A Historical Analysis On Climate Change

Screenshot of MWP Mapping Project (Source: Luening http://t1p.de/mwp downloaded 27-Dec-2016)

Watts Up With That?: Documenting the Global Extent of the Medieval Warm Period

In this article I pose the following questions:

Was the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) a global event?
Where the MWP temperatures higher than recent times?
The reasons for asking these questions are that climate establishment have tried to sideline the MWP as a purely local North Atlantic event. They also frequently state that current temperatures are the highest ever.

I attempt to answer these questions below.

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CSN Editor: A good historical analysis on climate change.

A Blast From The Past: A 1981 News Report On The Internet

1981 News Report On The Internet is Now Hilarious -- Neatorama

There are so many amusing things in this 1981 television report about getting newspaper content from the Internet that it's hard to keep track. The smirk and smug tone of voice of the reporter, as if she's informing the public of a quaint yet ridiculous idea that stands no chance of ever being embraced by the public. The opening line: "Imagine if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee and turning on your home computer to read the day's newspaper." Mind boggling! The CRT screens, dial-up connections using a phone receiver and hours of download time for a text file.

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My Comment: We have certainly gone a long way in 33 years.

Sonar Images Show The Deep Sea Grave Of The Titanic

Deep Sea Grave Of The Titanic: Extraordinary Sonar Images Show Full Map Of Shipwreck On Ocean Floor For First Time -- Daily Mail

* Researchers hope the map will provide new clues about what happened when the famous vessel sank 100 years ago
* Expedition team used sonar imaging and more than 100,000 photos taken from underwater robots to create the detailed map
* It shows where hundreds of objects and pieces of the presumed-unsinkable vessel landed

It is one of the most famous disasters the world has ever known and even inspired an Oscar-winning film.

But never before has the Titanic disaster been seen in such extraordinary detail as these new images show.

Researchers have pieced together what is believed to be the first comprehensive map of the entire 3-by-5-mile Titanic debris field.

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High-Tech Effort Underway to Protect Magna Carta

One of four existing copies of the 1297 Magna Carta. Credit: National Archives & Records Administration

From Live Science:

The Magna Carta helped form the foundation for modern English and U.S. law. Now one of two copies known to exist outside England is headed for a special new case to preserve it.

The very first Magna Carta dates to 1215, when English barons forced King John to write down the traditional rights and liberties of the country's free persons. A copy of the Magna Carta signed by King Edward I in 1297 currently resides within a helium-filled casement at the National Archives Building in Washington. But the medieval document is scheduled for a temporary removal in 2011 so it can be re-measured for a new case filled with argon.

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Mystery of Great Civilization's Destruction Revealed

The religious complex of Angkor Wat was center of a civilization that depended for irrigation on a vast network of canals, embankments and reservoirs. Credit: Charles J. Sharp.

From Live Science:

Climate change might have helped bring about the fall of the ancient Khmer civilization in Angkor, Cambodia, nearly 600 years ago, new research suggests.

Historians have given various explanations for the fall of the empire that stretched across much of Southeast Asia between the ninth and 14th centuries (801 to 1400), from land overexploitation to conflict with rival kingdoms. But the new study offers strong evidence that two severe droughts, punctuated by bouts of heavy monsoon rain, could have weakened the empire by shrinking water supplies for drinking and agriculture, and damaging Angkor's vast irrigation system, which was central to its economy.

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Biblical Plagues Really Happened Say Scientists

From The Telegraph:

The Biblical plagues that devastated Ancient Egypt in the Old Testament were the result of global warming and a volcanic eruption, scientists have claimed.

Researchers believe they have found evidence of real natural disasters on which the ten plagues of Egypt, which led to Moses freeing the Israelites from slavery in the Book of Exodus in the Bible, were based.

But rather than explaining them as the wrathful act of a vengeful God, the scientists claim the plagues can be attributed to a chain of natural phenomena triggered by changes in the climate and environmental disasters that happened hundreds of miles away.

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Search Engine Collects Historical Resources

From The BBC:

A search engine is being created to help historians find useful sources.

The Connected History project will link up currently separate databases of source materials.

Once complete, it will give academics or members of the public a single site that lets them search all the collections.

