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The Last Decade | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...last-decade Succession Queen Elizabeth
shared by manhefnawi on 22 May 18 - No Cached
  • When the Spanish ambassador to England reported to his master in December 1558 about Queen Elizabeth and her newly established government, he lamented that ‘the kingdom is entirely in the hands of young folks, heretics and traitors’.
  • The Queen’s advancing age had at least two important consequences in the 1590s. Firstly, it underscored the continuing uncertainty over the royal succession, since Elizabeth had no children and had always refused to nominate a successor. Secondly, Elizabeth’s increasing dotage encouraged members of a younger generation to feel impatient at their sovereign’s conservatism and to resent the continuing sway of the elderly men and women who monopolised virtually all the key positions around her
  • Elizabeth’s courtiers and councillors during the 1590s always had to reckon on this likelihood and shaped their actions accordingly, even if they usually kept their preparations low-key for fear of angering the Queen and raising awkward questions about their loyalty to her – acting too precipitately might ruin their career and even expose them to charges of treason
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  • Routine actions by the Privy Council, such as the authorisation of government expenditure, had traditionally required the signatures of three, four or five members of the Council, but Burghley now began to authorise a growing number of actions entirely by himself. This was partly a concession to the demands of his extraordinary work load, but it also reflected his unprecedented new status as the Queen’s de facto chief minister.
  • who should replace the Queen. Elaborate genealogies were constructed to undermine the credentials of each of the leading claimants to the English throne – including James VI – and to advance the case for the Infanta of Spain. This suggested that Doleman’s book was intended to clear the way for Philip II to claim Elizabeth’s throne for the Habsburgs
  • The loss of so many stalwarts of the Elizabethan regime significantly changed the nature of the Privy Council during the early 1590s and set the scene for political instability in the years that followed.
  • Wentworth’s gaoler, Sir Michael Blount, the Lieutenant of the Tower, was himself dismissed and imprisoned in late 1595 for stockpiling arms in anticipation of the Queen’s death. While Wentworth championed James VI of Scotland as Elizabeth’s successor, Blount supported the rival claim of the Seymour family
  • Elizabeth’s willingness to grant Cecil a place on the council at the youthful age of twenty-eight represented a striking concession, but she rejected his bid to fill the vacant secretaryship of state. As a junior councillor without obvious portfolio, Cecil instead became his father’s assistant.
  • While Essex’s generation had grown up to hate Spain and to covet the riches and prestige of Spain’s global empire, she and Burghley were old enough to recall that France was England’s traditional enemy. Elizabeth’s goal was not a new European order or to become ‘Queen of the Seas’, but a return to the old European order, in which the inveterate rivalry between France and the Habsburgs would enable England to play those two great powers off against each other for the least risk and maximum diplomatic benefit
  • For their part, Essex and his followers interpreted this opposition as the jealousy of small-minded civilians who did not understand military matters and unfairly sought to deny Essex and his officers the rewards of victory
  • The personal nature of what was effectively an internal family feud also seemed bewildering to the Queen
  • This danger seemed all the more pressing because of the continuing uncertainty about the succession. Essex had long been the foremost English advocate of the claims of James VI, who was widely recognised as the most plausible candidate to succeed Elizabeth
  • By the time Elizabeth entered her final illness in March 1603, the secret alliance of Cecil and James had ensured there would be no succession crisis. As the old Queen lay dying, the burning question troubling her courtiers was not who would be the next sovereign of England, but who would be able to emulate Cecil and his closest allies in securing the new King’s favour
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The Siege of Alicante | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...siege-alicante Spain Britain Military Spanish Succession
shared by manhefnawi on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • The long and distinguished annals of the British army contain numerous examples of courage, endurance and devotion to duty
  • The one hundred and thirty-six day defence of Alicante belongs to the latter category, and it is fitting in this, the two hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the siege, to recall the bravery of the Allied garrison, and above all of the man who was the very soul and inspiration of the defence both before and after his gallant death, namely the Governor, Major-General John Richards
  • The War of the Spanish Succession was more than five years old before Alicante figured in its history. Three campaigns had already been fought in the Iberian Peninsula when an Allied force appeared in the offing, determined to secure Alicante for the cause of the Habsburg claimant to the throne of Spain, Charles III (later the Emperor Charles VI).
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  • The castle presented a formidable problem; the ships’ guns could not be elevated sufficiently to sweep the summit of the rock, and it was not until a number of bomb vessels had been summoned that the fortress could be brought under effective fire
  • resolutely determined to retain their Bourbon monarch, Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV, on the throne willed to him in 1700 by the last of the Spanish Habsburgs
  • The Earl of Galway’s army received a sharp defeat at Almanza some sixty miles inland from Alicante on April 25 th, 1707, and within the next twenty months the Bourbonists had recaptured the important cities of Lerida and Tortosa besides many more minor places
  • On the Spanish mainland, however, the forces of Philip V undoubtedly enjoyed the main initiative from Almanza onwards, while the Allied generals spent much of their time quarrelling, intriguing and splitting up their forces into ill-coordinated parts
  • To his disappointment, he failed to persuade the government to prosecute a major descent from the sea against Cadiz, but instead found himself landing at Alicante with his brother Michael as part of reinforcements for the Huguenot commander-in-chief, Lord Galway. Subsequently, as has already been related, he was appointed Governor of Alicante in succession to General Gorges, who returned to England
  • Recognizing that its defence could have only one outcome, and anxious to spare the townsfolk the fate of their compatriots at Denia where all had been put to the sword after the storm of the lower town, Richards beat a parley, and agreed to evacuate the town in return for an undertaking that the citizens should be treated by the Bourbon forces as if they had never rebelled against Philip V
  • On Monday, March 3rd, sentries reported at six in the morning that the townsfolk were hastily evacuating the quarter of Alicante nearest the castle
  • Again, the fact that he was not technically an English officer but a general in the service of Charles III, the Spanish Pretender, may have caused his act of courage to go relatively unrecognised in the history of a long war that saw many greater events than the siege of Alicante
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Europe in the Caribbean, Part II: The Monarch of the West Indies | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...an-part-ii-monarch-west-indies Division Caribbean France Spain England West Indies
shared by manhefnawi on 15 May 18 - No Cached
  • the dispute will be whether the King of England or of France shall be the Monarch of the West Indies, for the King of Spain cannot hold it long
  • The wars between the Kings of France and Britain were, on the contrary, waged for supremacy in the Caribbean itself and it was this aspect that gave West Indian history, from Cromwell’s Protectorate to the battle of Trafalgar, its special stamp
  • a handful of stubborn and self-reliant Commonwealth soldiers within five years got the better of the King of Spain
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  • We are starving
  • In 1635 Guadeloupe and Martinique became and, after several changes, remained profitable French possessions
  • The French, unlike the British, also established themselves on Hispaniola, Spain’s largest, most prestigious and administratively most important island in the area.
