One of the most significant milestones in our campaign came this week, when Nature magazine, the most important of the world’s scientific publications, made 350 the lead story for the week. You can read the article here to see where the number came from, and to understand why so many researchers are taking it so seriously. As Nature puts it, “a growing number of scientists agree that the co2 challenge is even greater than had been previously thought.”
We’ve argued from the day we launched 350.org that it was time to take the real data seriously—to understand that scientists have given us the warning we need. Scientists can only do so much by themselves. Now it’s up to those of us with other skills: writing, music, art. And that one skill possessed by everyone with an internet connection and a few friends: organizing. Registering an action for Oct. 24 and then making it happen.
And in case you wonder if organizing can ever really work, you’ll see a funny picture in the Nature article of Bill McKibben and Jim Hansen looking a little cold as they stand outside the gates of a coal-fired power plant in Washington DC last month. Yesterday came the official word that the protest many of you helped support had definitively worked—the Capitol announced that they plant will never burn coal again. If that’s what we can do with one action, think what can happen from the thousands on Oct. 24.