On Sept. 23, a broad coalition of environmental groups blocked several key intersections during the Monday morning rush hour in Washington D.C. to raise awareness about climate change.
More than a thousand people enlisted in the Shut Down DC event which is planned for this week to coincide with the UN climate summit occurring in New York City.
The organization vowed on its event website to bring “the whole city to a gridlocked standstill.” Today’s demonstrations resulted in 22 intersections being occupied at various times, the activists claimed. However, according to police, there were only 15 intersections blocked.
“We hope with by our actions on Monday, we can raise public awareness of this issue and understand it’s just not going to be taken as business as usual, that we need some drastic action on climate change issues in the relatively near future,” said a spokesman Mike Golash, according to CBS News affiliate WUSA.
One of the major traffic standstills occurred at the K and 16th street intersection, just a few blocks away from the White House, where protesters parked a boat and chained themselves to it. Police officers brought power tools and had meticulously freed all four protesters by 10.a.m.
George Davidson, a graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in environmental policy and the last protester to be cut free from the boat, said: “I’m glad to be doing this. If I have kids, I want to be able to look them in the eye and tell them I did everything I could.”
Protesters that were chained to the boat were not arrested, but elsewhere a total of 32 “climate rebels” were arrested, 26 in D.C. and 6 on Capitol Hill, and charged with “road blocking,” according to The Washington Post.
In June, we reported on a Finnish scientific study that downplayed considerably the effects man has on global climate.
New Finnish Study Finds Human Activity Has Minor Influence on Global Temperature Change
A Finnish study completed by researchers at the University of Turku found that mankind only accounts for a minute portion of the global temperature change over the past 100 years.
Jyrki Kauppinen and Pekka Malmi from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Turku, claim humans have little influence on global temperatures in their paper (pdf) titled “No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic (man-made) climate change,” published on June 29.
“The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) climate sensitivity is about one order of magnitude (i.e. 10 times) too high, because a strong negative feedback of the clouds is missing in climate models. If we pay attention to the fact that only a small part of the increased CO2 concentration is anthropogenic, we have to recognize that the anthropogenic climate change does not exist in practice.”
According to the study, even though the global temperature has risen by 0.1 degrees celsius in the past 100 years, human activity only accounts for a tenth of that amount, about 0.01 degrees celsius, a negligible amount.
Instead, their findings point out that low cloud formations are responsible for climate change, they claim. “The changes in the low cloud cover fraction practically control the global temperature.”