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Donald Trump appeals $454m New York civil fraud judgment as $112,000-a-day interest accrues
Tuesday, 27 February 2024 04:44 Written by Michael Abiodun
Former US President, Donald Trump has appealed his $454m New York civil fraud judgment, challenging judge Arthur Engoron's finding that the former president lied about his wealth as he grew the real estate empire that launched him to stardom. Trump’s lawyers wrote in court papers that they were asking the appeals court to decide whether Engoron “committed errors of law and/or fact” and whether he abused his discretion or “acted in excess” of his jurisdiction. Trump’s appeal was expected. Trump had vowed to appeal and his lawyers had been laying the groundwork for months by objecting frequently to Engoron’s handling of the trial. If Trump is unsuccessful at the appellate division, he can ask the state’s highest court, the court of appeals, to consider taking his case. In January, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3m to the writer E Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him in 2019 of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. That is on top of the $5m a jury awarded Carroll in a related trial last year.
Trump's lawyers filed notices of appeal on Monday, February 26, asking the state’s mid-level appeals court to overturn Judge Engoron’s 16 February verdict in the lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, and reverse staggering penalties that threaten to wipe out Trump’s cash reserves.
Trump’s appeal paperwork did not address whether Trump was seeking to pause collection of the judgment while he appeals by putting up money, assets or an appeal bond covering the amount owed to qualify for an automatic stay.
Engoron found that Trump, his company and top executives, including his sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr, schemed for years to deceive banks and insurers by inflating his wealth on financial statements used to secure loans and make deals. Among other penalties, the judge put strict limitations on the ability of Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, to do business in New York.
The appeal ensures that the legal fight over Trump’s business practices will persist into for the time being, as he tries to clinch the Republican presidential nomination in his quest to retake the White House.
If upheld, Engoron’s ruling will force Trump to give up a sizable chunk of his fortune. Engoron ordered Trump to pay $355m in penalties, but with interest the total has grown to nearly $454m. That total will increase by nearly $112,000 a day until he pays.
During the trial, Trump’s lawyers accused Engoron of “tangible and overwhelming” bias. They have also objected to the legal mechanics of James’s lawsuit. Trump contends the law she sued him under is a consumer-protection statute that is normally used to rein in businesses that rip off customers.
Trump’s lawyers have long argued that some of the allegations are barred by the statute of limitations, contending that Engoron failed to comply with an appellate division ruling last year that he narrow the scope of the trial to weed out outdated allegations.
The diversity within Black Canada should be recognized and amplified
Tuesday, 13 February 2024 02:01 Written by theconversation 
Alpha Abebe, McMaster University
It seems trite, in 2024, to suggest that the Black population in Canada is diverse. On the surface, this is a relatively uncontroversial point to make and one that most people would agree with.
However, are we curious enough about what this diversity actually looks like? Further, what are the implications of reckoning with these nuances as we support and shape Black-focused policies, programs, studies, and spaces? These questions lead us into less certain terrain.
Global music star Abel Tesfaye, formerly known as The Weeknd, is arguably one of the most recognizable contemporary Black Canadian figures. Piecing together some of the public details about his background and activities paints a picture that helps us appreciate the textured landscape of Black Canada today.
Abel was born in Toronto to Ethiopian immigrant parents and raised in Scarborough — a neighbourhood with diverse Black communities. His music draws on a wide repertoire of Black musical traditions, including R&B and Ethiopian influences and melodies.
His recent philanthropy is also notable, including donations to causes such as Black Lives Matter, Ethiopic Studies at the University of Toronto and humanitarian efforts in Tigray (northern Ethiopia).
When we zoom in to individual stories like Abel’s, we can appreciate the multifaceted nature of Black Canada and the connections between contemporary and historical processes and events.
Black Canadian histories
Black Studies scholars Peter James Hudson and Aaron Kamugisha remind us that “despite Black Canada’s apparent marginality,” it exists and matters as it relates to our histories, cultures, ideas and politics as a country. The new edited volume Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian History by history professors Michele A. Johnson and Funké Aladejebi underscores this point and demonstrates that we can trace Black people to every corner in Canada, across both space and time.
