Nature Bats Last – 03.01.16

Exposing Bill McKibben

This week Mike and Guy were joined by independent journalist Cory Morningstar. They discussed and analyzed the words of prominent activist Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org. Guy adds a brief climate-change update.

Nature Bats Last – 10.20.15

Nature Bats last – calling out Hansen, Mann et. al.

This week we called out climate scientists and pundits for their misinformation and half-truths. Among others, we took aim at James Hansen, Michael Mann, Bill McKibben, and Naomi Klein. Listeners called in with cogent questions, too.

350.org: Selling a lie

From Kevin Hester

"As our climate change catastrophe unfolds the new climate change denier is programmed to admit that it is happening but to down play the severity of the disaster and to lead people to believe that the powers that be are working on the issue and that MSM is covering it. I call BS. When I quote the 6th great extinction I am quoting Professor Guy McPherson , the World Wildlife Fund and National Geographic who are all using that expression now but the MSM and Bill McKibben of 350.org are here to obfuscate and deceive everyone as to the severity of the catastrophe......

"They know when everyone realise's that the game's up, chaos will ensue but if you had a terminal disease don't you think you have a right to know?.....

"Bill McKibben's optimism is completely baseless and is funded by the corporate donations 350.org happily lives on.

"The new climate change deniers are amongst us, follow the money and read carefully so that you won't be deceived."

350.org's Big Lie

Seemorerocks

I shouldn't really be surprised that the Guardian, which has hitherto been one of the better sources of information on climate change has adopted the stance it has in the editorial by retiring editor Alan Rusbridge.

After all this is the newspaper that, almost above all others has acted as a liberal attack dog for the neocons in its crusade against Russian and Vladimir Putin.

The article started out saying all the things that one might expect from a mainstream source on climate change and then Rusbridge brought in Bill McKibben and 350.org.




In particular this:

565 gigatons: “Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have some reasonable hope of staying below 2C,” is how McKibben crisply puts it. Few dispute that this idea of a global “carbon budget” is broadly right.

The Guardian has become the vehicle for a Big Lie that in the face of all the science it has produced over the years to say otherwise. We are told by McKibben in one breathe that not only is 2C a workable goal but that we still have 'wiggle room' and can continue to emit CO2 into the atmosphere just so long as we don't put too much - and we start to divest from investment in fossil fuels

Guy McPherson was recently asked if he had read McKibben's work and he quipped that he has no time for fiction.

Quite.

The biggest danger these days comes not from the reptilian climate change deniers of the Republican Party. Indeed, the biggest danger comes from the liberal flank, from McPherson calls abrupt climate change denial.

As we have come to know 350.org is receiving funding from corporate America and even talks about "our friends in Wall Street". The line comes down from the top: from McKibben, and his "friends in Wall Street" tell McKIbben what the acceptable message is.

The aim is to obfuscate and take the discussion away from the realities that show that climate change is NOW and that, with a growing number of positive self-reinforcing feedbacks (including the growing release into the atmosphere of a gas, methane, that is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. the train has long left the station.

We musn't know that 2C (which already threatens our ability to practise agriculture and feed ourselves) is already baked into the cake with CO2 remaining in the atmosphere for a thousand years and a lead time between emissions and the effects of warming being felt.

We musn't know how close the Arctic is to melting; about the melting permafrost and the release of methane and the real-time connections will increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather.

That might get people to really question closely about how all this came about and that would take people back to Wall Street and the Infinite Growth Paradigm that is not at all challenged by the mainstream environmental movement.

Instead the corporates would like the masses to put their energy into signing petitions, appealing to President Barack Obama, changing their light bulbs, driving a Prius and divesting from investment in the fossil fuel industry.

Above all we should donate our money and build the 350.org movement.

Anything but being radical - getting to the root of the matter.


350.org and the liberal, white. middle class, male Americans that stand behind the likes of Global Warming Fact of the Day (from which the author, Guy McPherson, Paul Beckwith and other friends have been ejected) play their role in reinforcing the comforting idea that real climate change is somewhere off in the future and we must believe the conservative science 'consensus' rather than those who have, through actual observations shown that the computer models are sorely lacking in their ability to explain the reality of abrupt climate change.