  • Just before the last Habsburg King of Spain died, the French presence in the Spanish mare nostrum generally, and in Hispaniola in particular, was given international recognition in the treaty of Ryswick of 1697
  • The Most Serene King of Great Britain, his Heirs and Successors, shall have, hold and possess for ever, with full sovereignty, ownership and possession, all the lands, regions, islands, colonies and dominions, situated in the West Indies or in any part of America, that the said King of Great Britain and his subjects at present hold and possess
  • The recognition of the new status quo, distressing but realistic so far as Spain was concerned, while being a considerable political and commercial boon to Charles II’s government
  • the peace of Utrecht was in reality only an uneasy truce
  • Thus with the restoration of Charles II and the almost simultaneous taking up of the reins of government by the young Louis XIV, Britain and France stood poised in the Caribbean facing each other from positions of great potential wealth, strategic advantage and political power. Both monarchs had triumphed over their enemies at home, but equally they had both come into an inheritance accumulated by their predecessor
  • The Netherlands had in fact been the first country deliberately to challenge the power of the King of Spain on his own ground in the Indies
  • No wonder that in 1609 Philip III offered these irrepressible heretics a twelve years’ truce, which implied a preliminary recognition of independence
  • Rich in ships, men and money -the days of the Dutch sea-beggars were over -the company, parent and model of all future companies of this type, pursued an ambitious programme. Not content like the British and French to settle on the smaller islands of the Caribbean neglected by Spain, they attacked the mighty colony of Brazil itself since until 1640 the crowns of Portugal and Spain were united in personal union under the Habsburgs
  • With the Treaty of Westphalia we enter in the West Indies on the violent but passing era of the buccaneers, when Englishmen like Henry Morgan
  • This uncontrollable anarchy in the Caribbean and along the coasts of Central and South America was exceeded only by the savage cruelty with which these accomplished but coarsened sailors pursued their greedy aims, and the spectacle was viewed with mounting disfavour by the governments at Whitehall and Versailles
  • The first opportunity to root out this barbarous nuisance came during the negotiations at Utrecht and elsewhere for a settlement to end the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1713 the Bourbons were accepted as Kings of Spain and the Indies
  • Spain, weakened by Protestant aggression and incapable of adapting its rigid and creaking caste system to the new realities of maritime and economic life
  • In the French islands, les grands blancs, among whom the family of the future Empress Josephine at Martinique was perhaps the most celebrated example, ruled on the basis of the code noir, introduced by Louis XIV and subject to various reforms and modifications in subsequent reigns, especially that of Louis XVI
  • Where in the French islands absolutist rule was maintained by the conseils supérieurs appointed by the King at Versailles, in the British possessions political power was vested in a Governor sent out from England by letter-patent together with a handful of other political and administrative officers
  • In the south another ex-slave presently proclaimed himself Emperor of Haiti, while in 1811 the black titan of the North, Jean Christophe, became King Christophe I of Haiti
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William of Orange 1533-1584 | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...william-orange-1533-1584 Revolution William III Europe
shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • Four hundred years ago this month, western Europe was shocked to learn of the assassination of William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, in a house in Delft (Holland)
  • William of Orange was not a king; yet his murder caused no less upheaval than the others, for since 1572 he had been leader of the Revolt of the Netherlands against their hereditary sovereign, Philip II of Spain
  • It was primarily to prevent Philip II from restoring his control over the North Sea coast that Elizabeth of England in 1585 in effect declared war on him
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  • Orange in death was thus, indeed, the saviour of his country.
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The Roots of Muslim Rage - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...304643 muslim rage History crisis culture
shared by Javier E on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that
  • Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance
  • It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world
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  • But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going through such a period
  • At times this hatred goes beyond hostility to specific interests or actions or policies or even countries and becomes a rejection of Western civilization as such, not only what it does but what it is, and the principles and values that it practices and professes. These are indeed seen as innately evil, and those who promote or accept them as the "enemies of God.
  • It must surely be clear that what won support for such totally diverse doctrines was not Nazi race theory, which can have had little appeal for Arabs, or Soviet atheistic communism, which can have had little appeal for Muslims, but rather their common anti-Westernism
  • In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam
  • But the greater part of the world is still outside Islam, and even inside the Islamic lands, according to the view of the Muslim radicals, the faith of Islam has been undermined and the law of Islam has been abrogated. The obligation of holy war therefore begins at home and continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.
  • Like every other civilization known to human history, the Muslim world in its heyday saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment, surrounded by infidel barbarians whom it would in due course enlighten and civilize.
  • Among the components in the mood of anti-Westernism, and more especially of anti-Americanism, were certain intellectual influences coming from Europe
  • One of these was from Germany, where a negative view of America formed part of a school of thought by no means limited to the Nazis but including writers as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke, Ernst Junger, and Martin Heidegger. In this perception, America was the ultimate example of civilization without culture
  • German philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of education, enjoyed a considerable vogue among Arab and some other Muslim intellectuals in the thirties and early forties, and this philosophic anti-Americanism was part of the message.
  • sophy, even more anti-American, took its place—the Soviet version of Marxism, with a denunciation of Western capitalism
  • Not all the ideas imported from the West by Western intruders or native Westernizers have been rejected. Some have been accepted by even the most radical Islamic fundamentalists, usually without acknowledgment of source, and suffering a sea change into something rarely rich but often strange
  • The cause most frequently adduced for anti-American feeling among Muslims today is American support for Israel. This support is certainly a factor of importance
  • Despite this monotheism, Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, was at various stages influenced, especially in Iran, by the dualist idea of a cosmic clash of good and evil, light and darkness, order and chaos, truth and falsehood, God and the Adversary, variously known as devil, Iblis, Satan, and by other names.
  • More than ever before it is Western capitalism and democracy that provide an authentic and attractive alternative to traditional ways of thought and life. Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for their people.
  • Ultimately, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two enemies, secularism and modernism. The war against secularism is conscious and explicit, and there is by now a whole literature denouncing secularism as an evil neo-pagan force in the modern world and attributing it variously to the Jews, the West, and the United States.
  • The war against modernity is for the most part neither conscious nor explicit, and is directed against the whole process of change that has taken place in the Islamic world in the past century or more and has transformed the political, economic, social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries.
  • Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.
  • The instinct of the masses is not false in locating the ultimate source of these cataclysmic changes in the West and in attributing the disruption of their old way of life to the impact of Western domination, Western influence, or Western precept and example.
  • And since the United States is the legitimate heir of European civilization and the recognized and unchallenged leader of the West, the United States has inherited the resulting grievances and become the focus for the pent-up hate and anger.
  • It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them.
  • This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both
  • It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.
  • Another explanation, more often heard from Muslim dissidents, attributes anti-American feeling to American support for hated regimes, seen as reactionary by radicals, as impious by conservatives, as corrupt and tyrannical by both. This accusation has some plausibility
  • One such was political freedom, with the associated notions and practices of representation, election, and constitutional government. Even the Islamic Republic of Iran has a written constitution and an elected assembly
  • Muslim states have also retained many of the cultural and social customs of the West and the symbols that express them, such as the form and style of male (and to a much lesser extent female) clothing, notably in the military.