There are many historic Black communities in Canada established by people brought by, fleeing and descended from the transatlantic slave trade, including Africville, a Black settlement in Nova Scotia.
There was a new and large wave of Black people who arrived from the Caribbean beginning in the 1960s, following the introduction of a point-based immigration system in Canada. Generations of Caribbean communities have made an indelible mark on Canada, from underpinning the health-care system in the 20th century, to solidifying the Jamaican beef patty as an essential staple in the Toronto diet.
This only begins to scratch the surface of the multiplicity of experiences, communities and stories encompassed within Black Canada. Yet even these few details are ones you rarely bump into, but rather have to go searching for on your own. The mainstream discourse around Blackness in Canada often leans too heavily upon American Black history and politics, and/or monolithic depictions of “the Black community.”
There is utility and beauty found behind the broad and unifying banner of Blackness. We saw this most starkly during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, as a diversity of Black people, communities and organizations stood in solidarity and collective pain and grief. While it is important to amplify and stay attuned to these collective identities and movements, it should not be at the expense of attention to the details of this bigger picture.
New waves of immigration
Statistics Canada census data from both 2016 and 2021 captures changes that were already apparent to many of us living alongside, working with or paying attention to Black people in Canada. Demographics have shifted considerably, owing in large part to new waves and patterns in immigration trends.
To begin with, the Black population in Canada is growing rapidly — from 573,000 in 1996 to 1.5 million in 2021. Around 60 per cent of Black people in Canada were born abroad. While earlier generations of Black immigrants were mostly from the Caribbean, more recent immigrants are coming from African countries, including Nigeria and Ethiopia. This is also shifting broader national demographics, as Africa is now the second largest source continent representing recent immigrants in Canada.
These migration patterns are more than footnotes in Black Canadian history. This diversity intersects with vastly different migration pathways and immigration statuses, class differences, unique cultural and linguistic influences, a multitude of religious traditions, as well as a variety of local and transnational social and political practices.
Diversity of Black experiences
We need the language, and quite frankly the attention span, to make sense of these unique Black trajectories and stories in Canada. For example, experiences and insights coming from the Somali diaspora community in Etobicoke are likely different than long-established Black communities in Halifax. Also, despite living with the unifying experience of encountering anti-Black racism, new Black Canadians who arrive as economic migrants may benefit from resources and privileges unavailable to Black folks who grew up in structurally-induced intergenerational poverty.
There is also so much to make note of as far as how Blackness itself is being made and remade in Canada through these shifting tides. Eden Hagos is a young Black-Canadian entrepreneur and founder of the online food and culture platform Black Foodie. Hagos was inspired to become an advocate for Black food and culture after experiencing a racist incident at a European restaurant in Toronto.
When you peruse Black Foodie content (including her merchandise donning phrases such as “Injera + Chill” and “Jollof + Chill”), you see that Hagos’s expression of Blackness is filtered through her East African roots, and her culinary routes through various African, Caribbean and Black American traditions.
If we care to make Black communities more visible and amplify their voices and demands for change and belonging, it is critical we also tune into these diversity of experiences and perspectives. We should take care to ensure the hard-earned policies and initiatives intended to combat the legacy of anti-Black racism in Canada are extended throughout Black communities, and not just to those who have the easiest access to them.
In public discourse and national remembering, we need to continue the project of raising consciousness around the stories of historic Black communities while also drawing attention to contemporary diasporic communities, like the forthcoming book by sociologist Sam Tecle does.
From an academic perspective, Black Studies in Canada also needs to make note of and engage with this diversity of experience. It should foster a new set of research questions and curricula that reflect this dynamism and diversity.
While concepts like “Black Canada” are useful blanket terms and an important organizing identity, a closer look reveals a detailed and fascinating tapestry that also deserves to be put on display.
Alpha Abebe, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities, McMaster University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Curating early Black experiences in Kingston, Canada’s first capital, a city long defined by histories of whiteness
Tuesday, 13 February 2024 01:57 Written by theconversationQanita Lilla, Queen's University, Ontario
Nineteenth century Black history is missing from the mainstream story of Kingston, Ont., but traces of this history in the city’s archives show that it undoubtedly had a Black presence.
Research undertaken for a curatorial collaboration at Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University is attempting to fill this gap.
Early Black histories
Kingston is a historical city. Located on Lake Ontario at the apex of the St. Lawrence and Cataraqui Rivers, it was Canada’s first legislative capital, and was always an important place for Indigenous gathering.
Today, the city acknowledges it sits on the traditional homeland of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat and is home to a “growing urban population of over 7,000 residents who identify as First Nations, Inuit or Métis.”
At Agnes, Emelie Chhangur, director and curator, Sebastian De Line, associate curator care and relations, and myself, associate curator, Arts of Africa, are piecing together early Black histories in a place that has long been defined by histories of Canadian whiteness.
Broader historical reckoning
Agnes has an art collection of over 17,000 pieces, some of which have complex colonial histories. Today, the museum finds itself at a watershed moment of having to reckon with its past as well as Kingston’s.
At Agnes, Chhangur considers the transformative potential of the art museum, where new collaborative curatorial methods can counteract past colonial practices. These practices include extracting material and knowledge in a colonial way and overlooking people who do not conform to white dominance in society.
Along with my colleagues at Agnes, I see this work as part of a broader historical reckoning already being undertaken by dynamic groups like OPIRG Kingston and Keep Up With Kingston. OPIRG has a mandate of pursuing social justice work critical to the city, seen in The People’s History Project.
Networks like Keep Up With Kingston engage Black lived experience in the city by spreading news on food, cultural and literary events by Black-run businesses.
As we at Agnes engage with people who are revitalizing Kingston, the city has become a place where new opportunities for dialogue are rising.
History as distillation
Our journey into Black history was precipitated by the artistic work of British-Nigerian artist Zina Saro-Wiwa, who will visit Kingston in March 2023. Saro-Wiwa’s “Illicit Gin Institute,” is an artistic project which takes up the theme of palm wine spirit (also known as “illicit gin”) to expose deeper and surprising narratives about her place of origin, the Niger Delta.
Her curated assemblies are public gatherings that are responsive to the places they are situated in. In this way Saro-Wiwa uses gin as a lens through which to undertake multiple artistic investigations.
In preparation for the Kingston assembly, curators and the artist are thinking about Black histories as illicit to a city imagined as white. We think of the fermentation process as tied to the land, but we also consider how distillation might be a useful metaphor to rethink collaborative history recovery processes.
The gin distillation process involves three distinct stages known as a head, heart and tail. The head is from the beginning of the run and contains a high percentage of low boiling point alcohols, the heart is the desirable middle and the tail has the highest percentage of oil — and is discarded.
White supremacist historical narratives have discarded essential and rich elements. Our collaborative curatorial process is about documenting history beginning with cherishing every little relational trace.
Kingston’s Black histories
Piecing together Kingston’s Black history has happened mostly through primary archival sources: newspaper articles on microfilm, adverts for businesses, legal petitions, diary entries, old photographs and city maps.
Secondary sources are from online blogs and websites. Stones Kingston is an archival website, from Queen’s University, that contains a thread of local 19th-century Black history.
Through this portal we found the names of prominent Black business owners in the city: William Johnson, James and Marie Elder and George Mink.
George Mink was a well-known figure in early Kingston. He was a son of enslaved Mink senior who arrived in the city as the “property” of John Herkimer (also known as Johan Jost Herkimer) after the American Revolution.
Black owned hotels, livery stables
George Mink owned hotels and livery stables and was also awarded the contract for the stage coach and mail routes from Kingston to Toronto and across Wolfe Island. He was popular among his peers who nominated him as Alderman in 1850, a position he did not take up.
Many parts of Mink’s story remain untold and the sources are thin. It is unclear what happened to George Mink at the end of his life, because following the establishment of the railroad he lost his coach licenses and died in poverty.
According to a 1952 book Kingston, the King’s Town, by James A. Roy, who retired from the Queen’s University literature department in 1950, Mink was laid to rest in an unmarked grave and his body was exhumed by Queen’s medical students. The author relays this as fact, but there are no reliable references to support this.