The article, which I wrote in 2013 and is reproduced below expresses not even the half of the sordid reality of the betrayal by the liberals, and by McKibben and his organisation

I would recommend a careful reading of the articles by Cory Morningstar that express the full, sordid reality behind 350.org.....


For the full story read these two articles by Cory Morningstar

The Corporate Money Behind McKibben’s Divestment Tour 

350.org’s Friends on Wall Street

Here is an article I wrote on 350.org back in May, 2013

350.org and 

near-term extinction

Seemorerocks

With the news that concentrations of carbon have reached 400 ppm, a level we haven't seen since homeo sapiens has been walking this earth, it is time to address some of the people that I have held in high regard.

These include George Monbiot and Bill McKibben of 350.org.

James Hansen recently said that if the Canadian tar sands were to be mined, it would be 'game over' for climate change.

Well guess what? – tar sands are being mined.

One of the latest reports (and each one keeps getting more dire than the one before it) says that temperatures on the planet could increase by 4C by the year 2030. (For details on this go to Guy McPherson's article HERE)

This is simply not consistent with life as we know it – including human life – let alone any sort of human civilisation.

That is why there has been increasing talk of the possibility of near-term human extinction.

Since the news of the rapid changes in the Arctic (including a whole range of positive feedbacks) has come out some of the responses of those who have been in the spotlight over climate change for some time.

George Monbiot is clearly grasping at straws to maintain civilisation as he would like it. After becoming converted to nuclear power, and then renouncing Peak Oil, he is now saying that 400 ppm is only of 'symbolic' importance, and what we have to do is get back to 350 ppm.

Sorry George, the horse has bolted, and the C02 that's in the atmosphere will stay there for a long time (all the more so that the Amazon is becoming a carbon emitter rather than a carbon sink – something that was predicted some years ago.(see also HERE)

What is it about these people that they can't recognise that the dire predictions they warned of, are coming to pass.

Instead, every new disaster becomes yet another 'wake-up call'.

This poster from 350.org is a clear example.

 

'The good news is that we are doing it'

"We're building a worldwide movement to solve the climate crisis'

Excuse me!  

Solving the crisis!!!

Do they not know the difference between a crisis and a predicament?

This is getting into the are of cognitive dissonance when people who were formerly at the forefront of getting the message out about climate change ignore the clear signs and are putting out the 'good news' (whatever that is).

I will be the first to admit that we have to acknowledge uncertainty.

We don't KNOW how events will transpire

But, based on all the best evidence it clearly looks as if it's game's up for the climate.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not against actions such as demonstrating against the Keystone XL pipeline.

Resistance is to the prevailing paradigm is all that we have.

The problem comes when these organisations start to use their power to form public opinion to send people to sleep. 

No matter how bad things get it's just another 'wake-up call'

'Go out and demonstrate, change your light bulbs, fill out another petition - help to build a movement to finally persuade the politicians that they need to act'.

Perhaps the secret is the building a worldwide movement bit?

Just a small amount of research has revealed that 350.org gets corporate funding, including from the Rockefeller Brothers.

There might perhaps be an inbuilt incentive to keep the message within 'acceptable bounds'.

Don't people need to be warned about what's coming? - economic, financial, social, and finally political collapse; the end of human, industrial civilisation (whether we want it or not), and finally - the possibility of near-term extinction.

I get the feeling about the Monbiots and the McKibbens that their ideas are still stuck in the 90's when we may have had a chance of turning things round.

What I admire in Guy McPherson is his intellectual independence: his outlook has not remained static but evolved in line with the evidence that is available - and that evidence has got more and more dire.

It is time, not to advocate for more political action, but to unblinkingly look reality in the eye, and to fully acknowledge both our own, and our species' mortality (let alone the wholesale destruction of other species and everything that they need to survive on this planet.

That would be a start.

As Mike Ruppert says - 'evolve or perish and die!'


The following would be fairly typical of a mainstream presentation of climate change by Bill McKibben.

