Well of course nitrogen dioxide concentrations will drop in the locations where the protests are taking place, but what about concentrations in other locations, where the displaced traffic would have had to go?
In which case, I cannot find evidence to prove or disprove your statement.
Personally I wouldn't call it "peaceful" to willfully obstruct the public highway and prevent other people from going about their lawful business. You could have had a protest in Hyde Park or somewhere like that.
In which case, we have to agree to disagree.
Still, it's going to be interesting hearing Greta Thunberg explain to the British politicians that she meets what action she has taken to reduce her own personal carbon footprint, including how she is going to offset the carbon emissions incurred by travelling from Sweden to the UK.
She doesn't eat meat. She travelled by train, not using areoplane or coach.
Are you saying over a 1000 arrests is a peaceful protest ?
Arrests are not always for violence. Good grief
.
There was a huge switch to cycling due to safe & clean streets during the protests. Nobody lost out, its all spin by fossil junkies!
Greta refuses to fly and only uses trains, taking her 2 days to get to London from Italy. Would you do that?
Yes! And I have done it. In 1 day (not 2).
Perhaps Greta could have a word with Emma Thompson then. (who flew in from LA especially for the "protests")
Because she's got better things to do....
I question the premise of various statements in this thread (for example,
@duncanp 's in posts #368 and #372). If her [Ms G Thuneburg's journey from Sweden to the UK used 1kg of Carbon Dioxide, would it invalidate the points she was making? Would the impending climate disaster cease to be relevent just because one teenager from Scandinavia ate a ham sandwich? Clearly not. "Oh my goodness! Some person who supported the protests used a plane! That must mean climate change isn't a problem!" Again, no.
Quite a lot of posts on the opposing side focus on visible personalities and frankly trivial sources (such as
@Xenophon PCDGS ' comments about the emissions from wild ruminants - post #270) rather than engaging with the 97% of peer-reviewed (IE: proper) climate scientists who say that humans are
at least accellerating climate change. Taking pot-shots at the fringes isn't an appropriate method of engagement.
Climate change protestors and activists have attempted to engage in politics using formal avenues for years (participating in elections), but have since been forced to move to more informal measures (petition signing, school strikes) and now more visible protests and action because the political establishment simply isn't listening. Action is not happening. When the school strikes started, our glorious Prime Minister said that the protesting school children should be in school. And, when a debate on the significant threat that climate change brings to this country finally happened, the turnout was awful. 10 MPs from the governing party turned out, and no more than 40 in total (this was March 2019). That is simply pathetic, but also shows a complete lack of respect.
What would you do? Climate change is clearly a threat, it is almost certainly caused by people (certainly exacerbated by our actions), and, unless action isn't taken within the next decade and a half, the world is royally screwed. As outlined above, conventional methods of engagement have already been tried, to no avail. Sometimes it has been met with outright disrespect (as Mrs May's response to the climate change school protestors showed). Given the above, what is the next step? Giving up is not an option (I quite like living on a habitable planet), so what do we do?