Draken Harald Hårfagre
Published 20 Aug 20168 minutes with the amazing Draken Viking Ship. This is the film we showed in our exhibition tent on the festivals around the Great Lakes, filmed between Greenland and Newfoundland on the crossing of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Geographics
Published 14 Jul 2020This video is #sponsored by Squarespace.
Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Ben Adelman
Producer – Jennifer Da Silva
Executive Producer – Shell HarrisBusiness inquiries to admin@toptenz.net
If you found this video interesting, you might also want to read my article on the Halifax Explosion here.
World War Two
Published 31 Oct 2020Operation Typhoon is halted until the coming winter can freeze enough ground to increase mobility. But the ever colder weather is a disaster waiting to happen for an already over-stretched German supply line.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
Mikolaj Uchman
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…Sources:
Bundesrchiv
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
Yad Vashem 7283/146Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johannes Bornlof – “Death And Glory 2”
Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Hakan Eriksson – “Epic Adventure Theme 4”
Farell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
As we’ve all been inundated with the shocking images of almost the entire inhabited area of the Australian mainland burning, like this one, for example, claimed on social media to be a “satellite image”:
… it’s not surprising that anecdotal evidence of the decline in bookings from foreign tourists implies that there will be few visitors to the burned-out wasteland that used to be a thriving first-world nation. This, on top of the widely reported “death” of the Great Barrier Reef, means the few dozen dazed survivors will be reduced to cannibalism shortly. Or, as Arthur Chrenkoff suggests, we’ve been sold another bill of goods and things are not quite as desolate and post-apocalyptic as all that:
Just like many other people I know, I have been inundated by messages from family and friends overseas, inquiring about my safety, having been terrified by the media reports of what seemed like an environmental armageddon engulfing the entire country. I had to explain time after time that while the fires have been savage and extensive, they have largely burned through relatively sparsely populated areas (if it all, considering the vast extent of our national parks). No significant town has been threatened and destruction and loss of life, while tragic, have been pretty small in proportion to the area affected.
Yet, watching the hysterical and over-sensationalised coverage overseas has convinced many that the very existence of the nation is at stake. And the social media, if anything, has been even worse, with a number of completely misleading maps and photos exaggerating the extent of the affected areas by two-figure factors. As I pointed out, indeed the area the size of the state of Kentucky has been burned out, but unlike most other places on Earth, certainly in the developed world, Australia fits in nearly eighty Kentuckys, most of them pretty empty of human presence and activity.
Media sensationalises at the best of times in a never-ending quest for more eyeballs (“if it bleeds it leads”, or, in this case, “if it’s on fire, we’re on fire”) but the intersection of a large scale natural disaster with the “climate crisis” activism has generated a truly terrifying inferno of human passions where news becomes propaganda and the narrative trumps the objectivity. A significant proportion of the population — and the majority in the media — want to see the fires as Gaia’s wrath, with the disaster turning into green porn to terrify, titillate and agitate. Tourism has now become one of the casualties of this rhetorical excess, a collateral damage to the pursuit of a political agenda. This crisis is very much man-made and the economic pain unnecessarily inflicted on a whole industry because you wanted to make as terrible a point as possible will hang around your necks like a charred albatross, dear green activists on the streets and those masquerading as journalists.
The Green Wattle Creek bushfire moves towards the Southern Highlands township of Yanderra as police evacuate residents from Yanderra Road, 21 December, 2019.
Photo by Helitak430 via Wikimedia Commons
Arthur Chrenkoff rounds up the surprisingly numerous reports of arson over the last few months in Australia:
The Green Wattle Creek bushfire moves towards the Southern Highlands township of Yanderra as police evacuate residents from Yanderra Road, 21 December, 2019.
Photo by Helitak430 via Wikimedia Commons
According to my calculations and estimates, the number of individuals around Australia whose arson has contributed to the current bushfire crisis has now passed 200.
