CLIMATE protesters defaced Charles Darwin’s grave in Westminster Abbey temporarily on Monday, drawing attention to last week’s news that, in 2024, average temperatures had been, for the primary time, greater than 1.5ºC higher than within the pre-industrial era.
On Monday morning, the 2 protesters used spray-on orange chalk to write down “1.5 IS DEAD” on Darwin’s grave slab, in Scientists’ Corner.
The activists — Alyson Lee and Bi Bligh — were arrested, and an Abbey spokesperson said that that they had caused no everlasting damage to the grave. “Conservators took immediate motion to scrub the grave,” the spokesperson said, and confirmed that the Abbey had remained open for visiting and worship throughout.
On Tuesday morning, the Metropolitan Police announced that the protesters had been charged with criminal damage.
In a press release from Just Stop Oil, Ms Lee, a retired teaching assistant, said that “despite numerous tremendous words from international leaders, emissions are still rising. Without real motion, words are useless: you can’t negotiate with the laws of physics.”
The European Copernicus Climate Change Service reported last Friday that 2024 had been the most well liked yr on record, with global average temperatures about 1.6º higher than pre-industrial levels.
In 2015, at a gathering in Paris, countries pledged to “endeavour to limit” global warming to 1.5º (News, 18 December 2015). The agreement refers to average temperatures over multiple yr; so the 2024 figures on their very own don’t mean that the agreement has been broken.
On Monday, Ms Bligh, a former chief executive of Reading Council, said: “If we don’t work together to rein in the firms and billionaires driving us beyond our means, humanity is not going to have the option to adapt to what’s coming. We are on target to lose the whole lot, and politicians are doing nowhere near enough to forestall it.”
The spokesperson said that Westminster Abbey was “committed to environmental sustainability and to reducing our carbon emissions”, and was looking for to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. “These commitments form a part of the Abbey’s carbon-reduction plan as we work to realize carbon neutrality, implementing quite a lot of energy efficiency measures,” she said.
