The heads of the nation's five branches of government, as well as top business executives, were invited to watch the premiere of ±2°C (±2°C ─ 台灣必須面對的真相), a documentary on climate change in Taiwan, at the Butterfly Pavilion in Taipei last night.
TV commentator Sisy Chen (陳文茜), the producer of the film, said she hoped that those who watched the film would write letters to the Presidential Office and ask the chief executive to list climate change as a national security issue.
Chen said she had seen several documentaries on climate change, including An Inconvenient Truth by former US vice president Al Gore and Home by Luc Besson. None of these films, however, mentioned the impact of climate change on Taiwan.
“Don't take that as a cue that Taiwan is exempt from its influence. In fact, people in Taiwan might become the first group of victims of global climate change,” Chen said.
“Many people know that countries like Maldives might sink sooner than other places around the world, but few know that what may happen to the Maldives could also happen to Taiwan one day,” Chen said, adding that some locations in Taiwan might soon be underwater should temperatures and sea levels continue rising.
The film's name came from the consensus reached at the Copenhagen Summit last year, which was to take actions to keep any temperature increases below 2°C, she said.
Emphasizing that the film is a non-profit project, Chen said only wanted to use the film to educate the next generation about the issues surrounding climate change.
Any TV station can broadcast the film free of charge, she said.
Chen said she would also work with local governments so that the film could be shown nationwide. The film runs about 70 minutes and examines the issue of climate change from the natural disasters that have occurred around the world in the past six months to the scientific research and eventually focus on problems on the home front.
The production of the film began after the devastation caused by Typhoon Morakot last August.
An estimated 2 million people are expected to see the film, she said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching