Global issue spurs global protest

Levels are currently around 385 ppm and on track to bust a 450 ppm threshold previously viewed as safe.

Launched in March 2008, the Web-based network says it has nearly 200,000 activists in dozens of grassroots groups spread across 170 countries.

“It has worked beyond our wildest expectations,” McKibben told AFP. “We've basically got the whole world organized, much of it for the first time. October 24 is going to be, by a very large margin, the most widespread day of environmental action ever.”

Two demographic profiles dominate among 350.org's rank-and-file, McKibben said: educated youth and people linked by religion.

“I was aware of climate change but didn't know what I could do,” Gan Pei Ling, 22, a student at Tunku Abdul Rahman University in Malaysia, said this month at climate talks in Bangkok, where she had come to lobby negotiators.

Meeting a small node of activists in Malaysia gave her the courage to speak out, and 350.org put her in touch with like-minded young people across Asia and beyond.

Gan Pei Ling and hundreds of other 20-something activists who converged on Bangkok -- many sporting T-shirts asking “How Old Will You Be in 2050?” -- see global warming as an injustice toward the poor and the young.

“Older people don't seem to care,” said Lokendra Shrestha, a 28-year-old sociology student from Nepal, where vanishing glaciers threaten much of Asia's water supply.

Religion is also emerging as a lightning rod.

“Climate has risen up massively as an issue of concern in religious communities,” said Stuart Scott, a former statistics professor from Hawaii who has crisscrossed the globe garnering support for his Interfaith Declaration on Climate Change (www.interfaithdeclaration.org).

His cause got a big boost when the declaration was included in an ecumenical ceremony at the U.N. last month ahead of the world's first climate summit.

“It would be a huge mobilizing force if people started to frame the issue of climate change in religious terms,” noted Newell.

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