It is sad that Roy’s mention of George Mink is the only time this prominent Kingston resident appears in a monograph. A more significant piece of writing is a 1998 article in the journal Historic Kingston written by Rick Neilson and published by the Kingston Historical Society. This article focuses on Mink’s businesses in Kingston but offers no clarity on the end of his life.
Tobias Mink
There are no photographs of George Mink, but we have found an 1864 portrait of his nephew, Tobias Mink.
In a photographic studio he sits in a chair holding a bottle of alcohol, wearing a hat and smoking a pipe. His torn clothes speak of a working man. Records state he was a “cartman” and that he did manual labour around town.
We know that Tobias lived at Minks Bridge in Napanee, 48 kilometres from Kingston — a bridge named after his family — and that he was photographed in Stephen Manson Benson’s photographic studio. In a collection of 385 glass-plate negatives depicting the townspeople, Tobias Mink was the only Black person photographed.
Lively, visible history
This curatorial project aims to make this quiet Kingston history lively and visible.
As a curatorial team collaborating with artist Zina Saro-Wiwa, we seek to find networks of solidarity that were not afforded to us in the past. But we also aim to expose the challenges inherent to history writing so long forgotten.
Together we are trying to bring forth and distil local Kingston histories that have been submerged while thinking of new ways of assembling this rich history.
Qanita Lilla, Associate Curator Arts of Africa, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen's University, Ontario
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The private sector housing experiment has failed: Ottawa must now step up on social housing
Tuesday, 13 February 2024 01:51 Written by theconversationPoliticians of all stripes say that housing affordability is a top priority. But few are saying much about social housing — the kind that’s needed for low-income households in greatest need of affordable rental housing.
Social housing is non-market housing, either publicly owned or non-profit, and substantially subsidized to ensure low-income renter households pay no more than 30 per cent of their gross income on rent. Canada was committed to this kind of housing after the Great Depression, but began to step away from it in the early 1990s.
With funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Social Housing and Human Rights coalition is bringing together researchers, advocates and people across Canada experiencing homelessness and housing precarity to raise public awareness about the causes and solutions to the lack of housing for low-income renters.
Failed private sector experiment
I am a researcher and member of the coalition organizing committee. We have synthesized research that tells the story of a 30-plus year experiment, aligned with the rise of neoliberalism, to rely on the private sector to respond to all housing needs.
It hasn’t worked.
Our examination of housing policy in liberal democracies including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and throughout Europe leads us to conclude, as does the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), that “social housing is a key part of past and future housing policy.”
We conclude that if we are to begin to make progress on an increasingly daunting challenge, the government of Canada will need to do two things:
Create a minimum of 50,000 new rent-geared-to-income social housing units each year for 10 years, starting now. These units should be targeted for the lowest income renter households and those experiencing homelessness, and should have rents permanently set at no more than 30 per cent of household income.
Invest now in the acquisition, construction, operation and maintenance of new and existing public, non-profit and co-operative-owned housing that meets the unique and varied requirements of low-income renters and people experiencing homelessness.
Just scratching the surface
We recognize that adding 50,000 additional units annually is not nearly enough. Instead, we recommend this as a minimum, based on the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s (CMHC) projected need to expand overall supply by building 5.8 million homes over the next decade.
We estimate that because 33.5 per cent of households are renters, 194,300 of this supply should be rental. Since the CMHC has found that approximately a quarter of renters are paying more than 30 per cent of income on rent, living in housing in poor repair or living in crowded conditions, we believe a minimum of 48,575 (rounded up to 50,000) of new rental housing should be at rent-geared-to-income rates affordable to low-income renters.
This more than triples the target in the federal government’s National Housing Strategy and redirects the focus from modest affordability to deeply affordable. This amount is relatively consistent with calls to double the number of social housing units to more closely align with the OECD average.
New social housing supply requires capital investments for construction so that new housing can be built, and for acquisition so existing properties can be purchased and repurposed or renovated as needed.
New and existing social housing supply also requires investments in ongoing subsidies to support the costs of operating the housing while charging rent-geared-to-income rents. It will require ongoing capital investments for the purpose of maintaining the quality of housing and preserving the stock. Operating costs may include services and programs that support tenants.
Calls for change ignored
Social Housing and Human Rights coalition members are now reaching out to MPs across the country to make the case that more social housing is needed. It’s a challenge.
