Africa women's film festival: Works centre on climate crisis and peacemaking

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Africa women's film festival: Works centre on climate crisis and peacemaking


The closing ceremony of the 6th African Women’s Film Festival in the Senegal capital is taking place with films on the theme of ‘climate emergency and peace’. The festival was postponed in April due to the presidential election.

Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque reports from Dakar.

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5 Comments

  1. Look at these masonic rats, she is not a Palestinian but freemasonic terrorist either she is Armenian or Greek but definitely not Palestinian, why are these people…….

  2. There has been a 10% decline in natural disasters since 2000 (CRED). Normalised disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920, so you're 50 times less likely to die from a climate-related disaster in a world that's 1°C warmer than 100 years ago (EM-DAT, CRED/UC). Deaths from drought have declined by 99%!

    As an example of good news, Climate Change saved 555,103 lives in England and Wales between 2001 and 2020 (ONS, 2022).

    Globally the ACE index (accumulated cyclone energy) 1980-2021 shows no increasing trend. Global Hurricane Landfalls 1970-2021 (updated from Weinkle et al, 2012) shows no trend. Satellite data since 1980 shows a slight downward global trend for total hurricaine numbers with 2021 being a record low year. From the NOAA GFDL website 'Global Warming and Hurricanes, An Overview of Current Research' (dated Feb. 9, 2023). And I quote "We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes." Multidecadal variability in Atlantic hurricaines is most probably related to the AMO (Vecchi et al, 2021). NOAA data 1851-2021 shows no trend in number of hurricaine landfalls with the record high being 1886. There is also no trend in the frequency of major hurricanes (Cat 3 +) for the same period, although the trend for the last 20 years is downwards. It makes no difference if you look at the Pacific. Using data from the JMA 1951-2022 we see typhoon activity trending downwards for over 7 decades.

    There is evidence cited in AR6 (IPCC) that Australia is experiencing the lowest frequency of tropical cyclones in the last 550 to 1,500 years, and that windspeed overland throughout the Northern Hemisphere has been dropping in recent decades. Also the number of intense storms (below 960 mbars) in the Northern Atlantic has fallen sharply since 1990 (Tilinina et al, 2021).

    Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report, Chapter 11,"Weather and Climate Extreme Events in Changing Climate" concludes that changes in the frequency and intensity of most severe weather events (with corresponding intense rainfall) have not been detected nor can they be attributed to human caused climate change.

    What the data from NOAA SPC shows about tornados: EF1-EF5 (1954-2022) no trend; EF3-EF5 (most destructive) (1954-2022) 50% decline. No EF5s in US since 2013 (a record absence).

    There has been no clear change in annual precipitation over the Earth's landmasses between 1850-2000 (Wijngaarden, 2015).

    Drought appears to be decreasing globally (Watts et al, 2018) measured by SPI 1901-2017.

    Deserts have shrunk considerably since the 1980's. The Sahara shrank by 12,000km² per year 1984-2015(Liu & Xue, 2020). The Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime. "The greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year"(NASA, 2019). Observations of Earth’s vegetative cover since the year 2000 by NASA’s Terra satellite show a 10% increase in vegetation in the first 20 years of the century. Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016 (Nature, 2018). As well as human intervention, the reasons for this include forests expanding polewards aided by additional CO2 and a slight rise in temperature. Increased CO2 causes this in two ways: it has a direct fertilising effect (the CFE), and it increases drought tolerance by reducing stomata. This greening of the Earth due to CO2 is now "an indisputable fact" (Chen et al, 2024). In fact, 55.15% of those areas greening have been doing so at an accelerated rate since 2001. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the Earth's primary productivity has increased by more than 30% (Campbell et al, 2017 and Haverd et al, 2020).

    The Earth’s natural vegetation productivity actually increased 6% in 18 years (Nemani et al, 2003) with 42% of this increase coming from the Amazon rainforests.

    Between 1961 and 2021 global cereal production increased 250% and cereal yield increased over 200%. Land used for cereal hardly increased (Data from World Bank, FAO/UN). This is the only time in human history that you are more likely to be overfed rather than underfed. We should be thankful we were borne into an age of such abundance. A US DoE study (Taylor & Schlenker, 2021) estimated that a 1 ppm increase in CO2 led to an increase of 0.4%, 0.6% and 1% in yield for corn, soybeans and wheat, respectively, and that CO2 increase was the main driver of the 500% yield growth in corn since 1940. Global tomato production has set a record each year for the past 10 years. Banana production has doubled in 20 years. All 10 of the largest sugar crops in global history occurred during the past 10 years. All 10 of the 10 largest rice crop years occurred during the past 10 years (UNFAO). 2023 was another record cereal crop.

    The Great Barrier Reef's coral cover reached the greatest extent ever recorded in 2022 and 2023 (AIMS) despite reports of supposed repeated bleaching. If you look at the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) data, the WIO (West Indian Ocean) shows 26% hard coral cover in 1985 upto 30% in 2020. South Asia reefs shows a decline around 2000 to below 25% then a regrowth to around 40% (2010) and a decline to 25% (2020). The Red Sea shows no change at around 25% (1995-2020). So the pattern in these three areas show no relationship to each other or to a changing climate. The Caribbean region reefs have a cover of around 0.15 ± 0.02. There is no evidence of a major reduction in coral cover in the Caribbean over the last two decades.

    GCRMN data for the most important coral bioregion, the East Asia Seas, with 30% of the world’s coral reefs, and containing the most diverse coral of the ‘Coral Triangle’, show no statistically significant net coral loss since records began. The East Asia region has the biggest human population living in close proximity to reefs, and is located in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool – the hottest major water mass on earth.

    Life is most diverse in the warmest parts of the world’s oceans. This has been shown across 13 major taxonomic groups from zooplankton to marine mammals. Warmer water = more biodiversity. This is a scare story about things you cannot see.

    Extinction rates (1500-2009) peaked around 1900 at 50 per decade. Extinction rates have declined dramatically to around 4 to per decade in the 2000s. So the extinction rate is very low: 900 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years (IUCN), so from observations there are an average of slightly less than 2 species lost every year. Out of a known species total of over 2 million. That gives an annual percentage loss of less than 0.0001%. That's background extinction. At that frequency it will take over 930,000 years to reach 80% extinction of species experienced at the K-T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs. Of course, extinction is a natural part of the evolution of life on this planet with the average lifespan of a species thought to be about 1 million years (cf 930,000). It is estimated that 99.9% of all plant and animal species that have existed have gone extinct. It should also be noted that no taxonomic families have become extinct in the last 500 years. In fact marine diversity at the taxonomic level of families is the highest it has ever been in the Earth's long history (see Sepkoski Curve). In a review of 16,009 species, most populations (85%) did not show significant trends in abundance, and those that did were balanced between winners (8%) and losers (7%) (Dornelas et al, 2019). There have been only 9 species of continental birds and mammals confirmed extinct since 1500 (Loehle, 2011). No global marine animals have become extinct in the past 50 years (McCauley et, 2015 using IUCN data).

    There is no climate crisis.