  • The movement nowadays called fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition. There are others, more tolerant, more open, that helped to inspire the great achievements of Islamic civilization in the past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time prevail
  • But before this issue is decided there will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little or nothing
  • To this end we must strive to achieve a better appreciation of other religious and political cultures, through the study of their history, their literature, and their achievements
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James IV: Renaissance Monarch | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...james-iv-renaissance-monarch Scotland James IV Henry VIII France Kings England Queen Margaret
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  • In June 1488, just three years after Henry VII’s unlikely victory in the English Midlands, James IV became king on the battlefield of Sauchieburn south of Stirling, close to the spot where Robert Bruce had won his great victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314.
  • James IV was brought up at Stirling Castle by his mother, Margaret of Denmark, alongside his two younger brothers. The queen had produced three healthy sons but she and James III led separate lives after an earlier rebellion in 1482. The king, who had managed to alienate all of his siblings, believed that his wife had sided with his brother, the Duke of Albany, when the duke returned from exile in France and invaded Scotland with the future Richard III of England. James III seems also to have felt that his eldest son was tainted by contact with Albany and perhaps considered barring the boy from the succession
  • James IV was ruler of a land famously described in a letter written by its own nobility in 1320 to Pope John XXII as ‘the tiny country of Scotia lying on the very edge of the inhabited world’. Scotland was poor, cold and wet. Edinburgh, its capital, held only 12,000 citizens, in contrast to London’s 50,000. Yet, like its new monarch, the country was not inward-looking.  Difficulty of travel by road over rugged terrain meant that it had long relied on sea routes for transport and communication with the wider world. The kings of Scotland were determined not to be overlooked in Europe. They forged trade and political alliances with Scandinavia and were long-standing allies of the French, who viewed Scotland as a brake on the ambitions of England. The two countries that occupied the island of Britain were natural enemies, nowhere more so than in the Borders, where centuries-old feuds and the violence that fuelled them were adjudicated by special courts composed of English and Scots. But James III had attempted a policy of conciliation with England that was unpopular with his aristocracy and Henry VII, a cautious man, did not relish constant war with his northern neighbour. It remained to be seen how James IV would approach Anglo-Scottish relations and how he would develop his ambition to make Scotland a European power.
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  • His first years on the throne of Scotland were as troubled and insecure as those of Henry VII in England. In the early 1490s the threat of rebellion was never far away. James’ experience of life outside Stirling Castle was limited but he was a young man of keen intelligence and a shrewd observer of court politics
  • Foreign policy was traditionally the king’s preserve and it was here he would first show his mettle. He chose to do so in a way that had potentially grave repercussions for Henry VII.
  • In November 1495 the imposter Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV, was warmly welcomed to Stirling by James IV
  • Henry VII was also looking for a wife for his son, Arthur, in Spain and James knew that the stability of Anglo-Scottish relations was important for the marriage negotiations to succeed.
  • He was sending a clear message to Henry VII that he had the means to threaten the Tudor throne. In the summer of 1496 he backed this up with military might when he and the Scottish host crossed the river Tweed into England with ‘Richard IV’ in their midst.
  • A proxy marriage took place at Richmond a few months after the wedding of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon. The new Queen of Scots did not, however, go north to live with her husband until the summer of 1503. She was still several months short of her 14th birthday when, after a magnificent and demanding progress north, intended to showcase the splendour of the Tudor regime, she finally met James IV in early August at Dalkeith Castle
  • Over time, considerable affection grew between them and a mutual commitment to establishing their line and enhancing Scotland’s prestige. Once she reached the age of 16 Margaret did her duty valiantly, producing children most years, though none survived for long before she gave birth to the future James V in 1512. The king and queen kept a cultured Renaissance court, encouraging the flowering of Scottish literature, enjoying their mutual love of music and attracting artisans, intellectuals and men of science from all over Europe
  • Establishing Scotland as a European power cost money and James’ exchequer was constantly challenged once Margaret Tudor’s substantial dowry had been paid
  • James was also interested in medicine and dentistry, practising his skills on courtiers who gamely allowed themselves to have teeth extracted. Thomas Wolsey, then a rising prospect in Henry VII’s administration, was once kept waiting for an audience with the king because James was busy making gunpowder
  • In the summer of 1506 James wrote to his ally, Louis XII of France, setting forth his determination to develop a fleet that would be the key to defending Scotland from her enemies. He wanted it to be able to stand comparison with that of much bigger European powers. A northern ally with a substantial naval presence was music to the ears of the French king.
  • As his stock rose in Europe it became apparent that this would lead to tensions with his wife’s brother. Henry VIII was irritated by what he saw as the pretentions of James IV and Queen Margaret. The rivalry that soon became apparent was fuelled not just by a boy’s contempt for an older man but by the long-standing resentment that Henry felt for Margaret, who had briefly taken precedence over him before she left for Scotland.
  • Henry and Katherine remained childless and the uncomfortable truth, which Henry studiously ignored, was that his sister was his heir. If he were to die, James IV would effectively rule both kingdoms of the British Isles. His dynastic ambitions at home unfulfilled, Henry aspired to play a greater role in Europe. The main prize for Henry was not Scotland, but France. Yet it was in pursuit of this dream, a yearning to go back to the glory days of Henry V, that he would come into conflict with his brother-in-law and the Treaty of Perpetual Peace would be destroyed
  • Our husband knows it is witholden for his sake and will recompense us
  • By 1512 this family feud formed part of the wider backdrop of European war, as Henry VIII, in alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian, declared war against Louis XII of France
  • James visited Margaret and their son at Linlithgow in early August 1513 before he left for Edinburgh to oversee military preparations, praying for success in the beautiful church of St Michael just outside the palace gates. On August 13th the Scottish host, sporting the latest artillery technology, 20 pieces of cannon made of brass and supported by European experts in field warfare, left Edinburgh in a mighty procession of men and arms.
  • The old Earl of Surrey, a veteran of the Wars of the Roses, who accompanied Margaret Tudor on her journey to Scotland ten years previously, had moved rapidly north and now stood in James’ way
  • The Scots were stunned by their loss, though they did not fall apart. Henry VIII, fighting a desultory and vainglorious little war in France, had neither the interest nor the ability to follow up Surrey’s unlikely victory and James V grew up to carry on his father’s rivalry with the English monarch as the prolonged struggle between the Tudors and the Stewarts continued
  • The belief that Scotland as an independent kingdom died with James IV developed well after the event and has damaged his reputation. But it also fails to recognise his achievements. A true Renaissance monarch, he had made Scotland into a European power and his people mourned him greatly.
