The last hundred years: Focus on two things in particular:

1. What is the evidence that the planet has warmed significantly in the last century?
2. What is the evidence that human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible?

The last thousand years: This gets into some very tricky and controversial material that was central to the infamous “climategate” scandal in 2009. I will not spend a huge amount of time on this, but I will attempt to explain in class what the controversy was about and why it isn’t nearly as big a deal as the media have made it out to be.

Some things to understand about the past millennium are:

• What is a proxy for ancient temperatures? What are examples of commonly used proxies?
• What problems do scientists face trying to get past temperatures from proxies?
• What were the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age? Roughly when did they happen? What are the big questions scientists have about them?