Reversing Global Warming, part two

This is part two of a series of blog posts on reversing global warming. In the first I proposed trying iron dust on the oceans to cause phytoplankton blooms that would eliminate atmospheric CO2, which would (in theory) reduce global warming. The second method would be to cut down on heating from the Sun.

It is obvious that reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth would lower the temperature of the Earth. My suggestion is not new. Others have suggested shielding the Earth from the Sun, and some have made detailed plans. Basically the shield need not be fancy, and it could be made largely of space junk and rocks. There are some amazingly expensive proposals that have been made. The first proposal linked below would cost only about 350 Trillion dollars; apparently the one who dreamed it up just wanted to be on record as having made such a proposal. The second one isn’t as expensive, and some of the ideas are quite reasonable.

The second proposal might be affordable, and it probably would work quite nicely. It proposes putting a dust cloud around the Earth by turning some asteroids in dust and persuading the dust to flow in the right pattern. Moving the asteroid into a suitable orbit before turning it to dust would work nicely. The proposal would start with a near Earth asteroid, and crush much of that. Then a mass driver would be used to spread the dust. And the remains of the asteroid would become another satellite that would hold the dust in place as the moons of Saturn help to keep the rings in place.

The third proposal has some good and some bad features. It wouldn’t cost all that much. The website doesn’t include a cost estimate, but it would be similar to the cost of a Mars ship. One of the bad points is that a rather large asteroid would be put into a fairly close Earth orbit. A small mistake in placement could result in a large mass dropping to Earth. That might cut down on solar radiation by putting up large clouds of dust from Earth. It might also kill many people, etc.  

I think that the easiest way to block sunlight would be something like a window blind in geosynchronous orbit. The blind need not be solid, and it would certainly have to be flexible. It could be made from space junk and material from near Earth asteroids. The exact material would depend on what was available out there, but one side would have to ne reflective. If it weren’t reflective, then it would become rather hot, because there would be nothing to conduct the heat away, so it would have to radiate away, and that might not be reliable. It might also be possible to convert the heat to electricity. There already are many things in geosynchronous orbit, so we would have to put this at a different distance, but it could house communications and other facilities; it would even be possible to put a few hotels along the blind to help to defray the cats of construction, and the NSA would love to have it as a listening post.

The concept is simple, but estimating the cost will have to wait until we decide on the placement and size of the shield. The location will be important, because there are so many things in orbit already, and we would have to avoid interfering with those. When the shield will be completed, it can replace many satellites, but until then it will have to be out of the way. Another consideration is the latitude at which it would orbit, or if it would have a sinusoidal orbit. Having it at high latitudes would block sunlight to a larger area, and that might be desirable, but the reduction in temperature would be more noticeable at lower latitudes. Its effects would be more lasting in the higher latitudes also, because the icepack and glaciers would hold the cold for a long time. That location of it would also make it more like correcting the axial tilt of the Earth. A shield just a thousand miles wide could put the entire Polar Regions into permanent darkness and cold. The only downside would be that the scientific station at the South Pole would become less useful. But all of Antarctica would become dark, so it would be less useful for all purposes.

We will have to make a decision. There is something to be said for all of the shields, but I will present other alternatives in part three.

Comments and suggestions are solicited.

First sunshield proposal

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/4839985/Scientists-to-stop-global-warming-with-100000-square-mile-sun-shade.html

Second

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/climatechanging/climatescienceinfozone/exploringourfuturechoices/3point7/3point7point1.aspx

Third

http://www.space.com/17830-asteroid-dust-geoenineering-global-warming.html

Reversing Global Warming, part one

People are always talking about the weather, but I am proposing that we do something about it. This is the first of three (or maybe more) posts about reducing reversing global warming.

People have been talking and writing about global warming since they stopped talking about the next ice age; that was around 1980. SO far it has all be words. It climate scientists are so sure that human activity has been causing a rise in temperatures, then we should correct the damage before it will be too late.