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This War Must Be Ended | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...war-must-be-ended Germany the Kaiser World War Military
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  • August 8th, 1918 was ‘the black day of the German Army’. On that day the British Fourth Army and the French First Army, both under command of Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, launched a highly successful attack south of the River Somme: the Battle of Amiens
  • German losses amounted to nearly 27,000; the British alone captured over 300 guns
  • Nevertheless, by August 11th, the German High Command, assessing the damage done, recognized that the war had taken a decisive turn. At a conference at Advanced General Headquarters that day, the Kaiser said: ‘I see that we must strike a balance. We have nearly reached the limit of our powers of resistance. The war must be ended
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  • At the front the month continued as it had begun. On August 17th Marshal Foch, the Allied Generalissimo, extended the offensive southward in the Battle of Noyon, pulling in the French Third Army. On the 21st Haig extended it northward, bringing in the British Third Army for the Battle of Albert; on the 26th the British First Army began the Fourth Battle of the Scarpe; on the 30th the Third and Fourth Armies were engaged in the Battle of Bapaume
  • An emissary of the High Command set off for Berlin on the evening of September 29th to demand that the Government should take immediate steps to procure an armistice; six weeks would elapse before that became effective. During those weeks, the quiet Belgian town of Spa became the last citadel of the German Empire
  • The Kaiser had returned to Berlin, where this demand (signed ‘Hindenburg’, but actually from Ludendorff) was naturally regarded as a cry of despair, gravely complicating the search for a new Chancellor
  • The only likely candidate at this stage was Prince Max of Baden, ‘the one prominent royalist liberal in the Empire’, who was known to want an early peace. But not that early: every instinct of statemanship indicated the need to prepare the ground, to avoid what must otherwise look like sheer capitulation. The High Command, however, was adamant; and the Kaiser supported it
  • An obvious divergence between the views of the German leaders and the American President existed in the matters of Alsace-Lorraine and the Polish districts of East Prussia, both regarded by the High Command as integral German territory
  • The High Command, in fact, regarded the Fourteen Points merely as heads of discussion, admissible only to bring the disastrous fighting to a stop. With misgiving, Prince Max composed a Note to President Wilson which was forwarded to him via Switzerland on October 4th; it accepted the Fourteen Points, and certain subsequent elucidations by the President, ‘as a basis for peace negotiations’
  • was the German Note simply a new move in an old game, or was there a more estimable thrust behind it
  • Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and war...’ - a concept that had threatened to bring Britain and America to blows in 1915
  • There could be, he said, no cessation of hostilities until the Germans had evacuated the invaded territories, and returned their inhabitants. Among these territories he firmly listed Alsace-Lorraine. He demanded bridgeheads over the Rhine and Allied occupation of the whole left bank as security for reparations; everything that the Germans could not remove in the prescribed time should become allied property
  • And the Germans, with that extraordinary talent for self-destruction which they sometimes displayed, now powerfully reinforced every instinct towards harshness on the Allied side. On October 10th the mail-packet Leinster was twice torpedoed in the Irish Channel with a loss of 527 lives, causing, as Lloyd George says, ‘a howl of indignation’. The timing could hardly have been worse; but one cannot blame the U-boat captain; it is the German Government that has to be blamed for not suspending the submarine campaign while negotiations were in progress
  • But now the President reminded the Germans that, in a speech on the Fourth of July, he had also spoken of ‘the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly and of its single choice, disturb the peace of the world’; and this was one of the supplementary pronouncements that the Germans had also agreed to accept. It now became clear that the ‘arbitrary power’ in question was the German Empire; the Allies were either unaware of, or chose to ignore, the fact that the Empire had undergone a drastic change; nothing would satisfy them now but the abdication of the Kaiser
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Sultan of Yogyakarta: A feminist revolution in an ancient kingdom - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-43806210 women asia revolution politics
shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The Sultan of Yogyakarta holds a powerful political and spiritual position on the Indonesian island of Java. He is manoeuvring to make his eldest daughter his heir, sparking a bitter feud, as the BBC's Indonesia editor Rebecca Henschke reports.
  • In Javanese culture, things are not said directly, but instead conveyed by symbolism.
  • The Javanese royal rule stretches back to the 16th Century and while the family is now Muslim like most Indonesians, the rituals they carry out are steeped in mysticism, a product of Hinduism, Buddhism and animism of the past.
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  • Fingernail clippings and locks of the sultan's hair are offered to the sea goddess every year. They are also offered to the ogre Sapu Jagat inside Mount Merapi, one of Indonesia's most active volcanoes that looms over the city.
  • So Yogyakarta is the only place in Indonesia where residents don't get to directly elect their leader. When it was suggested by Jakarta that this should change in 2010 there were angry protests on the streets of Yogyakarta and the central government backed down.
  • Veneration of objects or idols, and hints to polytheism, run in conflict with the Wahhabis strain of Islam that is growing in popularity in Java.
  • Recently the daughter of Indonesia's first President Sukarno, Sukmawati, was reported to the police for blasphemy and forced to apologise for saying in a poem that the Javanese hairbun was more beautiful than a Islamic chador.
  • The sultan's extended family accuses the queen, who is a senator in the national parliament, of leading the revolt against tradition.
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Angkor Wat - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com - 0 views

www.history.com/...angkor-wat Angkor War history
shared by g-dragon on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • Originally dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, Angkor Wat became a Buddhist temple by the end of the 12th century.
  • Although it is no longer an active temple, it serves as an important tourist attraction in Cambodia, despite the fact it sustained significant damage during the autocratic rule of the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s and in earlier regional conflicts.
  • However, when it was built, it served as the capital of the Khmer empire, which ruled the region at the time. The word “Angkor” means “capital city” in the Khmer language, while the word “Wat” means “temple.”
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  • Initially, Angkor Wat was designed as a Hindu temple, as that was the religion of the region’s ruler at the time, Suryavarman II. However, by the end of the 12th century, it was considered a Buddhist site.
  • As Angkor Wat’s significance within the Buddhist religion of the region increased, so too did the legend surrounding the site. Many Buddhists believe the temple’s construction was ordered by the god Indra, and that the work was accomplished in one night.
  • However, scholars now know it took several decades to build Angkor Wat, from the design phase to completion.
  • Although Angkor Wat was no longer a site of political, cultural or commercial significance by the 13th century, it remained an important monument for the Buddhist religion into the 1800s.
  • The compliment can likely be attributed to the temple’s design, which is supposed to represent Mount Meru, the home of the gods, according to tenets of both the Hindu and Buddhist faiths. Its five towers are intended to recreate the five peaks of Mount Meru, while the walls and moat below honor the surrounding mountain ranges and the sea.
  • Unfortunately, although Angkor Wat remained in use until fairly recently—into the 1800s—the site has sustained significant damage, from forest overgrowth to earthquakes to war.
  • When Cambodia fell into a brutal civil war in the 1970s, Angkor Wat, somewhat miraculously, sustained relatively minimal damage.
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MH370: Four-year hunt ends after private search is completed - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-44285241 Malaysia crash crisis death
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  • The four-year hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has ended with the latest, privately funded search coming to a close.