Once completed the search engine will index digitised books, newspapers, manuscripts, genealogical records, maps and images that date from 1500-1900.

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Secrets Of The Ancients

Pharaoh Tuthankamen's famous burial mask.
Credit: Wikimedia

From Cosmos:

King Tut is only one in a growing list of ancient humans forced to reveal their secrets through high-tech prodding. By rushing into such studies, we may be opening a historical Pandora's Box.

On 26 November 1922, the British Egyptology Howard Carter peered through a tiny hole into the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.

"I see wonderful things," he gasped as he glimpsed a profusion of gold and ebony, hidden for more than 30 centuries.

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Titanic vs. Lusitania: Time Determined Who Survived

The RMS Titanic being towed

From Live Science:

The time people have during survival situations might affect whether they behave selfishly or socially. Examining two shipwrecks, the Titanic and the Lusitania, researchers recently found the longer passengers had to react to the disaster, the more likely they were to follow social mores. The less time, the more selfishly passengers behaved.

The result: It was every man for himself aboard the rapidly sinking Lusitania, and so the fittest were the most likely to survive that accident. During the lengthy Titanic shipwreck, women in their reproductive years were the most likely to make it, while men of the same age had a lower probability of surviving.

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Aboriginal Folklore Leads To Meteorite Crater

Researchers are using Aboriginal dreaming stories and Google Maps to
find new meteorite impact craters. Credit: Google Maps

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: An Australian Aboriginal 'Dreaming' story has helped experts uncover a meteorite impact crater in the outback of the Northern Territory.

Duane Hamacher, an astrophysicist studying Aboriginal astronomy at Sydney's Macquarie University, used Google Maps to search for the signs of impact craters in areas related to Aboriginal stories of stars or stones falling from the sky.

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Were Rats Behind Easter Island Mystery?

Moai statues on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, among the most remote spots on Earth.
By Jayne Clark, USA TODAY

From USA Today:

Easter Island's mystery — brooding statues atop a treeless Polynesian island — fascinates tourists and scholars alike.

And inspires debate.

"Who or what destroyed the ancient palm woodland on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)?" ask German ecologists Andreas Mieth and Hans-Rudolf Bork, in an upcoming paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. "The circumstances, causes and triggers of these environmental changes are the subject of persistent scientific discussion."

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PICTURES: The Hunt for Lost WWII 'Samurai Subs'

In this image, the I-401 submarine is shown. The I-401 aircraft-carrying submarine could travel one and a half times around the world without refueling. (Wild Life Productions, National Geographic Channel)

From ABC News:

National Geographic Channel Program Documents Undersea Search for Japanese Super-Submarines.

With more time, military experts say, a fleet of revolutionary Japanese super-submarines could have changed the course of World War II.

Some were designed to launch bombers on kamikaze missions against New York City, Washington, D.C., and the Panama Canal. Others were thought to be twice as fast any other submarine used in the war.

None had the chance to execute their stealth missions against the U.S. mainland or critical targets in the Pacific during the war.

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CSN Editor: For background information, see History of Submarine Aircraft Carriers -- New Wars

National World War II Museum: Bringing The Battle To Life

Ringside for a global fight, viewers will gain an up-close perspective in the new Solomon Victory Theater at the World War II museum in New Orleans. (The National World War II Museum)

From Christian Science Monitor:

The New Orleans National World War II Museum uses immersive tech to boost teaching power – and also entertain.

There are those who served at the battlefront and witnessed first-hand the ugliness of war. And there are the rest of us who experience it from behind exhibition glass.

This month in New Orleans, however, The National World War II Museum is opening the doors to a new $60 million complex that will feature as its centerpiece a 35-minute film designed to virtually transport viewers 70 years into the past through technology marketed as “4-D cinematics,” including special lighting, fog, stage snow, moving props, surround sound, and digital animation.

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The Fourth Part Of The World: The Epic Story Of History’s Greatest Map By Toby Lester

From Times Online:

In 2003, the US Library of Congress spent $10m on a beautiful world map, created in 1507. The price was justified by a single, magical name, inscribed in capitals on a strange tract of blank space in the far west: “AMERICA”. As Toby Lester tells in this boundlessly engaging book, this map was not just the first to give America a name, it was the very first to show it as a continent, separated from Asia by a new ocean.