Despite the evidence, some are quick to tell us they don’t believe social housing is needed and that governments should simply incentivize private sector developers and remove “red tape.”
But our research shows no evidence this will work.
Private-sector solutions were the focus of cost-shared federal/provincial/territorial initiatives beginning in 2001 through the Affordable Housing Framework Agreement. But the emphasis on limited capital grants per unit resulted in modest development of units renting at 80 per cent of average market rents, unaffordable to low-income households. Furthermore, agreements requiring rents be set at affordable rates for 15 years have now expired.
The shortage of truly affordable rental housing across Canada has only worsened because governments have not been willing to invest in social housing. Yes, it is expensive — at least in the short term — and it is getting more expensive each year. But as demonstrated by Finland, a country that has remained committed to social housing investment, it pays off in the long term.
Lessons from Finland
The Finns have tackled homelessness like no other country. They know that without public investment in safe, stable housing, people are at higher risk of having poor mental and physical health, poor education outcomes, weaker labour market attachment and a host of other issues that governments must attend to.
There are many strategies needed simultaneously to address housing affordability. The expansion of social housing supply is one.
But calls are all too often ignored by governments turning to the private sector for low-cost quick fixes that continue to fail those in greatest need.
Shauna MacKinnon, Professor and Chair, Department of Urban and Inner-City Studies, University of Winnipeg
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Popular News
Parents of Courtney Clenney who killed Nigerian boyfriend are arrested in connection to their daughter's murder case
Friday, 02 February 2024 06:59 Written by lindaikejisblog The laptop, belonging to Christian Obumseli, Clenney's boyfriend, was left in the apartment they shared. Clenney's parents and one of their lawyers, Frank Prieto, allegedly engaged in a group chat conversation discussing Obumseli's possible passwords and transfer of the laptop from their possession, according to the NBC article. Investigators received warrants for the parents' iCloud accounts which allegedly included messages with their lawyers about how to access the laptop, with Kim saying he correctly guessed the pin passcode. "Kim. Hold off on going through the computer please," one attorney responded, per the warrant. "I don't want to turn you into a witness just yet if you find something useful." Kim allegedly responded saying he "didn't see anything" because he never opened a file. "I had barely opened it and was starting to poke around," he wrote, "but we started a video call so I stopped." The laptop was later handed over to defense attorneys. Travis County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the Clenneys were arrested on Jan. 30 on out-of-state felony charges, but declined to comment further. "We assisted in executing an out-of-state warrant and have no involvement in the case," a spokesman said.
Lady left in shock after a mountain lion wandered into her compound in Canada
Friday, 02 February 2024 06:24 Written by lindaikejisblog
A lady was left in shock after a mountain lion wandered into her house in Canada. In a video she recorded, the lion could be seen looking at her through the window and even made an attempt to pounce on her but was prevented by the glass. Watch the video below…
Nelson Mandela’s personal items under the hammer in New York? Why it outraged some, and what’s at stake
Wednesday, 31 January 2024 05:09 Written by theconversation
Nelson Mandela revisiting his cell at Robben Island prison. The image was sold to support his charitable causes. Louise Gubb/Corbis via Getty Images
An identity document, a pair of reading glasses, a hearing aid and a pair of worn shoes. These are just some of Nelson Mandela’s personal items that were due to go on auction on 22 February 2024. A month before the auction was due, the New York-based Guernsey’s auction house put a notice on its website that it was suspending the sales. No explanation was given.
The initial news of the auction caused outrage. South African government officials, commentators on South African social media, and even members of the family of South Africa’s late former president expressed shocked disbelief.
In December 2021 the auction published an auction catalogue – subsequently removed on 30 January 2024 – promoting many personal items, as well as the key to Mandela’s cell on Robben Island, where he was imprisoned for 18 years for his opposition to apartheid. Makaziwe Mandela, Mandela’s daughter, who consigned the items for auction, stated that proceeds from the sale would go towards the building of a memorial garden in Qunu, the rural settlement where he was born.
On 23 December 2021, the UK Daily Mail published a sensational news item reporting that the key was expected to fetch £1 million (US1.27 million).
