Holyrood 350 — H35O

We are organ­is­ing an action of behalf of 350.org on Sat­ur­day 24 Octo­ber for the Inter­na­tional Day of Cli­mate Action. It’d be great if you could join us!

The idea is to form a giant 350 human ban­ner to call on world lead­ers at the Copen­hagen talks, to deliver a strong global treaty that will get us back to the safe upper limit for CO2 in ourat­mos­phere, i.e. 350 parts per million.

The event will com­mence out­side the City Cham­bers on High Street at 12:30 with a parade of drum­mers lead­ing us down the Royal Mile to form the human ban­ner out­side the Scot­tish Par­lia­ment at 13:00. This is intended to tie in with over 100 actions around the globe on the same day, includ­ing a par­al­lel drum­ming event in Barcelona.

If you have drums or know drum­mers please bring them and ask oth­ers to get in touch. We are ask­ing peo­ple to reg­is­ter by e-mailing us at 350humanbanner@googlemail.com as it will help us with the logis­tics of mak­ing the ban­ner. Please wear some­thing blue — or bring a blue umbrella if it’s raining! 

Mean­while in Findhorn … 

The cen­tre piece of the day will be a cer­e­mony with at its heart a mass impromptu choir of 350 singers belt­ing out the 8-part har­monic song based on the Chief Seat­tle speech – ‘The earth does not belong to us, We belong to the earth.….…’

Below is more infor­ma­tion on the cam­paign. See you on Sat­ur­day 24th October!

Why is 350 an impor­tant number?

350 parts per mil­lion (ppm) is what many sci­en­tists, cli­mate experts, and pro­gres­sive national gov­ern­ments are now say­ing is the safe upper limit for CO2 in our atmosphere.

Accel­er­at­ing arc­tic warm­ing and other early cli­mate impacts have led sci­en­tists to con­clude that we are already above the safe zone at our cur­rent 390ppm, and that unless we are able to rapidly return to 350ppm this cen­tury, we risk reach­ing tip­ping points and irre­versible impacts such as the melt­ing of the Green­land ice sheet and major methane releases from increased per­mafrost melt.

How do we get back to 350?

Get­ting back to 350 means trans­form­ing our world. It means build­ing solar arrays instead of coal plants, it means plant­ing trees instead of clear-cutting rain­forests, it means increas­ing effi­ciency and decreas­ing our waste. Get­ting to 350 means devel­op­ing a thou­sand dif­fer­ent solu­tions – all of which will become much eas­ier if we have a global treaty grounded in the lat­est sci­ence and built around the prin­ci­ples of equity and justice.

The United Nations is work­ing on a treaty, which is sup­posed to be com­pleted in Decem­ber of 2009 at the Copen­hagen con­fer­ence, Den­mark . But the cur­rent plans for the treaty are much too weak to get us back to the safe limit of 350ppm. This treaty needs to put a high enough price on car­bon so that we stop using so much. It also needs to make sure that poor coun­tries are ensured a fair chance to develop.

What can you do?

You can help stop global warm­ing by spread­ing the num­ber 350.

Join us to form a human 350 ban­ner out­side the Scot­tish Par­lia­ment at 13:00 — or, bet­ter still, join us ear­lier with drums or just your voice out­side the City Cham­bers and march down with us to Par­lia­ment to make our voices heard!