Advertising its purchase, Congress called the map “America’s birth certificate”; Lester rates its importance much less narrowly. It charts an astonishing shift in world-view, he argues, from the Europe-centred, God-driven world of the Middle Ages to the brave new imperial vision of the early modern age.

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Earhart's Final Resting Place Believed Found

Amelia Earhart appears above in her flight gear in this undated photo. Legendary aviator Amelia Earhart mostly likely died on an tropical island in the southwestern Pacific. AP

From Discovery News:

Oct. 23, 2009 -- Legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart most likely died on an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).

Tall, slender, blonde and brave, Earhart disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator. Her final resting place has long been a mystery.

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A World Redrawn When America Showed Up On A Map, It Was The Universe That Got Transformed

Image: Nicholas Copernicus (Getty Images)

From Boston.com:

NEARLY FIVE CENTURIES ago, the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus went public with one of the most important arguments ever made in the history of ideas. The earth did not sit immobile at the center of the universe, he wrote. It revolved around the sun.

It was the mother of all paradigm shifts, dismantling a model of the universe that had been dogma since antiquity. When he published his theory, in “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” (1543), Copernicus provided a wealth of data on the movements of celestial bodies in support of his case. But what’s often overlooked is that he began his argument from the ground up, by focusing not on the heavens but the earth. In particular, he began with a geographical revelation, prompted by something he had recently come across on a new map.

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Overfishing Goes Back Centuries, Log Books Reveal

One of the earliest depictions of trawling. Mosaic from the 5th century, Bizerte, Tunisia. Credit: Yacoub, M., Splendors of Tunisian Mosaics, Tunis, 1995, Fig. 115.

From Live Science:

Overfishing led to shrinking sizes of freshwater fish caught by Europeans all the way back in medieval times. And the real revolution in deep-sea fishing came not with modern day trawlers, but back in the 1600s when pairs of boats began dragging a net between them.

Those are just a few of the facts unearthed by marine historians who want to find out when ocean life populations and natural sizes began to shrink.

The evidence shows that much of the decline took place even before the modern fishing industry really got going.

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Who Discovered The North Pole?

Frederick Cook and Robert Peary both claimed they discovered the North Pole. AGIP / Rue des Archives / The Granger Collection, New York

From The Smithsonian:

A century ago, explorer Robert Peary earned fame for discovering the North Pole, but did Frederick Cook get there first?

On September 7, 1909, readers of the New York Times awakened to a stunning front-page headline: "Peary Discovers the North Pole After Eight Trials in 23 Years." The North Pole was one of the last remaining laurels of earthly exploration, a prize for which countless explorers from many nations had suffered and died for 300 years. And here was the American explorer Robert E. Peary sending word from Indian Harbour, Labrador, that he had reached the pole in April 1909, one hundred years ago this month. The Times story alone would have been astounding. But it wasn't alone.

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Mystery Of Horse Domestication Solved?

Wild horses running in the desert mountains of Kazakhstan.
(Credit: iStockphoto/Maxim Petrichuk)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 24, 2009) — Wild horses were domesticated in the Ponto-Caspian steppe region (today Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Romania) in the 3rd millennium B.C. Despite the pivotal role horses have played in the history of human societies, the process of their domestication is not well understood.

In a new study published in the scientific journal Science, an analysis by German researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, the German Archaeological Institute, the Humboldt University Berlin, the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, in cooperation with American and Spanish scientists, has unravelled the mystery about the domestication of the horse.

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Archaeologist: Oldest Cyprus Temple Discovered

From The International Herald Tribune:

NICOSIA, Cyprus: An Italian archaeologist claimed Friday to have discovered Cyprus' oldest religious site, which she said echoes descriptions in the Bible of temples in ancient Palestine.

Maria Rosaria Belgiorno said the 4,000-year-old triangular temple predates any other found on the east Mediterranean island by a millennium.

"For sure it's the most ancient religious site on the island," she told The Associated Press from her home in Rome. "This confirms that religious worship in Cyprus began much earlier than previously believed."

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