  • "People might think: 'Why are these people still harping on about this, it's been four years'. It's important for people to remember that MH370 is not history," she told the Guardian newspaper.
  • There is still no answer. Finding the plane, or at least more bits of its wreckage, could prove key but investigators have very limited information about the plane's last hours.
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  • Experts still cannot come to a definitive conclusion as to whether MH370 remained under the pilot's command, or crashed out of control into the sea.
  • Although the Malaysian government says it will not extend the private search, Anwar Ibrahim, who is widely tipped as next prime minister, told The Australian newspaper there was "further digging" to be done.
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Catherine II - Emperor - Biography - 0 views

www.biography.com/...catherine-ii-9241622 Russia's Absolute Rulers
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  • Catherine II served as empress of Russia for more than three decades in the late 18th century after overthrowing her husband, Peter III
  • was born in Prussia in 1729 and married into the Russian royal family in 1745
  • Catherine orchestrated a coup to become empress of Russia in 1762
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  • After more than three decades as Russia's absolute ruler, she died in 1796
  • Catherine II, often called Catherine the Great, became empress consort of Russia when her husband, Peter III, ascended to the throne following the death of his aunt, Elizabeth of Russia, on December 25, 1761
  • During his brief time in power, Catherine II conspired with her lover, Gregory Orlov, a Russian lieutenant, and other powerful figures to leverage the discontent with Peter and build up support for his removal
  • Catherine II finally produced a heir with son Paul, born on September 20, 1754. The paternity of the child has been a subject of great debate among scholars, with some claiming that Paul's father was actually Sergei Saltykov, a Russian noble and member of the court
  • Concerned about being toppled by opposing forces early in her reign, Catherine II sought to appease the military and the church
  • she also returned the church's land and property that had been taken by Peter, though she later changed course on that front, making the church part of the state
  • While Catherine believed in absolute rule, she did make some efforts toward social and political reforms
  • During Catherine's reign, Russia expanded its borders. She made substantial gains in Poland, where she had earlier installed her former lover, Polish count Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the country's throne
  • Catherine gave parts of Poland to Prussia and Austria, while taking the eastern region herself.
  • Russia's actions in Poland triggered a military conflict with Turkey. Enjoying numerous victories in 1769 and 1770, Catherine showed the world that Russia was a mighty power. She reached a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire in 1774, bringing new lands into the empire and giving Russia a foothold in the Black Sea
  • Catherine II started out as a minor German princess. Her birth name was Sophie Friederike Auguste, and she grew up in Stettin in a small principality called Anhalt-Zebst. Her father, Christian August, a prince of this tiny dominion, gained fame for his military career by serving as a general for Frederick William I of Prussia
  • Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, Catherine II's mother
  • By the mid-1790s, Catherine had enjoyed several decades as Russia's absolute ruler. She had a strained relationship with her son and heir, Paul, over her grip on power, but she enjoyed her grandchildren, especially the oldest one, Alexander
  • Historians have also criticized her for not improving the lives of serfs, who represented the majority of the Russian population. Still, Catherine made some significant contributions to Russia, bringing forth educational reforms and championing the arts. As leader, Catherine also extended the country's borders through military might and diplomatic prowess
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Restoring Forests Could Help Put a Brake on Global Warming, Study Finds - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...es-forests-climate-change.html forests global warming trees crisis policy
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  • How many trees could be planted on every available parcel of land on Earth, where they could go, and what impact could that have on our survival?
  • the planet could support nearly 2.5 billion additional acres of forest without shrinking our cities and farms, and that those additional trees, when they mature, could store a whole lot of the extra carbon — 200 gigatons of carbon, to be precise — generated by industrial activity over the last 150 years.
  • The study’s authors asserted that, under their model, forest restoration could absorb two-thirds of historic emissions. Zeke Hausfather, an analyst for the climate science website Carbon Brief, said the true figure would be closer to one-third. That’s because part of the emissions absorbed by the additional trees would have been absorbed by the soil or the seas anyway.
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  • like every other climate solution, it’s part of a larger portfolio of strategies rather than a silver bullet,”
  • reforestation “won’t fix the climate problem, albeit it should be part of the solution.”
  • mass reforestation would not be a quick fix for climate change but said it would result in an “unexpectedly huge carbon drawdown solution” in the long term
  • “The new information simply allows us to re-prioritize investment into the restoration of forests and the conservation of existing forests as this has more potential for carbon capture than we could have anticipated,
  • The reason forests are important is that they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and incorporate it into their roots and branches. That absorbed carbon becomes part of the soil when trees die and decompose. Depending on factors like temperature and soil management, it can remain there for millenniums.
  • even mass die-offs of trees release less carbon than expected into the atmosphere.
  • The latest United Nations-backed climate science panel has estimated that it would take 2.5 billion acres of new forest cover to stave off the most devastating impacts of climate change. The study led by ETH Zurich tried to quantify where on Earth new trees could be grown.
  • A handful of countries could make a very big difference. The researchers found that Russia could restore 373 million acres, or 151 million hectares, of forest. That was followed by the United States, with 255 million acres and Canada with 193 million acres. Other large countries like Australia, Brazil and China also have large areas suitable for forest restoration
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Jill Lepore On Why We Need a New American National Story - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...canism-nationalism-jill-lepore american national story historiography history US nationalism
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  • Degler, a gentle and quietly heroic man, accused his colleagues of nothing short of dereliction of duty: appalled by nationalism, they had abandoned the study of the nation.
  • “If we historians fail to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.”
  • historians seemed to believe that if they stopped studying it, it would die sooner: starved, neglected, and abandoned.
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  • Nation-states, when they form, imagine a past. That, at least in part, accounts for why modern historical writing arose with the nation-state.
  • For more than a century, the nation-state was the central object of historical inquiry.
  • studying American history meant studying the American nation. As the historian John Higham put it, “From the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s, the nation was the grand subject of American history.”
  • “A history in common is fundamental to sustaining the affiliation that constitutes national subjects,” the historian Thomas Bender once observed. “Nations are, among other things, a collective agreement, partly coerced, to affirm a common history as the basis for a shared future.”
  • in the 1970s, studying the nation fell out of favor in the American historical profession. Most historians started looking at either smaller or bigger things, investigating the experiences and cultures of social groups or taking the broad vantage promised by global history
  • The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of blackguards willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to empty out old rubbish bags full of festering resentments and calls to violence.
  • When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism. 
  • is there any option other than to try to craft a new American history—one that could foster a new Americanism? 
  • o review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws.
  • A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry.
  • These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.”
  • Not until the 1840s, when European nations were swept up in what has been called “the age of nationalities,” did Americans come to think of themselves as belonging to a nation, with a destiny
  • the state-nation, which arises when the state is formed before the development of any sense of national consciousness. The United States might be seen as a, perhaps the only, spectacular example of the latter”
  • Bancroft’s ten-volume History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, was published between 1834 and 1874.
