Tag Archives: history

No, they were not predicting an ice age.

What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s?

The fact is that around 1970 there were 6 times as many scientists predicting a warming rather than a cooling planet.

Their papers showed that the growing amount of greenhouse gasses that humans were putting into the atmosphere would cause much greater warming – warming that would exert a much greater influence on global temperature than any possible natural or human-caused cooling effects.

A hero of our age

Beheaded Syrian scholar refused to lead Isis to hidden Palmyra antiquities

He was a world-renowned scholar of antiquities, enchanted into his old age by Syria’s fabled city of Palmyra, which he called among the most beautiful in the world.

Not far from the spectacular Roman ruins he had spent decades safeguarding, 82-year-old Khaled Asaad met a brutal end at the hands of the militants of Islamic State, relatives and colleagues said Wednesday.

Asaad, the retired director of Palmyra’s antiquities and museum, was publicly beheaded Tuesday in a main square of the modern-day Syrian city of Tadmur, adjoining the ruins, according to a monitoring group and Syria’s antiquities chief. His executioners publicly displayed the bloodied corpse, they said.

The Shadow of the Past

From the buried bunker, Hitler’s ghost still haunts Berlin’s psyche, 70 years on

There are few surviving buildings or monuments to testify to the period in which Berlin was the Nazi capital, when it was to become Welthauptstadt Germania – an Albert Speer-designed world capital of a massively expanded German nation.

The Olympic stadium, site of the 1936 Games, still exists, the disused Tempelhof airport and, most notably, the forbidding former ministry of aviation from which Hermann Göring boasted of dominating the European skies.

It is now the home of the ministry of finance, which many believe dominates Europe in a far more effective manner than the Luftwaffe could ever have done.

Fascism and capital punishment

Mussolini’s Secret Weapon: Castor Oil is an interesting sidelight on history. It includes something in particular for modern Americans to think about:

In the years from the March of Rome, 1922 to Italy’s foolish entry into WW2 10 June 1940 sixty five men were executed in Fascist Italy (there were also a dozen or so extra legal killings). In modern Texas (with a population over half the size of 1930s Italy) twenty to thirty individuals are executed a year.

Faking History

Romans Invade Ireland

The following is a parable about how history is written on the internet. Let’s imagine you have a web page and you want people to visit it. How could you get the history scoop of 2014? Well you could go and bribe some doctorate students, ask for an interview with a wanw professor, research an area to death and pontificate… What you don’t have time? Then why not just make it all up?!