According to the climate scientists atmospheric CO2 is the thing that has caused rising temperatures, so we should bring the CO2 down to pre-industrial levels, and one method for doing that has been known since back when climate scientists were talking about the new ice age that was about to start. There were articles about how cooling started, and one of the theories was that seeding the oceans with iron would cause plankton blooms that would soak up CO2, and shrimp and other small animals would eat the plankton and multiply, thus exhaling CO2, so there would be no net change in the amount of atmospheric CO2, except for that carbon that would fall to the bottom of the ocean when the predators defecated. More recently it has been theorized that iron rich dust blown from deserts blowing into the oceans led to ice ages during the last four million years. (See link below)

People have, as the linked article states, tested part of this by spreading iron dust on the ocean. That has resulted in plankton blooms, as one would expect. But no one has dumped in enough iron to change the atmosphere at all. If the theory is correct, then a billion tons of iron dust would be enough to remove a substantial amount of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Even though a billion tons may seem like an amazingly large amount of iron, it isn’t all that much. Consider that a 10x10 steel I-beam weighs about fifty pounds per linear foot, so a billion pounds would translate to twenty million linear feet of bean, and if we cut the beam into forty foot sections, then there only be five hundred thousand beams, or the amount in a small city.

The iron would have to be ground rather finely. Single celled animals would have to eat the dust, and it would have to be light enough that it could float on a breeze. For that reason the iron would have to be ground to that small size. It wouldn’t make much difference whether the iron were pure or oxidized, so we could grind up ore very finely and use that, rather than wasting refined metal. There would be extraneous material in the ground ore, but that wouldn’t hurt, and it might help. U.S. production of iron ore is about two billion metric tons annually, so a twenty-five percent increase for two years would produce all of the iron dust we would need. If that schedule became a problem, then we could stretch production over another year or two. And, if it turned out that applications of iron dust would have to continue, it could become a permanent industry.

The actual schedule would have to be determined by experiments that have not yet been done that would show whether continued applications of iron dust were necessary and whether the applications would be continuous or periodic. Pouring on too much might just result in the extra sinking to the ocean bed.

Another thing that we don’t know is whether the iron dust causing a phytoplankton bloom causing a drop in CO2 levels would have immediate effects. As we can see from last fifteen years increases in CO2 do not cause immediate temperature rises, and the same may be true of decreases on CO2 levels. We also do not know whether the increase in animals that would eat the phytoplankton would have any effect.

It might be wise to regard the first ten years of applying iron dust to the ocean as an experiment to see whether it would be effective. An alternative theory about atmospheric CO2 and climate is that the CO2 is an effect of increasing temperatures, rather than a cause. I won’t argue this position, because we should be planning to test the theory.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128245.000-ironrich-dust-fuelled-4-million-years-of-ice-ages.html#.U5W45qyznvM

I’ll present another method next time.

Botching Executions

I just saw a news article about a botched execution in Oklahoma (link below). That is inexcusable. There are many ways to kill someone painlessly. Many people will take that story as a reason why capital punishment should be banned, but it is just an example of people not knowing what they are doing. Personally, I think there are people who have lost any right to live through their crimes, so I believe that capital punishment is appropriate in many cases.

More than two hundred years ago, M. Guillotine thought that executions were inhumane, so he built his device. It is known that when blood pressure falls drastically the brain loses consciousness instantly. That is what Guillotine knew and is why his device worked well. A heavy, sharp blade falling several feet will cut through any neck, and the person will lose consciousness before the nerve impulse can get from the cut to the brain.  There might be twitching from ganglia firing, but death would actually be within a fraction of a second. There would be no need for medical tests to determine whether the victim was dead; the head would be in a basket a few feet from the neck.

If people want to avoid the necessity of cleaning up all that bloody then there are effective and reliable chemical methods that would be painless. An overdose of heroin would take a few minutes to kill, but the person would be feeling quite nice, especially if there had been earlier, lesser doses injected to get the person into a comfortable condition.

What is with the mixtures of a variety of chemicals? One is supposed to do one thing, then another to do something else, and so on. Massive overdoses of many drugs will result in unconsciousness and death.

I realize that humans are almost as hard to kill as cockroaches, but there are many ways to quickly and painlessly kill both. If the cost is a consideration, then the guillotine would be quite cost effective. There would be a few thousand dollars for construction costs, but they wouldn’t require specially trained people, just someone who could put the neck in the slot where the blade will hit it. Using injections of heroin or barbiturates would just require someone to fill an IV bag and put a needle into a vein; it wouldn’t even need to be a clean needle.