  • Nineteenth-century nationalism was liberal, a product of the Enlightenment. It rested on an analogy between the individual and the collective
  • An architect of manifest destiny, Bancroft wrote his history in an attempt to make the United States’ founding appear inevitable, its growth inexorable, and its history ancient. De-emphasizing its British inheritance, he celebrated the United States as a pluralistic and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world:
  • “The concept of national self-determination—transferring the ideal of liberty from the individual to the organic collectivity—was raised as the banner of liberalism.” 
  • Nineteenth-century Americans understood the nation-state within the context of an emerging set of ideas about human rights: namely, that the power of the state guaranteed everyone eligible for citizenship the same set of irrevocable political rights.
  • The American Civil War was a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; it has just moved around
  • Southerners were nationalists, too. It’s just that their nationalism was what would now be termed “illiberal” or “ethnic,” as opposed to the Northerners’ liberal or civic nationalism.
  • hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century.
  • “Ours is the government of the white man,” the American statesman John C. Calhoun declared in 1848, arguing against admitting Mexicans as citizens of the United States. “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis,” the American politician Stephen Douglas said in 1858. “It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” 
  • In 1861, the Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he explained that the ideas that lay behind the U.S. Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races”—here ceding Lincoln’s argument—but that “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and moral condition.”
  • the battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism raged on, especially during the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the powers of nation-states—namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights, universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens
  • For Douglass, progress could only come in this new form of a nation, the composite nation. “We shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the Isles of the sea,” he said, and “all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same Government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.”
  • that effort had been betrayed by white Northerners and white Southerners who patched the United States back together by inventing a myth that the war was not a fight over slavery at all but merely a struggle between the nation and the states. “We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present,” Du Bois wrote bitterly.
  • Nationalism was taking a turn, away from liberalism and toward illiberalism, including in Germany
  • That “placed the question of the ‘nation,’ and the citizen’s feelings towards whatever he regarded as his ‘nation,’ ‘nationality’ or other centre of loyalty, at the top of the political agenda.”
  • began in the United States in the 1880s, with the rise of Jim Crow laws, and with a regime of immigration restriction, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting immigration, which was passed in 1882. Both betrayed the promises and constitutional guarantees made by the 14th and 15th Amendments.
  • the white men who delivered speeches at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association during those years had little interest in discussing racial segregation, the disenfranchisement of black men, or immigration restriction
  • All offered national histories that left out the origins and endurance of racial inequality.
  • the uglier and more illiberal nationalism got, the more liberals became convinced of the impossibility of liberal nationalism
  • The last, best single-volume popular history of the United States written in the twentieth century was Degler’s 1959 book, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America: a stunning, sweeping account that, greatly influenced by Du Bois, placed race, slavery, segregation, and civil rights at the center of the story, alongside liberty, rights, revolution, freedom, and equality. Astonishingly, it was Degler’s first book.
  • much of U.S. history has been a battle between them. 
  • with the coming of the Vietnam War, American historians stopped studying the nation-state in part out of a fear of complicity with atrocities of U.S. foreign policy and regimes of political oppression at home.
  • Bender observed in Rethinking American History in a Global Age in 2002. “Only recently,” he continued, “and because of the uncertain status of the nation-state has it been recognized that history as a professional discipline is part of its own substantive narrative and not at all sufficiently self-conscious about the implications of that circularity.” Since then, historians have only become more self-conscious, to the point of paralysis
  • If nationalism was a pathology, the thinking went, the writing of national histories was one of its symptoms, just another form of mythmaking
  • Beginning in the 1960s, women and people of color entered the historical profession and wrote new, rich, revolutionary histories, asking different questions and drawing different conclusions
  • a lot of historians in the United States had begun advocating a kind of historical cosmopolitanism, writing global rather than national history
  • Michael Walzer grimly announced that “the tribes have returned.” They had never left. They’d only become harder for historians to see, because they weren’t really looking anymore. 
  • Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But not writing national history creates more problems, and these problems are worse.
  • What would a new Americanism and a new American history look like? They might look rather a lot like the composite nationalism imagined by Douglass and the clear-eyed histories written by Du Bois
  • A nation born in contradiction will forever fight over the meaning of its history. But that doesn’t mean history is meaningless, or that anyone can afford to sit out the fight.
  • “The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned
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Climate Change Threatens the World's Food Supply, United Nations Warns - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...limate-change-food-supply.html climate change food supply methane
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  • The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.
  • A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming
  • “People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors. “People don’t stay and die where they are. People migrate.”
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  • Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply
  • food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.
  • A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once
  • “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”
  • The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major re-evaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior
  • Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.
  • “One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Dr. Rosenzweig said. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”
  • activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
  • Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras showing up at the United States’ border with Mexico increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the signal of climate change
  • As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes.
  • Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
  • will also reduce food’s nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields and harm livestock
  • In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification and rising seas
  • Overall if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, so will food costs, according to the report, affecting people around the world.
  • “You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,”
  • agriculture itself is also exacerbating climate change.
  • the window to address the threat is closing rapidly
  • Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline
  • And the emissions of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,”
  • (By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)
  • cattle are significant producers of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, and an increase in global demand for beef and other meats has fueled their numbers and increased deforestation in critical forest systems like the Amazon
  • each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars
  • The authors urge changes in how food is produced and distributed, including better soil management, crop diversification and fewer restrictions on trade
  • They also call for shifts in consumer behavior, noting that at least one-quarter of all food worldwide is wasted
  • But protecting the food supply and cutting greenhouse emissions can also come into conflict with each other, forcing hard choices. For instance, the widespread use of strategies such as bioenergy — like growing corn to produce ethanol — could lead to the creation of new deserts or other land degradation
  • The report also calls for institutional changes, including better access to credit for farmers in developing countries and stronger property rights
  • The same is true for planting large numbers of trees (something often cited as a powerful strategy to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere), which can push crops and livestock onto less productive land
  • But it would also increase food prices as much as 80 percent by 2050.
  • “We cannot plant trees to get ourselves out of the problem that we’re in,
  • “The trade-offs that would keep us below 1.5 degrees, we’re not talking about them. We’re not ready to confront them yet.”
  • Preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius is likely to require both the widespread planting of trees as well as “substantial” bioenergy to help reduce the use of fossil fuels
  • “Above 2 degrees of global warming there could be an increase of 100 million or more of the population at risk of hunger,” Edouard Davin, a researcher at ETH Zurich and an author of the report, said by email. “We need to act quickly
  • Planting as many trees as possible would reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by about nine gigatons each year
  • “Agricultural practices that include indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to overcoming the combined challenges of climate change, food security, biodiversity conservation, and combating desertification and land degradation,”
  • an average of three people were killed per week defending their land in 2018, with more than half of them killed in Latin America.
  • the longer policymakers wait, the harder it will be to prevent a global crisis. “Acting now may avert or reduce risks and losses, and generate benefits to society,” the authors wrote. Waiting to cut emissions, on the other hand, risks “irreversible loss in land ecosystem functions and services required for food, health, habitable settlements and production.”