This figure is not presented as a counter-argument to those who blame the fires on climate change. Most people (I hope) understand that trees tend not to spontaneously combust, no matter what the air temperature is; when we talk about bushfires starting naturally, we are talking about lightning strikes igniting tinder. The climate change argument posits that the more extreme weather conditions – higher temperatures, drought, etc. – make fires, however started, much more destructive and much more difficult to control and extinguish. These are debates to be had between climatologists, forestry experts and fire fighters. What is painfully clear, however, that Australia has a firebug crisis. It will no doubt be up to future royal commissions and inquiries to calculate exactly what proportion of the current loss and destruction can be attributed to human action, but I suspect it will be a significant one. Man might be making climate change, but man is most definitely making fires start.
Below, a sample of news reports from around the country for the past several months.
[…]
There are no conspiracies here. Though arson has been tried and called for before as a tool of terror, the Australian fires seem to result from the actions of unconnected individuals who are either disturbed or reckless. This is nothing new; as ecological criminologist Paul Read wrote back in November:
A 2015 satellite analysis of 113,000 fires from 1997-2009 confirmed what we had known for some time — 40 per cent of fires are deliberately lit, another 47 per cent accidental. This generally matches previous data published a decade earlier that about half of all fires were suspected or deliberate arson, and 37 per cent accidental. Combined, they reach the same conclusion: 87 per cent are man-made …
If I had to guess, I’d say about 10,000 arsonists lurk from the top of Queensland to the southern-most tip of Victoria, but not all are active and some light fires during winter. The most dangerous light fires on the hottest days, generally closer to communities and during other blazes, suggesting more malicious motives. Only a tiny minority will gaze with wonder at the destruction they have wrought, deeply fascinated and empowered. Others get caught up with the excitement of chaos and behave like impulsive idiots.
As for children, they are not always malicious. Children and youths follow the age-crime curve where delinquency peaks in their late teens. Fire is just one of many misbehaviours. The great majority grow out of it. Four overlapping subgroups include: accidental fire-play getting out of control; victims of child abuse — including sexual abuse — and neglect; children with autism and developmental disorders; and conduct disorder from a younger age, which can be genuinely dangerous.
The more fires, proportionally the more arsonists. And the recent mega-fires are really bringing out all the fire bugs out of the woodwork (or into the woodwork to be more accurate). It is disturbing, but sadly not surprising or unexpected. As some have suggested already, the current crisis, with its large sample of arsonists, provides a good opportunity for more research into the psychology, motivation and behaviour of fire-starters. This might help in the future, but clearly arsonists will always be with us. The task is to make their work more difficult, for example through better management of our forests to make them less combustible. But as much as bushfires are an environmental and land management problem, as we search for solution we can’t forget that they are also a criminal one.
Philip Booth on Greta Thunberg’s message and its economic over-simplifications:
In many senses, economic problems are more complex than scientific problems and Thunberg is, implicitly at least, pronouncing on economic matters. Whilst knowledge about climate science is uncertain, a judgement has to be and can be made on the balance of evidence. But economic decisions involve trade-offs. Economics is, as Lionel Robbins put it, the science of not being able to have your cake and eat it. We cannot both decrease carbon emissions hugely and enjoy standards of living increasing at the rate that would have been possible if emissions were not reduced.
It is tempting the believe the green rhetoric that we will all have fluffy green jobs and a green standard of living without any hardship from reducing emissions. We cannot. Reducing carbon emissions quickly to zero means that we will have much less of everything else. We might prefer decarbonisation to other goods and services, but it is not a cost-free choice. We considering this, we should remember that the average income in the UK is ten times the average income in the rest of the world. When other people face these trade-offs the sacrifice of decarbonisation is that much greater.
One of the advantages of being richer is that we are more resilient to natural disasters. It follows from this that there is a trade-off between decarbonisation, which might lead to fewer natural disasters, and our ability to cope with them, which might reduce if we become less rich. As we have become richer, deaths from natural disasters have plummeted. The figure shows the fall in deaths in natural disasters over the last century – they have reduced by, perhaps, 90 per cent.
