Categories
Climate Change News

Visa dissonance: Why world music performers can’t always make it to the stage on time | KPCC – NPR News for Southern California [Video]

On July 31, the musical duo Comorian took the stage at Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival — for the past 40 years a showcase for “world music” stars as well as lesser known international musicians. (WOMAD stands for “World of Music, Arts and Dance.”)

This year headliners included Benin’s multi-Grammy winner Angélique Kidjo, octogenarian Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil and the wild card choice of Oklahoma City’s The Flaming Lips.

Comorian’s two members, M’madi Djibaba, 59, and Soubi Attoumane, 69, became the first musicians from Comoros to ever appear at WOMAD. An audience of hundreds listened to their original songs with ear-catching titles: “The Devil Doesn’t Eat Papaya, He Eats Fire” and “My Friends Went Abroad & Were Swallowed by the Waves.” After singing and playing an hour-long set of haunting acoustic music on handmade string instruments, the group earned two lengthy standing ovations and an encore.

But the duo almost didn’t make it to the stage. The reason: It was nearly impossible …

Watch/Read More
Categories
Climate Change News

Museum highlights climate change with tilted paintings [Video]

STORY: Activists from the group Last Generation smeared the screen in front of Klimt's "Death and Life" at the Leopold Museum in Vienna and glued one of their hands to it in the November protest calling for an end to drilling for oil."We found this way to be absolutely the wrong one," the museum's artistic director, Hans-Peter Wipplinger, told Reuters on the opening day of its response: a small exhibition with the full title "A Few Degrees More (Will Turn the World into an Uncomfortable Place)".It involves hanging 15 works by artists including Klimt and fellow Austrian great Egon Schiele at an angle, with texts calling attention to the effect that global warming of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels would have on the landscapes depicted in them.According to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), emissions must be halved by the mid-2030s if the world is to have any chance of limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels - a key target enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement."We wanted to initiate something productive, something communicative. That means conveying a message and not just in spectacular images (such as the protest) but by helping visitors learn about the situation and the various contexts of this global heating," Wipplinger said.The exhibition runs until June 26.

Categories
Climate Change News

Forget it, you can't keep politics out of climate change - Video

The latest U.S. climate report says we are drawing ever-closer to the 1.5-degrees-of-warming milestone. Jessica Green, professor of climate policy and politics, University of Toronto, says politics not technology is the crucial obstacle in slowing carbon pollution.