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I was wrong on climate change. Why can't other conservatives admit it, too? - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html climate change conservatives conservatism denial crisis politics
shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • I used to be a climate-change skeptic. I was one of those conservatives who thought that the science was inconclusive, that fears of global warming were as overblown as fears of a new ice age in the 1970s, that climate change was natural and cyclical, and that there was no need to incur any economic costs to deal with this speculative threat.
  • I no longer think any of that, because the scientific consensus is so clear and convincing.
  • “Observations collected around the world provide significant, clear, and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher, and is rising more rapidly, than anything modern civilization has experienced, with widespread and growing impacts.”
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  • “annual average temperatures have increased by 1.8°F across the contiguous United States since the beginning of the 20th century” and that “annual median sea level along the U.S. coast . . . has increased by about 9 inches since the early 20th century as oceans have warmed and land ice has melted.”
  • he National Climate Assessment warns that global warming could cause a 10 percent decline in gross domestic product and that the “potential for losses in some sectors could reach hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of this century.” Iowa and other farm states will be particularly hard hit as crops wilt and livestock die.
  • Compared with the crushing costs of climate change, the action needed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions is modest and manageabl
  • a carbon tax would increase average electricity rates from 17 cents to 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. The average household, he writes, would see spending on energy rise “only about $35 per month.” That’s not nothing — but it’s better than allowing climate change to continue unabated
  • I’ve owned up to the danger. Why haven’t other conservatives? They are captives, first and foremost, of the fossil fuel industry, which outspent green groups 10 to 1 in lobbying on climate change from 2000 to 2016. But they are also captives of their own rigid ideology
15More

The oceans are warming faster than we thought, and scientists suggest we brace for impa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ntists-suggest-we-brace-impact youth activism effect ocean temperature
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  • The oceans are warming faster than climate reports have suggested, according to a new synthesis of temperature observations published this week.
  • “The numbers are coming in 40 to 50 percent [warmer] than the last IPCC report,”
  • Oceans cover 70 percent of the globe and absorb 93 percent of the planet’s extra heat from climate change.
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  • They appeared to miss the so-called global warming hiatus between 1998 and 2013. At the time, scientists posited there wasn’t really a hiatus, but that the heat was simply building up in the oceans, or that there was a data collection issue. They were right, but that didn’t save the models from criticism.
  • The scientists combined four data sets to paint a picture of what has been happening in the oceans since 1991
  • Trenberth and his co-authors say ocean heat content, which is a measure of the warmth of the water down to about 2,000 meters, is a “great metric for measuring global warming” because the data isn’t as erratic as the temperature on land, and it captures much more of the planet.
  • n the process, they discovered something interesting: Their data agrees with what the climate models were predicting
  • Trenberth and his colleagues say if society continues to emit greenhouse gas at its current rate, oceans will rise one foot by the end of the century on top of the rise expected from melting land ice on Greenland and Antarctica.
  • This synthesis suggests the models are doing just fine
  • The IPCC reports have research deadlines at least a year before they are published; science in the most recent report may have been done six to eight years ago and “there’s a whole lot of stuff that has happened since then,”
  • Looking forward, there are two scenarios scientists are working with. The low-emissions scenario that the Paris climate change agreement was built around is no longer realistic, Trenberth said. The high-emissions, business-as-usual scenario will probably continue until about 2040, in his opinion, but eventually society will figure out how to manage the crisis.
  • “Yes, we need to try and stop emitting greenhouse gas. But the inertia is large,” Trenberth said. “Therefore the climate is going to continue to change.
  • Di Liberto agrees that we’re already feeling the effects, but he sees things changing in society, too
  • “We’ve spent too much time and effort on people who may not be convinced” that climate change is real and important, he said
  • But now there seems to be this grass-roots movement of young people who care. I don’t remember a time like this.”
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Opinion | The White House Blocked My Report on Climate Change and National Security - T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-climate-change.html climate change security science politics
shared by Javier E on 31 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council
  • My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities
  • I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations
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  • Congress was deprived of the full analysis, including the scientific baseline from which it was drawn. Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record.
  • The bottom line of written testimony was this: “Climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security over the next 20 years.”
  • In blocking the submission of the written testimony, the White House trampled not only on the scientific integrity of the assessment but also on the analytic independence of an arm of the intelligence community
  • Decades of scientific measurements have established that global temperatures are increasing and ocean waters are acidifying. These changes produce shifts in a vast number of earth system processes: in the atmosphere, ocean, freshwater, soil, ice masses, permafrost and organisms making up the biosphere.
  • Some effects are well known, like increased frequency and intensity of heat waves and droughts, and rising sea levels. Others are less familiar, like decreasing oceanic oxygen levels and the redistribution of species.
  • With these environmental changes we should expect disruptions to global water and food security, reduced economic security and weakened livelihoods, worsened human and animal health, and risks to the global supply chain on which the United States and its partners depend
  • Political instability, heightened tensions over resources, climate-linked humanitarian crises and adverse effects to militaries in some places are likely to increase
  • I believe that once one accepts that global temperatures are increasing, a fact that only the most ardent climate disbeliever rejects, the case for that fact’s relevance to nation security directly follows.
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Andrew Sullivan: Biden Can Make the Moral Case Against Trump - 0 views

nymag.com/...-moral-case-against-trump.html election 2010 candidates
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  • Next year will not be a midterm election, after all. It will be a referendum on Trump — as it has to be, and as Trump will insist it be
  • the central task of the Democratic candidate will be not just to explain how dangerous Trump’s rhetoric and behavior is, but how un-American it is, and how a second term could leave behind an unutterably altered America. One term and the stain, however dark, might fade in time. Two terms and it marks us forever.
  • Biden made this moral case. And he did it with feeling, and a wounded sense of patriotism. He invoked previous presidents, including Republicans, who knew how insidiously evil white supremacy is and wouldn’t give any quarter to it. He reminded us that in politics, words are acts, and they have consequences when uttered by a national leader: “The words of a president … can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace. They can calm a nation in turmoil. They can console and confront and comfort in times of tragedy … They can appeal to the better angels of our nature. But they can also unleash the deepest, darkest forces in this nation.” And this, Biden argues, is what Trump has done: tap that dark psychic force, in an act of malignant and nihilist narcissism.
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  • he went further and explained why America, at its best, is an inversion of that twisted racial identitarianism: “What this president doesn’t understand is that unlike every other nation on earth, we’re unable to define what constitutes ‘American’ by religion, by ethnicity, or by tribe; you can’t do it. America is an idea. An idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It gives hope to the most desperate people on earth.”
  • more importantly, Biden was able to express all this with authority. The speech was a defense of American decency against an indecent commander-in-chief — and it echoed loudly because Biden is, so evidently, a decent human
  • for 25 minutes or so this week, I felt as if I were living in America again, the America I love and chose to live in, a deeply flawed America, to be sure, marked forever by slavery’s stain, and racism’s endurance, but an America that, at its heart, is a decent country, full of decent people.