Not before time, Someone challenges Bill,fibbin' McKibben

Bill McKibben, Founder of 350.org on Climate Challenge, Host Karyn Strickler

Host Karyn Strickler challenges Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and his organizing techniques, this week on Climate Challenge.

.

The IPCC report - 350.org's view

And just think - Bill McKibben peddles hopium, ignores the methane emergency and lulls people to sleep with a promise of a “return to 350ppm” (if we join the organsiation), gets his funding from Rockefeller.

The IPCC is stern on climate change – but it still underestimates the situation

UN body’s warning on carbon emissions is hard to ignore, but breaking the power of the fossil fuel industry won’t be easy

Bangkok's skyline blanketed in a haze. The IPCC report says climate change has increased the risk of severe heatwaves and other extreme weather. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters

the Guardian,

2 November, 2014

At this point, the scientists who run the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change must feel like it’s time to trade their satellites, their carefully calibrated thermometers and spectrometers, their finely tuned computer models – all of them for a thesaurus. Surely, somewhere, there must be words that will prompt the world’s leaders to act.

This week, with the release of their new synthesis report, they are trying the words “severe, widespread, and irreversible” to describe the effects of climate change – which for scientists, conservative by nature, falls just short of announcing that climate change will produce a zombie apocalypse plus random beheadings plus Ebola. It’s hard to imagine how they will up the language in time for the next big global confab in Paris.

But even with all that, this new document – actually a synthesis of three big working group reports released over the last year – almost certainly underestimates the actual severity of the situation. As the Washington Post pointed out this week, past reports have always tried to err on the side of understatement; it’s a particular problem with sea level rise, since the current IPCC document does not even include the finding in May that the great Antarctic ice sheets have begun to melt. (The studies were published after the IPCC’s cutoff date.)

But when you get right down to it, who cares? The scientists have done their job; no sentient person, including Republican Senate candidates, can any longer believe in their heart of hearts that there’s not a problem here. The scientific method has triumphed: over a quarter of a century, researchers have reached astonishing consensus on a basic problem in chemistry and physics.

And the engineers have done just as well. The price of a solar panel has dropped by more than 90% over the last 25 years, and continues to plummet. In the few places they have actually been deployed at scale, the results are astonishing: there were days this summer when Germany generated 75% of its power from the wind and the sun.

That, of course, is not because Germany is so richly endowed with sunlight (it’s a rare person who books a North Sea beach holiday). It’s because the Germans have produced a remarkable quantity of political will, and put it to good use.

As opposed to the rest of the world, where the fossil fuel industry has produced an enormous amount of fear in the political class, and kept things from changing. Their vast piles of money have so far weighed more in the political balance than the vast piles of data accumulated by the scientists. In fact, the IPCC can calculate the size of the gap with great exactness. To get on the right track, they estimate, the world would have to cut fossil fuel investments annually between now and 2029, and use the money instead to push the pace of renewables.

That is a hard task, but not an impossible one. Indeed, the people’s movement symbolised by September’s mammoth climate march in New York, has begun to make an impact in dollars and cents. A new report this week shows that by delaying the Keystone pipeline in North America protesters have prevented at least $17bn (£10.6bn) in new investments in the tar sands of Canada – investments that would have produced carbon equivalent to 735 coal-fired power plants. That’s pretty good work.

Our political leaders could do much more, of course. If they put a serious price on carbon, we would move quickly out of the fossil fuel age and into the renewable future. But that won’t happen until we break the power of the fossil fuel industry. That’s why it’s very good news that divestment campaigners have been winning victories on one continent after another, as universities from Stanford to Sydney to Glasgow start selling their fossil fuel stocks in protest – hey, even the Rockefeller Brothers fund, heir to the greatest oil fortune ever, have joined in the fight.

Breaking the power of the fossil fuel industry won’t be easy, especially since it has to happen fast. It has to happen, in fact, before the carbon we’ve unleashed into the atmosphere breaks the planet. I’m not certain we’ll win this fight – but, thanks to the IPCC, no one will ever be able to say they weren’t warned.

The impossibility of 350 ppm

We keep on hearing from Bill McKIbben (whose 350.org is financed by corporate interests like the Rockefeller Foundation) and other methane deniers that we have "got to get back to 350.ppm" - the level indicated as being the maximum possible level of CO2 in an off-the-uff comment by James Hansen.

How is this possible even if by some magic the politicians and corporations all started listening and all our wish lists were fulfilled.

Not if this 2008 article, (when I suspect there was more striaghtforward honesty about these questions), is correct.

Carbon is forever

Carbon dioxide emissions and their associated warming could linger for millennia, according to some climate scientists. Mason Inman looks at why the fallout from burning fossil fuels could last far longer than expected

Distant future: our continued use of fossil fuels could leave a CO₂legacy that lasts millennia, says climatologist David Archer

Nature.com,

20 November, 2008

After our fossil fuel blow-out, how long will the CO₂ hangover last? And what about the global fever that comes along with it? These sound like simple questions, but the answers are complex — and not well understood or appreciated outside a small group of climate scientists. Popular books on climate change — even those written by scientists — if they mention the lifetime of CO₂ at all, typically say it lasts "a century or more"¹ or "more than a hundred years".

"That's complete nonsense," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. It doesn't help that the summaries in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have confused the issue, allege Caldeira and colleagues in an upcoming paper in Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences². Now he and a few other climate scientists are trying to spread the word that human-generated CO₂, and the warming it brings, will linger far into the future — unless we take heroic measures to pull the gas out of the air.

University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer, who led the study with Caldeira and others, is credited with doing more than anyone to show how long CO₂ from fossil fuels will last in the atmosphere. As he puts it in his new book The Long Thaw, "The lifetime of fossil fuel CO₂ in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. The next time you fill your tank, reflect upon this"³.

"The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO₂ to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge," Archer writes. "Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far."

The effects of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere drop off so slowly that unless we kick our "fossil fuel addiction", to use George W. Bush's phrase, we could force Earth out of its regular pattern of freezes and thaws that has lasted for more than a million years. "If the entire coal reserves were used," Archer writes, "then glaciation could be delayed for half a million years."

Cloudy reports

"The longevity of CO₂ in the atmosphere is probably the least well understood part of the global warming issue," says paleoclimatologist Peter Fawcett of the University of New Mexico. "And it's not because it isn't well documented in the IPCC report. It is, but it is buried under a lot of other material."

It doesn't help, though, that past reports from the UN panel of climate experts have made misleading statements about the lifetime of CO₂, argue Archer, Caldeira and colleagues. The first assessment report, in 1990, said that CO₂'s lifetime is 50 to 200 years. The reports in 1995 and 2001 revised this down to 5 to 200 years. Because the oceans suck up huge amounts of the gas each year, the average CO₂ molecule does spend about 5 years in the atmosphere. But the oceans also release much of that CO₂ back to the air, such that man-made emissions keep the atmosphere's CO₂ levels elevated for millennia. Even as CO₂ levels drop, temperatures take longer to fall, according to recent studies.

"The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO₂ to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far."

David Archer

Earlier reports from the panel did include caveats such as "No single lifetime can be defined for CO₂ because of the different rates of uptake by different removal processes." The IPCC's latest assessment, however, avoids the problems of earlier reports by including similar caveats while simply refusing to give a numeric estimate of the lifetime for carbon dioxide. Contributing author Richard Betts of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre says the panel made this change in recognition of the fact that "the lifetime estimates cited in previous reports had been potentially misleading, or at least open to misinterpretation."

Instead of pinning an absolute value on the atmospheric lifetime of CO₂, the 2007 report describes its gradual dissipation over time, saying, "About 50% of a CO₂ increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years." But if cumulative emissions are high, the portion remaining in the atmosphere could be higher than this, models suggest. Overall, Caldeira argues, "the whole issue of our long-term commitment to climate change has not really ever been adequately addressed by the IPCC."

The lasting effects of CO₂ also have big implications for energy policies, argues James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies. "Because of this long CO₂lifetime, we cannot solve the climate problem by slowing down emissions by 20% or 50% or even 80%. It does not matter much whether the CO₂ is emitted this year, next year, or several years from now," he wrote in a letter this August. "Instead ... we must identify a portion of the fossil fuels that will be left in the ground, or captured upon emission and put back into the ground."

Slow on the uptake

Unlike other human-generated greenhouse gases, CO₂ gets taken up by a variety of different processes, some fast and some slow. This is what makes it so hard to pin a single number, or even a range, on CO₂'s lifetime. The majority of the CO₂ we emit will be soaked up by the ocean over a few hundred years, first being absorbed into the surface waters, and eventually into deeper waters, according to a long-term climate model run by Archer. Though the ocean is vast, the surface waters can absorb only so much CO₂, and currents have to bring up fresh water from the deep before the ocean can swallow more. Then, on a much longer timescale of several thousand years, most of the remaining CO₂ gets taken up as the gas dissolves into the ocean and reacts with chalk in ocean sediments. But this process would never soak up enough CO₂ to return atmospheric levels to what they were before industrialization, shows oceanographer Toby Tyrrell of the UK's National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, in a recent paper⁴.

Finally, the slowest process of all is rock weathering, during which atmospheric CO₂ reacts with water to form a weak acid that dissolves rocks. It's thought that this creates minerals such as magnesium carbonate that lock away the greenhouse gas. But according to simulations by Archer and others, it would take hundreds of thousands of years for these processes to bring CO₂ levels back to pre-industrial values (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Long lifetime.

Model simulation of atmospheric CO₂ concentration for 40,000 years following after a large CO₂ release from combustion of fossil fuels. Different fractions of the released gas recover on different timescales. Reproduced from The Long Thaw³.

Full figure and legend (18 KB)

Several long-term climate models, though their details differ, all agree that anthropogenic CO₂ takes an enormously long time to dissipate. If all recoverable fossil fuels were burnt up using today's technologies, after 1,000 years the air would still hold around a third to a half of the CO₂ emissions. "For practical purposes, 500 to 1000 years is 'forever,'" as Hansen and colleagues put it. In this time, civilizations can rise and fall, and the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could melt substantially, raising sea levels enough to transform the face of the planet.

New stable state

The warming from our CO₂ emissions would last effectively forever, too. A recent study by Caldeira and Damon Matthews of Concordia University in Montreal found that regardless of how much fossil fuel we burn, once we stop, within a few decades the planet will settle at a new, higher temperature⁵. As Caldeira explains, "It just increases for a few decades and then stays there" for at least 500 years — the length of time they ran their model. "That was not at all the result I was expecting," he says.

But this was not some peculiarity of their model, as the same behaviour shows up in an extremely simplified model of the climate⁶ — the only difference between the models being the final temperature of the planet. Archer and Victor Brovkin of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany found much the same result from much longer-term simulations⁶. Their model shows that whether we emit a lot or a little bit of CO₂, temperatures will quickly rise and plateau, dropping by only about 1 °C over 12,000 years.

"The longevity of CO₂ in the atmosphere is probably the least well understood part of the global warming issue."

Peter Fawcett

Because of changes in the Earth's orbit, ice sheets might start to grow from the poles in a few thousand years — but there's a good chance our greenhouse gas emissions already may prevent that, Archer argues. Even with the amount of CO₂ emitted so far, another ice age will almost certainly start in about 50,000 years. But if we burn all remaining fossil fuels, it could be more than half a million years before the Earth has another ice age, Archer says.

The long-term effects of our emissions might seem far removed. But as Tyrrell says, "It is a little bit scary, if you think about all the concerns we have about radioactive wastes produced by nuclear power. The potential impacts from emitting CO₂ to the atmosphere are even longer than that." But there's still hope for avoiding these long-term effects if technologies that are now on the drawing board can be scaled up affordably. "If civilization was able to develop ways of scrubbing CO₂ out of the atmosphere," Tyrrell says, "it's possible you could reverse this CO₂ hangover."

References

1. Flannery, T. The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change162 (Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2005).
2. Archer, D. et al. Ann. Rev. Earth Pl. Sc. (in the press).
3. Archer, D. The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate (Princeton Univ. Press, 2008).
4. Tyrrell, T., Shepherd, J. G. & Castle, S. Tellus 59, 664–672, doi:10.1111/j.1600-0889.2007.00290.x (2007).
5. Matthews, H. D. & Caldeira, K. Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L04705, doi:10.1029/2007GL032388 (2008).
6. Archer, D. & Brovkin, V. Climatic Change 90, 283–297 (2008).

Here is Bill McKibben "doing the math" with Thom Hartmann to ave civilisation.

I used to listen to this stuff to get some confirmation of what I knew to be true - in vain.

A more realistic appraisal would not appeal to his corporate sponsors

The 2 degree Death Dance

An appropriate comment from a reader -

With everyone and their brother or sister always dumping on Guy they pull the focus off the contents of that Climate Summary Report.

The story of how we ever accepted that a 2 degree rise is acceptable is beyond belief, when one finds out that it wasn't the scientists who accepted this "fact", but an economist. 

For this alone people like McKibben, Klein and Scott Johnson should be tarred and feathered.


More coming

Climate Challenge - Cory Morningstar on the 2 Degree Death Dance, Host Karyn Strickler

"Climate Challenge" host Karyn Strickler interviews investigative journalist, Cory Morningstar who calls a 2 degree celsius rise in average global temperature a "2 Degree Death Dance."

Among other articles Cory wrote, "Eyes Wide Shut: Tick, Tick, Tick Expose," after the Copenhagen Climate meeting, named by Oil Sands Truth as "one the most important articles climate activists will ever read."

Cory helped to write The People's Agreement on Climate in Cochabamba and believes we should limit the rise in average global temperatures to 1 degree celsius.

The New York climate march

This is from yesterday's actions.

The people around the world are waking up to climate change – too late, I fear.

How long before we get the civil unrest on the streets that will cause the powers-that-be to roll out their plans to suppress the population?


I don't know whether to be inspired or saddened.

Voices from the People’s Climate March: Indigenous Groups Lead Historic 400,000-Strong NYC Protest

As many as 400,000 people turned out in New York City on Sunday for the People’s Climate March, the largest environmental protest in history.

With a turnout far exceeding expectations, the streets of midtown Manhattan were filled with environmentalists, politicians, musicians, students, farmers, celebrities, nurses and labor activists — all united in their demand for urgent action on climate change.

Organizers arranged the People’s Climate March into different contingents reflecting the movement’s diversity, with indigenous groups in the lead.

Democracy Now! producers Aaron Maté and Elizabeth Press were in the streets to hear from some of the demonstrators taking part in the historic protest.

Singer Angélique Kidjo: The Women of Africa Are Paying the Price of Climate Change

As up to 400,000 filled the streets, Democracy Now! did an exclusive three-hour global broadcast from the heart of the People’s Climate March in New York City. We air highlights of the special, beginning with the Grammy Award–winning Béninoise musician and activist Angélique Kidjo.

Anti-Coal Climate Activists March with Massachusetts District Attorney Who Almost Prosecuted Them

Massachusetts for blocking the shipment of 40,000 tons of coal to the Brayton Point power plant, a 51-year-old facility that is one of the region’s largest contributors to greenhouse gases.

But in a surprise move, local prosecutor Sam Sutter dropped the criminal charges and reduced three other charges to civil offenses, calling climate change one of the gravest crises our planet has ever faced.

On Sunday, the activists, Jay O’Hara and Ken Ward, marched with Sutter at the People’s Climate March in New York City.

And finally Bill McKibben of 350.org who excells at actions like this one but not at recognising the truth of runaway climate change being a reality

"This is History": People’s Climate March Organizer Bill McKibben on 400,000-Strong Turnout

Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and a lead organizer behind Sunday’s People’s Climate March and global day of action, joins us to reflect on the historic protest. "There hasn’t been a political gathering about anything this large in this country for many years," McKibben says. "And I think what it demonstrates is that climate change is at the absolute tip now of people’s consciousness."