You’d think that a country that could get people onto the Moon could kill someone quickly and painlessly. There are many other methods that I haven’t mentioned but that are more effective and faster than that collection of drugs that some states are using.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/04/30/oklahoma-tries-stanch-execution-fallout/Zkx2AlsEbesZsscblgW9CI/story.html

Federal Reserve Folly

I don't bother with conspiracy theories when I can avoid them, but today I went into a coffee place and they had a question posted by a register for a get it right and save a whole ten cents. I usually know the correct answer, and I did today. The question was "Which branch is the Federal Reserve part of?" Obviously it is part of the Administrative branch. The clerk looked at the answer, and it said that is was privately owned. I was shocked that they would have that. I thought that foolishness was straightened out years ago. But apparently there still are people who don't know that the Fed is an independent agency of the federal government.

A simple search brings up a number of results that clearly explain that the Federal Reserve System belongs to the Federal government. The Fed even turns over its profits to the Treasury Department. But I was looking for the kind of morons who think that the Fed belongs to the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Well a little farther down the page I found one (http://www.save-a-patriot.org/files/view/whofed.html) that claims that it is a collection of banks controlled by the Rothschilds, etc. Then there's this one: http://www.dailypaul.com/77899/the-p...serve-bank-are
Well, that's more than enough of that idiocy. The Federal Reserve System was established by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and amended a number of times. Those acts are incorporated in Title 12 of the U. S. Code (links below (The information at the Fed probably is easier to work with.). The Chairman of the Fed is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The Federal Reserve System was established for two purposes: for the clearing of transfers (checks, etc.) and to keep the currency stable. This was a response to the Panic of 1907 during which most of the clearing banks went belly-up, and the banking system was all but insolvent, because there was no “lender of last resort”. If you find economic systems interesting reading, then read about that panic; it was horrific. Many people don’t realize that the Fed is the main clearing bank in the U.S., because it does such a good job that money transfers are almost invisible. I would prefer if checks were still checks, but they became EFT’s (Electronic Funds Transfers) several years ago to speed the system.

The Fed hasn’t been as good at stabilizing the currency. If it did, then there would be no inflation or deflation, but there is a good reason for the lack of stability. The Treasury Department issues bonds, bills, and notes of maturities from one month to thirty years. Thirty year bonds are repaid with dollars that are worth less than half of the initial price of the bond due to inflation. Treasury saves money, and the investors got their money through the interest payments over time, so they feel that they are compensated.

I have never figured out why some people think that the Federal Reserve System is privately owned. It serves a public function, and it turns in its profits to the Treasury. It is an independent agency, but it has to be rather independent to carry out its functions. Many people (including me) disagree with how the Fed carries out some of its functions, and there probably will be more disagreements in the future, because the Fed has started regulating banks, and that may be a conflict of interest.

After a little more research I think that some people think the Fed is privately owned, because they never bothered to read the Federal Reserve Act (Title 12 of the U.S. Code). And they misunderstand the nature of the capitalization of the regional Federal Reserve Banks. Member banks are required to deposit as much as fourteen percent of their capital with the Fed, and the Fed is required to pay six percent annual interest on that money. (The Fed can and has varied the reserve requirement.) In some places that money is called “preferred stock”, because, like preferred stock, the interest is paid before other expenses, but this preferred stock does not carry any ownership interest with it, as is true of some preferred stock of businesses; this money is more of a debt obligation.

After reading the article “10 Things That Every American Should Know About the Fed” (link below) I understand that the origins of the conspiracy theories about the Fed are mostly results of ignorance, but that article had a valid point also. On the other hand, The Fed is supposed to stabilize the banking system, so it has bailed out some banks, and that can be spun so that they were helping their friends. If one holds the delusion that the Fed is privately owned, then many of its actions look different from how they look when one realizes that the Fed is an agency of the Federal government.

One of the valid complaints (complaints that I consider valid anyway) is that they have a revolving door with some of the large financial companies, so they are regulating companies that belong to their friends and that will hire them after they leave the Fed. I also disagree with the bailouts of large banks in 2008 and 2009; those companies should have been put through bankruptcy just like any other company. The excuse was that the economy would have been disrupted, but it was disrupted anyway, and it gave the appearance that the government favors large companies at the expense of small companies and individuals.