The South African Heritage Resources Agency, which coordinates the identification and management of national heritage, learned of the auction through the report. It contacted the auction house, ordering it to stop the auction immediately. It claimed that the items were heritage objects and that they had been exported from South Africa without the relevant permits.
Makaziwe Mandela responded, arguing that the items were her private possessions.
The South African Heritage Resources Agency, the Robben Island Museum and the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture took the case to the Pretoria High Court. The court found that the items weren’t heritage objects because, among other things, the language that describes a “heritage object” that the state was arguing for was too broad.
Heritage is always contested. The state, the nation, private individuals and the market often have competing stakes in making claims to – and about – the cultural value that heritage holds. At times courts are enlisted to mediate such disputes.
Many South Africans have a strong personal relationship with Mandela. The outrage directed against the proposed auction can be traced to the personal and intimate nature of the items. And the fact that their sale feels like transgressing a moral boundary of familial respect.
In addition, given his political stature at home and globally, there are many who feel the auction crossed a cultural boundary. The items being put on the block are special for the nation and are tied to the post-apartheid story of the struggle for freedom and democracy.
This value is intuitively understood as heritage.
As a scholar of the cultural construction of heritage and contested public culture, I find this dispute a fascinating illustration of the shifting dynamics of heritage adjudication after 30 years of democracy. Where once heritage was about reconciliation and nation building, it is ever more about struggles over ownership, private property, cultural value and economic gain.
Judgment
The Pretoria High Court handed down its judgment on the basis of the facts brought before it.
In its arguments before the court the South African Heritage Resources Agency quoted sections of, among others, the National Heritage Resources Act, which protects heritage objects, or things deemed as such on the basis of their
association with political processes, events and figures and leaders in South Africa.
But in its judgment, the court found that definition the state wanted for heritage status was
so overbroad that just about anything that President Mandela touched or is associated with, or related to him, can be considered a heritage object.
It asked how these items could be termed heritage items while the “tens of hundreds of Springbok Rugby jerseys or ruling party attire autographed by Nelson Mandela on the campaign trail” were not.
The justices also inferred that items should have extraordinary qualities of great national significance for them to be registered as heritage objects. The Mandela items, many of which were as ordinary as reading glasses and his hearing aids, did not seem to meet that criterion.
Yet, there is a precedent for such use, such as Mandela’s red Mercedes displayed at the Apartheid Museum. Objects telling meaningful stories have also been curated and displayed at the museum marking the place at which Nelson Mandela was once captured.
Nevertheless, it was for these reasons that the items were not declared heritage objects.
Contested terrain
Concern about the heritage value of the items is well founded. By definition it raises questions about the South African Heritage Resources Agency and its role as a custodian of national heritage.
Possession comes with all kinds of responsibilities of care and public education. In making its case, the agency did not present a custodial plan including an assessment of the items, the museums to which they would go once they were repatriated and the exhibitions and educational projects they would potentially be used for.
There was also no mention of how costs for this curatorial custodianship would be carried.
Without any of this the question arises: if we believe that these objects do belong to the nation under the South African Heritage Resources Agency’s care, what benchmarks can be used to assess its ability to effectively manage and publicise Nelson Mandela’s legacy?
On the other hand, it’s not entirely clear that these items should be available for private sale either, even if it is to contribute to the social good of memorialisation. Could they not have been better used as displays in the memorial garden in Qunu, and then create a sustainable heritage tourism attraction, for example?
After Mandela’s death in 2013, the organisations responsible for managing his legacy continued to endorse commercial ventures of a charitable kind or with some form of social good.
The case shows how the dynamics of struggle and dispute have shifted in ways that lean more towards narratives that privilege the idea of heritage as private property linked to public good. No more is the struggle so much about transformation of the heritage landscape.
This trend can be traced back to Nelson Mandela’s own participation in the marketing of his legacy for charitable ventures. During his life he used his legacy for charitable causes, endorsing products, producing artworks and donating personal items for a variety of charitable ventures.
This change is also connected to the attrition of the state’s authority to articulate persuasive claims over things that belong to the nation. And its unclear role in promoting them for deepening the national story. For if these objects were of great national significance then surely the South African Heritage Resources Agency would have registered and classified them a long time ago. And they would be put to good use in commemorative projects befitting Nelson Mandela’s legacy in Qunu and beyond.
