Environmental activists were ironically met with freezing weather and light snow flurries on Monday while protesting global warming outside the Washington state capitol building, reports the Olympian.
“Climate and weather are two different things,” activist Paul Pickett was told the bundled-up crowd, adding that climate “is long term and weather is what happens daily.”
The so-called Climate Crisis Rally lasted four hours and focused on efforts to stop construction of a coal export terminal to ship U.S.-mined coal to coal-fired power plants in China. The Olympian reports that the public has until Jan. 21 to give their input what it wants covered in an environmental impact study about the coal terminal.
“We need to channel our anger into action,” urged Pickett. “We’ve got to stop feeding our addiction to fossil fuels.”
During the rally, about 70 activists gathered and formed a human mural which spelled: “NO COAL.”
“We can expose this and do something about it,” Evergreen State College geography professor Zoltan Grossman. “Say ‘yes’ to port jobs built on a more sustainable future and ‘no’ to the import and shipping of fracking supplies.”
Jiim Page, a Seattle folk singer and activist, was also there to entertain the freezing crowd with his rewrite of the Woody Guthrie song, “This Land is Your Land.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2012 was the warmest year on record in the U.S. which has sparked calls from environmentalists nationwide for more action to fight climate change.
“NOAA’s report should sound the alarm that we can’t wait another day to start fighting climate change,” said Daniel Lashof, director of Natural Resource Defense Council’s Climate and Clean Air Program.
Despite record temperatures in the U.S., last year was not the warmest year globally, said David Kreutzer, research fellow in Energy Economics and Climate Change at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“Global warming used to refer to the globe,” said Kreutzer. “The year 2012 was not the hottest year ever globally nor was it even the hottest year of the past 34 (since accurate satellite data have been kept). It was not the second hottest or the third hottest or the fourth hottest.”
“According to the climate models that are supposed to worry us, global warming should be accelerating,” Kreutzer added. “Instead world temperatures have flattened out over the past 15 years. Note that China is in the middle of a record-breaking cold winter.”
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