It is completely clear is that the Fed has not communicated effectively with the citizens. There is no reason why any sane person would think that the Fed is privately owned, and that fallacy should have been addressed and put to rest. Unfortunately, many of the people who think the Fed is privately owned have cognitive problems, so it may be impossible to completely end that idea.

It is my opinion that the Federal Reserve System should be different, but it isn’t easy to determine what the Fed should or should not do. For years Ron Paul tried to get a complete audit of the Fed, but that still hasn’t happened; although the Fed issues quarterly reports (link below) that give some idea of what is involved. The Fed has been assigned additional functions over the years, and not all of the functions are consistent with each other. It would be a good idea to think carefully about how the Monetary and banking systems should be organized and regulated. Someone should be trying to keep the currency stable, and someone should be regulating banks, and so on. Whether there should be one or several agencies is a question. The matter of what kind of currency and who would emit it is also a good question, and there are several valid answers.

What do you think? What should we do with the Fed? Sell it to the big banks or keep it as a government agency? Or something else?



Federal Reserve Act
http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fract.htm
Also in Title 12 U.S. Code
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/12/chapter-3

10 Things
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a...ederal-reserve

March 2014 Quarterly Report
http://www.federalreserve.gov/moneta...ort_201403.pdf

The End of Evolution

Whether one believes that evolution is factual or that everything was created on October 23, 4004 BCE is of no consequence, because there has been evolutionary change since 4004 BCE, but that may have changed within the last couple of centuries. It is possible that human evolution has been brought to a stop. I suspect that this hiatus will fail in the end, but it may have some ill effects, or this hiatus may simply turn out to be a different step in evolution. The specific matter to which I refer is modern medicine, which effectively has eliminated some of the mechanisms through which evolution had been operating.

More specifically, some people, who could not have survived because of genetically caused medical problems, are now living to become adults and sometimes passing on their genes that cause their disease. In addition to those conditions in the list below and on the linked list, many cancers are caused by genetic disorders that are triggered by other stimuli. By keeping alive people who would not be viable without major ongoing (or even constant) medical intervention and allowing some of those people to reproduce some of the results of millions of years of evolutionary improvement is being reversed.

It has been said that evolution ended when people started heating their places of habitation, but that was insignificant and other animals heat or at least insulate their places of residence. Many of the things that humans use are simply outgrowths of their evolutionary development, and the invented devices simply became additional tools for evolution. For example, humans invented cooking a long time ago. Initially cooking probably was a method for making carrion a little less likely to cause sickness, but cooking also led to the reduction in tooth size and made it more nutritious.

Cooking, building houses, mechanical transportation, and so on became tools for evolution and instruments for humans to do what they would have done anyway but a little more easily. Over the last couple million years humans have been slowly developing their tools and improving their methods for building houses. These things did not impede the biological systems, genes, etc. that are essential to evolution; they have been methods for evolution to operate or were until rather recently.

Humans had been altering their environment since the genus split from the other great apes, and humans are not the only species that alters its environment, so I don’t regard those changes as significant. Not even all medical practices do damage to the course of evolution. Chimps have been seen giving themselves medical treatments (see link below), and a variety of other animals eat foods that have specific medical benefits, but the extent of such treatments is rather limited (antibiotics and deworming mostly). Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to accept the medical industry as a natural outgrowth of the development of the human species, but I doubt the evolutionary value of treatments for various inherited genetic disorders that would cause death at an early age, if they were not treated. The outcome of such treatment is to help to perpetuate genetic characteristics that would not normally be passed on, because persons with those genes would not normally survive to reproduce. I am not suggesting eugenics, but I think that there has been too much medical care given to people who were not long for the world regardless of what might have been done for them. In addition, modern medicine has led to overpopulation.

I realize that there are people who think that the Earth could support even thirty billion people. But present evidence shows that it is difficult to have seven billion humans alive at once. The ability to produce adequate food for that many people is marginal at best, and, if the people who worry about climate change are right, then the resources to feed even the present population will not be available in the near future. A guess of how many humans the Earth could support effectively and with a safety cushion would be no more than two billion, roughly the Earth’s population in 1875. Although there were famines from time to time; there was adequate food production nearly all of the time. The places where there were famines had been developed and civilized for a long time and usually had local populations that pushed the local economy to its limit and any significant problem in food production resulted in a famine of some severity. Or famines were created by outside interference, as was the case in Ireland in the 1840’s. Famines were also created by invasions, and there have been periods of climate change in the past that led to crop failures; this happened during the period when the Little Ice Age was starting, resulting in cooler, wetter weather in some places, such as France where it cause crop failures. During the same era the American Southwest became dryer, and that led to the abandonment of the Anasazi cities.