Duane Jethro, Lecturer Department of African Studies and Linguistics, University of Cape Town
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
2023 was the hottest year in history — and Canada is warming faster than anywhere else on earth
Tuesday, 23 January 2024 01:19 Written by theconversationGordon McBean, Western University
In 2015, most countries, including Canada, signed on to the Paris Climate Agreement which set the objective of “holding the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing the limit of 1.5 C to significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”
On Jan. 9, 2024, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) announced that their analysis confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year on record since 1850, when humans began burning fossil fuels at a major scale. The global average temperature was 1.48 C warmer than pre-industrial levels and much warmer (0.17 C) than 2016, the previous warmest year.
The map of surface air temperature anomalies around the globe, compared to the 1991–2020 average, shows large geographical variations and that some of the warmest areas are in Canada.
Rising temperatures
Leading scientists are predicting that 2024 will be even warmer as the global mean temperature continues to rise.
These rising temperatures are leading to more extreme weather events that impact societies around the world and across Canada. The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane have continued to increase and reached record levels in 2023, reaching 419 parts-per-million (ppm) of carbon dioxide concentrations, which was 2.4 ppm higher than in 2022.
The CCCS also noted that, in 2023, many extreme events were recorded across the globe, including heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires.
On Jan. 10, the World Economic Forum published its 2024 Global Risks Report, ranking global risks by severity over the next ten years. Extreme weather events are ranked to be the highest risk, leading to loss of human life, damage to ecosystems, destruction of property and/or financial loss.
Canada’s unique climate
Climate warming is not uniform due to a range of factors, including internal climate variability and regional variations in climate feedback and heat uptake.
In general, warming has been strongest at high northern latitudes and stronger over land than oceans. Global average temperature is greatly influenced by the oceans, which cover about 70 per cent of the planet and have large heat capacity, so they warm much slower than land areas.
Since Canada has a large land mass, much of which is located at high northern latitudes, warming across Canada has been about twice the global average and in the Canadian Arctic, the warming has been about three times higher. Loss of snow and sea ice reduces the reflectivity of the surface, resulting in stronger warming of ecosystems and increased absorption of solar radiation.
Surface temperatures are highly linked to the temperatures in the troposphere, which is the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere.
The troposphere includes most of the clouds and weather and varies from 18–20 kilometres in depth at the equator to about six kilometres near the poles. This smaller depth in the Arctic can result in more warming due to the heat energy from solar radiation or other processes.
Feedback processes
Enhanced warming for Canada as a whole, and for the Canadian Arctic in particular, is part of a climate phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification.” The climate response to radiative forcing from greenhouse gases is determined by subsequent processes and feedback within the climate system. Climate feedback in the Arctic enhance the warming from greenhouse gas forcing.
Feedback mechanisms make different contributions to warming, depending on the region of the world. Snow and ice reflect considerable solar energy back to space. When warming melts snow and ice, this causes the now-darker surface to absorb more solar radiation and heat.
Another issue is that atmospheric components radiate energy back to space, cooling the climate somewhat, but in the Arctic, this cooling effect is weaker and there is a relatively larger warming response at higher latitudes. Another factor is that in the Arctic, the increase in clouds enhances warming by trapping heat near the surface.
Urgent action is needed
The enhanced rates of warming over Canada and the Canadian Arctic are due to a unique combination of feedback mechanisms.
The year 2023 demonstrated the devastating impacts of the climate extremes that can and will occur in even the best case 1.5 C climate scenario hoped for by the Paris Agreement.
Canada, and particularly our north, will warm much faster than the global mean. This reality should have the effect of motivating governments at all levels — and citizens — to reduce the historic complacency displayed by most governments around the world.
The time is overdue to take comprehensive and strong actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to fully implement adaptation actions to make our societies and citizens less vulnerable and more resilient.
Through enabling communities across Canada to proactively advance climate resilience we can effectively reduce the risk of adverse climate impacts and prevent losses and damages during the extremes that a warming climate will bring.
Gordon McBean, Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography and Environment, Western University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
