. In fact, only advanced techniques enabled nortern temperate areas to become breadbaskets i.e. Poland, the Ukraine, Germany, Canada, the United States.
So given their proximity to Mesopotamia, the commercial links, and their advantage in climate, why wasn't African civilization more advanced than Europe's?

...is how I would characterize the modern debate on global climate change. Long before Al Gore's ravings of impending doom, Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote the Ingenuity Gap, an interesting primer on the challenges facing the world and possible solutions to them. He noted that while the Earth naturally goes through warming and cooling cycles, affecting flora, fauna, and ocean swelling, there can be no question that industrialization is having a negative impact on these cycles, one whose effects are still unknown, but that will inevitably result in humans having to take responsibility for maintaining the global climatic system. Thus, while we cannot attribute Hurricane Katrina to SUVs, it is in our interests to interfere with nature as little as possible and to engage in environmental stewardship as much as possible.

This fact has been erased out of the left and green history books. Who wants to put his/her future in their hands?

Industrialisation, commercial traffic, guildes, deforestation, wars, daily cooking...you name it, they'll find a reason. Perhaps they can date back Capitalism to the 10th century and prove its evilness...ahuh :-)

Ritvars, if you click on the link that says "global warming 1300 years ago" you will read a discussion of the Roman Warming from around 200 B.C. to 600 A.D.
I suspect we are seeing this dynamic: right wingers really and truly feel threatened by Muslim radicalism. They are very sensitive to the deaths (some of them quite nasty) in 9/11, Beslan, and on and on.
On the other hand, left wingers believe the emphasis on terrorism is simply a scare tactic to gain political support. So they have come up with a scare tactic of their own. Some politicized scientists have signed on to the propaganda campaign. Others have been intimidated and bullied into silence.

“We are currently experiencing the warmest period in the Alpine region in 1,300 years,” Reinhard Boehm, a climatologist at Austria's Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics said. Boehm said the current warm period in the Alpine region began in the 1980s, noting that a similar warming occurred in the 10th and 12th centuries.
I'd say 10th-12th century isn't quite 1300 years ago.

1300 years ago Islam started their conquest. And in the midst of this new global warming they are commencing their conquest!
hehehe, JK

"...leads to one question, what caused the global warming 1,300 years ago?"
 
...George W. Bush, evidently!

Didn't you know that William the Conqueror and its contemporaries drove SUVs?