  • decency is the heart of his candidacy. And voting for Joe Biden feels like voting for some things we’ve lost and have one last chance to regain. Normalcy, generosity, civility, experience — and a reminder that, in this current darkness, Trump does not define America.
  • “Currently, 66 percent of the public says ‘it would be too risky to give U.S. presidents more power to deal directly with many of the country’s problems.’ About three-in-ten adults (29 percent) offer the contrasting opinion that ‘problems could be dealt with more effectively if U.S. presidents didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts.’”
  • Three in ten is not a terrible place to start if you want to become an American autocrat
  • here’s one demographic in particular that is even more fertile territory: “The share of conservative Republicans who say that presidents could deal with problems more effectively if they ‘didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts’ has doubled since March 2018. Today, about half of conservative Republicans (52 percent) hold this view, compared with 26 percent a year ago.
  • Brits now favor expanding security over freedom by 65 to 35 percent.
  • “Across all dimensions, support for security was highest among groups that the Conservative Party now relies on most heavily for its voters: older age groups, pensioners, white voters, and those with lower levels of education.” If you wonder why the Tory Party has shifted away from Thatcherite liberalism to more statist authoritarianism, this is a clue. If they didn’t, they’d disappear
  • “British politics is undergoing a sea change and it is for security, not freedom. Most voters are not freedom fighters who want more rampant individualism, a small state and lower taxes. They want well-funded public services, security for their family, and a strong community in the place in which they live.”
  • “66 percent of 25-34 year olds favor ‘strong leaders who do not have to bother with Parliament’ and 26 percent believe democracy is a bad way to run the country.”
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'Americans are waking up': two thirds say climate crisis must be addressed | Environmen... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...climate-change-crisis-cbs-poll americans climate crisis environment climate change survey greta
shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Two-thirds of Americans believe climate change is either a crisis or a serious problem, with a majority wanting immediate action to address global heating and its damaging consequences, major new polling has found.
  • Amid a Democratic primary shaped by unprecedented alarm over the climate crisis and an insurgent youth climate movement that is sweeping the world, the polling shows substantial if uneven support for tackling the issue.
  • More than a quarter of Americans questioned in the new CBS News poll consider climate change a “crisis”, with a further 36% defining it as a “serious problem”
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  • Two in 10 respondents said it was a minor problem, with just 16% considering it not worrisome at all.
  • More than half of polled Americans said they wanted the climate crisis to be confronted right away, with smaller groups happy to wait a few more years and just 18% rejecting any need to act.
  • “Americans are finally beginning waking up to the existential threat that the climate emergency poses to our society,
  • This is huge progress for our movement – and it’s young people that have been primarily responsible for that.
  • However, just 44% of poll respondents said human activity was a major contributor to climate change.
  • There is an even starker split on the findings of climate scientists. According to the CBS poll, 52% of Americans say “scientists agree that humans are a main cause” of the climate crisis, with 48% claiming there is disagreement among experts.
  • “This remains a vitally important misunderstanding – if you believe global warming is just a natural cycle, you’re unlikely to support policies intended to reduce carbon pollution, like regulations and taxes,”
  • “These results also again confirm a long-standing problem, which is that many Americans still believe scientists themselves are uncertain whether human-caused global warming is happening.
  • “Our own and others’ research has repeatedly found that this is a critical misunderstanding, promoted by the fossil fuel industry for decades, in order to sow doubt, increase public uncertainty and thus keep people stuck in the status quo, in a ‘wait and see’ mode.”
  • While nearly seven in 10 Democratic voters understand that humans significantly influence the climate and 80% want immediate action
  • just 20% of Republicans think humans are a primary cause and barely a quarter want rapid action.
  • On the science, nearly three-quarters of Democrats said almost all experts agree that humans are driving climate change, with just 29% of Republicans saying the same.
  • Younger people are far more likely to consider it a personal responsibility to address the climate crisis and to believe that a transition to 100% renewable energy is viable.
  • Young people have been galvanized by climate science being taught in schools as well as a spreading global activist movement spearheaded by Greta Thunberg
  • This generational divide even cuts across party affiliation, with two-thirds of Republican voters aged under 45 considering it their duty to address the climate crisis
  • Just 38% of Republicans aged over 45 feel the same.
  • Around three-quarters of all respondents said they understand that climate change is melting the Arctic, raising sea levels and causing warmer summers
  • Just 19% said humans can stop rising temperatures and the associated impacts, with nearly half thinking it possible to slow but not stop the changes and 23% refusing to believe humans can do anything at all
  • “By saying we should merely slow and not reverse global warming, we are passively accepting the deaths of billions of people,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, of the Climate Mobilization Project.
  • “The only thing that can protect us is an all-out, all-hands on deck mobilization, like we did during the second world war. Avoiding the collapse of civilization and restoring a safe climate should be every government’s top priority – at the national, state, and local levels.”
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Protesting Climate Change, Young People Take to Streets in a Global Strike - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...global-climate-strike.html climate change strike global
shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • “The challenge is translating something that is a global movement into a kind of concentrated political pressure that can influence government decisions,” she said. “It needs to be translated to influencing decision makers who aren’t already convinced.”
  • Rarely, if ever, has the modern world witnessed a youth movement so large and wide, spanning across societies rich and poor, tied together by a common if inchoate sense of rage.
  • “They are mobilized around an issue of consistent concern across countries and across geographic areas,”
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  • “It spans the developing-developed country divide. There aren’t that many issues that would unify in such a manner. And we all know the burden of climate change will fall on these kids’ shoulders when they are adults. They are acutely aware as well.”
  • Many brought handmade signs. “Think or Swim,” one read
  • A day after Tropical Storm Imelda swamped parts of southeast Texas, crowds in Houston chanted, “Our streets flood, so we flood the streets.”
  • Using the internet, young people are organizing across continents like no generation before them. And though their outsize demands for an end to fossil fuels mirror those of older environmentalists, their movement has captured the public imagination far more effectively.
  • At the Seattle headquarters of Amazon, hundreds of employees walked out, continuing pressure on company leaders to do more about climate change. Those workers won concessions this week, as Amazon vowed to be carbon neutral by 2040 and to order 100,000 electric delivery trucks.
  • But the workers demanded more action on Friday. They asked Amazon to stop providing cloud-computing support to fossil fuel companies and to stop giving donations to politicians, and groups, who have resisted efforts to take more action to halt climate change, holding signs that read “Amazon: Zero $$ for Political Climate Denial.”
  • At a time of fraying trust in authority figures, children — who by definition have no authority over anything — are increasingly driving the debate.
  • Tens of thousands of protesters marched through the streets of San Francisco, chanting, “Green New Deal, make it real,” and carrying signs that read “The sea is rising, so must we.”
  • “What’s unique about this is that young people are able to see their future is at risk today,”
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