The use of air conditioning illustrates this trade-off in a rather stark way. In a letter on the environment written by Pope Francis in 2015 called Laudato si, the pontiff strongly criticised the adoption of air conditioning in the strongest terms. An academic paper on air conditioning in the US produced such remarkable results that the abstract is worth quoting at length:
“the mortality effect of an extremely hot day declined by about 80% between 1900-1959 and 1960-2004. As a consequence, days with temperatures exceeding 90°F were responsible for about 600 premature fatalities annually in the 1960-2004 period, compared to the approximately 3,600 premature fatalities that would have occurred if the temperature-mortality relationship from before 1960 still prevailed. Second, the adoption of residential air conditioning (AC) explains essentially the entire decline in the temperature-mortality relationship. In contrast, increased access to electricity and health care seem not to affect mortality on extremely hot days.”
Air conditioning leads to higher carbon emissions and, most likely, higher global temperatures. But the increase in resilience arising from air conditioning is astonishing – it has led to an 80 per cent drop in deaths from heat.
At some point in the last decade or so, media organizations decided to make the weather report into an extension of the news, to (as I’m sure they’d have explained) provide a richer media experience for their audiences. This has degenerated into some pretty ridiculous weather-event related claims, as it seems every month for the last several years has been “the hottest evah!” if you got your news from the TV. Claiming something is the best/worst in history sounds very impressive, until you realize just how short a time we’re considering when we talk about the weather:
“This is the worst [weather event] in history!” You see it in all the headlines: “Hottest day in history!” “Worst hurricane in history!” “Coldest winter in history!” These headlines make me crazy and it’s not just because they’re being used to shill anthropogenic climate change fears nor is it because a lot of them are false. (For example, since 1924, there have been thirty-five Category Five hurricanes in our part of the Atlantic, most in September. Dorian was just the latest, not the most exceptional.)
No, what really irks me is that phrase “in history” or its companion phrase “ever” (“Worst heat wave ever!”) What the dopes in the media miss, or perhaps willfully ignore, is the fact that we have barely any weather history. Instead, we’ve only been measuring weather data since the second half of the 19th century. I learned this when I read Simon Winchester’s delightful Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883. In it, he notes that the volcano’s explosion was the loudest sound ever recorded — and that it was recorded only because the Victorians had an obsession with record keeping.
Before the Victorians came along, there were always people who kept records, but once the Victorians came along it became a “thing.” For the first time in human history, people had (a) instruments that could measure things with a fair degree of accuracy and that were affordable, and (b) the literacy and leisure time to note and record these things.
Thus, in the late 19th century, owning a reliable thermometer, checking the weather daily, and taking the time to write it down was something entirely new. Before that, there were no reliable thermometers and only the richest could afford such unreliable tools as existed for measuring temperatures. The fact that people were no longer living at subsistence level and were literate enabled them to find the time and have the skills to record data.
That’s why we know how loud Krakatoa was: All over the world, as the sound waves reverberated around the earth, over and over, busy Victorians were looking at their reliable time-pieces (the first affordable, mass-produced watches were driven by railway needs and came onto the market in the late 19th century) and noting down the time at which they heard that strange loud noise.
All of which means that our reliable weather data isn’t about “history” or “ever,” but is, instead, about 150 years old, at most. Everything else is guess work, based upon random reminiscences and best guesses using things such as Arctic core samples or tree rings.
DutchRanger
Published on 13 Aug 2013A nice documentary of the winter war.
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 23 May 2017In this video, we examine the causes behind the Great Depression with the help of the aggregate demand-aggregate supply model.
In 1929, the stock market crashed and an air of pessimism swept across America — making bank depositors nervous. What would you do if you thought your money might not be safe with the bank? You’d probably want it back in your own hands. What happened next? A run on the banks.
Along with the Stock Market Crash of 1929, it’s one of the iconic moments of the early days of Great Depression. However, the Great Depression was an incredibly complex downturn in which the economy experienced a series of aggregate demand shocks. By the end of this video, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of the many factors behind the Great Depression and how to apply the AD-AS model to a real-world scenario.
There have been bad years in human history. There have been worse days in human history. But according to a recent study summarized in Science magazine, the worst year in recorded history was 536AD:
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night — for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice — a spike in airborne lead — marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
KnowledgeHub
Published on 29 Dec 2017Signup for your FREE trial to The Great Courses Plus here: http://ow.ly/6YHs30b1QVm
In the midst of WWII, Stalin decided to invade the small nation of Finland. It did not go the way he wanted it to. This is the story of the quagmire of 1939 that often isn’t talked about between the Fins and the Russians.