During the period from 1725 (pop. 1 billion) to the present (pop. 7 billion) medicine has gone from unsanitary bleeding and other non-productive activities to being pretty darned advanced and effective, and I would contend that the improvements in medicine have been the principal cause for the increase in population. Infant and childhood mortality has gone from almost fifty percent to about ten percent, and people die in great numbers at ages greater than sixty now.

The term “sustainability” has become popular in the last few years, and I am proposing a way to make human life on Earth sustainable. The Green Revolution was wonderful in its way, but it wasn’t sustainable, and many of the agricultural practices and plants introduced as parts of that program have been abandoned in the last forty years. Intensive farming is not sustainable, and soil is deteriorating around the world; we have been eating that soil. The sustainable level of population probably is in the range of one to two billion. Returning population to that level quickly will be impossible, unless we do have a great pandemic, something on the scale of the Black Death of the Fourteenth Century worldwide. There isn’t a high probability of such an event, but it may happen. In the absence of such an event, or a major war, limiting the extent of medical activity would slowly reduce the population to a sustainable level.

The climate change alarmists worry about changes that may take place, but the problems that already exist are just as bad, and they are real, not theoretical. Thomas Malthus has consistently been shown wrong since he first came up with his theory (1798), and humanity may dodge the bullet again, and it is conceivable that something unexpected will come along, but animal populations are well known to crash when population density reaches a level that is unsustainable, and the crashes take a variety of forms from pandemics to mass migrations to the occasional mass insanity. We do not have the necessary perspective to be able to see whether there are effects at present that may be viewed as part of a population crash in several hundred years, after population has stabilized at one and a half billion.

Careful consideration as to what medical procedures ought to be used to keep who alive will almost certainly take place over the next few hundred years. We can expect that reasonable and valid decisions will eventually be made, and it is possible that repairing genes that produce disorders may become routine, not may but almost certainly will become routine, but until then we will be retaining genetic code that leads to the devolution of the human species, unless we make some hard and cruel decisions soon. If we don’t make those decisions, then there may not be people who will be capable in the future.

While I do favor limiting the use of medical procedures, I have a distinct feeling that this post will look completely silly in a couple hundred years, or sooner, because we will have simple and easy genetic repair, interstellar travel, and a few other of those things that futurists have predicted, but the “Singularity” will never happen. I am working on another post regarding probability; that doesn’t apply well to pure speculation, but it suggests that past records are the only standard that we can quantify with much confidence. And that suggests that humanity will continue to make Thomas Malthus wrong.


Links
Why Chimps Eat Dead Wood and Other Plants
http://news.discovery.com/animals/wh...ith-111129.htm
Other animals taking natural medicines
http://www.cracked.com/article_19686...-medicine.html

List of Genetic disorders
http://www.genome.gov/10001204
More common disorders
22q11.2 deletion syndrome
Angelman syndrome
Canavan disease
Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease
Color blindness
Cri du chat
Cystic fibrosis
Down syndrome
Duchenne muscular dystrophy
Haemochromatosis
Haemophilia
Klinefelter syndrome
Neurofibromatosis
Phenylketonuria
Polycystic kidney disease
Prader–Willi syndrome
Sickle-cell disease
Tay–Sachs disease
Turner syndrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders
The End of Evolution
http://vega.org.uk/video/programme/13

Reversing the North Caucasian Diaspora

The current unpleasantness in Ukraine has caught my attention to a slight degree, especially in light of the Winter Olympics having been held nearby. The location of the Olympics gave me a hint as to the best way to handle the matter. As I am sure you know, Sochi was the principal city of Circassia before the Russians conquered that country to go along with the rest of their conquests South and East of Russia proper. I can understand the conquest of the Crimean Peninsula, which the Russians took over in the 1700's. And we all know that the origin of Russia was in Kiev, when the position of Grand Duke was given to Rurik in 862 CE. What is called Russia these days was just a lightly populated wilderness mostly populated by Finns (or a related people) back when Kiev was the founding city of Russia.

Since Russia is big on putting things that way they should be, instead of leaving things as they are, we should do that with a few parts of the Russian empire. Let's start by giving the North Caucus independence again. Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Circassia, Dagestan, and so on were only conquered in the 18th and 19th centuries; the Caucasian War only ended in 1864, when the Circassians were finally defeated after resisting Russian aggression for more than a century and never having accepted defeat. We can let the Cossacks have the Southern stretch on Russia; they've been the ones living there for several hundred years now, since the Mongols left, and the boundary between the Cossacks and the Circassians is still the Kuban River well up into the interior, and to the East the boundary between Russia and Dagestan and Chechnya and Ingushetia is the Terek River.

The people of the North Caucasus are worthy of consideration, and they have recent and current grievances against the Russians. If only one of the nations there were rebelling, then we could call them savages, and that’s how the Russians tried to paint the Chechens, but the Circassians have a long history of being cultured and respectable people, and the Circassian women are said to be the most beautiful in the world. But the Russians made war against women and children throughout the North Caucasus but especially in Circassia.

It is easy to find ancient examples of ethnic cleansing, but there have been only a few examples in modern times, and what was done in Circassia is one of the most extreme examples. "A Russian detachment having captured the village of Toobah on the Soobashi river, inhabited by about a hundred Abadzekh [a tribe of Circassians], and after these had surrendered themselves prisoners, they were all massacred by the Russian Troops. Among the victims were two women in an advanced state of pregnancy and five children. The detachment in question belongs to Count Evdokimoff's Army, and is said to have advanced from the Pshish valley. As the Russian troops gain ground on the [Black Sea] Coast, the natives are not allowed to remain there on any terms, but are compelled either to transfer themselves to the plains of the Kouban or emigrate to Turkey." (McCarthy, Justin. 1995. Death and exile: the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821–1922. Princeton, NJ: Darwin. Chapter 2: Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus)

The Circassians were not known as criminals or raiders. They had a settled culture for many centuries in that region, but they were in the way of Russian desire for empire, so they were slaughtered and driven out as much as possible. The commonly used number of Circassians driven out was 500,000, which was thought to be a little more than half of the total population. The Circassians were the most numerous of the nations of the North Caucasus, so the numbers of the people slaughtered among the other nations look tiny in comparison, but the Chechens, Ingushetians, Ossetians ( or Alans), and few even smaller nations were treated similarly. The Chechens have been the most violent in their recent resistance against Russian aggression, but Ingustia has been in civil war for several years, and the Circassians have been slowly filtering back to their homeland to fight for it. Most people would be better off, if they were peaceful, but the Russians have tried to crush a few too many others, and it might be a good idea, if there were some payback. To put it in proportion, the ethnic cleansing of Circassia is similar in nature to the theft of Kosovo, but many, many, many more people were killed or displaced in Circassia.

I think that the world would be a better place, if there were fewer people insisting that their tribe should have something, land freedom or whatever, and the easiest way to have fewer tribes and nations whining is to give them what they want, especially when all they want are some steep mountain valleys in an out of the way corner of the world. Let’s encourage Russia to negotiate the independence of the North Caucasus countries, and let us encourage the UN to oversee the peace in that region for some time.

Over the centuries Russia has subjugated other nations, but let’s start with an area where a single campaign can do a great deal of good. If you are interested in the issue, then searching for information about the North Caucasus peoples, the principle nations are the Adyghe (or Circassians), Chechens, Ingushetians, Ossetians (or Alans), and there are numerous smaller peoples in Dagestan. If you are interested in other nations subjugated by the Russians, then look into the Bashkirs, Crim Tatars, Mari, Finns, and some of the peoples mentioned in the pages linked below. Borders have moved over the centuries, so some groups that were subjugated centuries ago now live in other countries; only the Circassians (Adyghe) emigrated in great numbers.

http://www.euratlas.net/history/europe/1200/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...1200,_1127.svg
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/russia/ru01.html
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...56_%28A%29.jpg

http://www.rferl.org/content/circass.../24674280.html

The Caucasian War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_War

Russian - Circassian War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian...Circassian_War