Music:
Russian Slapstick by Hakan Erikson
Dramatic Orchestral Strings by Gavin Luke
Winds of Winter by Yi Natiro“The Great Courses Plus is currently available to watch through a web browser to almost anyone in the world and optimized for the US market. The Great Courses Plus is currently working to both optimize the product globally and accept credit card payments globally.”
The Great War
Published on 27 Jan 2018Check out the Open Air Museum: http://bit.ly/LagazuoiMuseum
Join a very cold Indy as he explores the Italian and Austro-Hungarian positions on Mount Lagazuoi and finds out how they were built and operated during the Great War. A special thanks to Stefano Illing for guiding us through this incredible place.
The Great War
Published on 15 Jan 2018Visit the Kobarid Museum: https://www.kobariski-muzej.si/eng/
Indy gets a tour through the impressive Kobarid Museum dedicated to the Isonzo Front and to the soldiers that experienced the war in the region.
Matt Ridley on the possibility that our current interglacial period — the time period during which all of human history has played out from before the start of agricultural civilization down to today — may be coming to an end:
In 1976 Nicholas Shackleton, a Cambridge physicist, and his colleagues published evidence from deep-sea cores of cycles in the warming and cooling of the Earth over the past half million years which fitted Milankovich’s orbital wobbles. Precession, which decides whether the Earth is closer to the sun in July or in January, is on a 23,000-year cycle; obliquity, which decides how tilted the axis of the Earth is and therefore how warm the summer is, is on a 41,000-year cycle; and eccentricity, which decides how rounded or elongated the Earth’s orbit is and therefore how close to the sun the planet gets, is on a 100,000-year cycle. When these combine to make a “great summer” in the north, the ice caps shrink.
Game, set and match to Milankovich? Not quite. The Antarctic ice cores, going back 800,000 years, then revealed that there were some great summers when the Milankovich wobbles should have produced an interglacial warming, but did not. To explain these “missing interglacials”, a recent paper in Geoscience Frontiers by Ralph Ellis and Michael Palmer argues we need carbon dioxide back on the stage, not as a greenhouse gas but as plant food.
The argument goes like this. Colder oceans evaporate less moisture and rainfall decreases. At the depth of the last ice age, Africa suffered long mega-droughts; only small pockets of rainforest remained. Crucially, the longer an ice age lasts, the more carbon dioxide is dissolved in the cold oceans. When the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drops below 200 parts per million (0.02 per cent), plants struggle to grow at all, especially at high altitudes. Deserts expand. Dust storms grow more frequent and larger. In the Antarctic ice cores, dust increased markedly whenever carbon dioxide levels got below 200 ppm. The dust would have begun to accumulate on the ice caps, especially those of Eurasia and North America, which were close to deserts. Next time a Milankovich great summer came along, and the ice caps began to melt, the ice would have grown dirtier and dirtier, years of deposited dust coming together as the ice shrank. The darker ice would have absorbed more heat from the sun and a runaway process of collapsing ice caps would have begun.
All of human civilisation happened in an interglacial period, with a relatively stable climate, plentiful rainfall and high enough levels of carbon dioxide to allow the vigorous growth of plants. Agriculture was probably impossible before then, and without its hugely expanded energy supply, none of the subsequent flowering of human culture would have happened.
That interglacial will end. Today the northern summer sunshine is again slightly weaker than the southern. In a few tens of thousands of years, our descendants will probably be struggling with volatile weather, dust storms and air that cannot support many crops. But that is a very long way off, and by then technology should be more advanced, unless we prevent it developing. The key will be energy. With plentiful and cheap energy our successors could thrive even in a future ice age, growing crops, watering deserts, maintaining rainforests and even melting ice caps.
The Great War
Published on 14 Oct 2017The mountains along the Italian front made for one of the most brutal and unforgiving battlefields of the World War 1, and the soldiers who fought here were tougher and more resilient than most. The Italian Alpini and the Austro-Hungarian Alpenjäger and Kaiserschützen who fought in the Dolomites waged different versions of mountain warfare, but both were subject to the harsh conditions of the peaks.
Powered by WordPress