The poster for the protest.

On Sunday I reposted Peter Sinclair’s ‘Tipping Point‘ article about the hundreds of thousands who took to the street to protest against government inaction on climate change. Today’s post is not a post about passing the climate tipping point as suggested by Guy McPherson. Instead, it’s a public tipping point. I’m suggesting you read another article by Peter Sinclair, who writes on the Climate Denial Crock of the Week blog. Nobody who’s reporting on the People’s Climate March that took place on Sunday September 21 is saying there were less than two hundred thousand people who turned out, and the median number reported is 300K. Don’t be surprised that the MSM outlets didn’t touch on it AT ALL on the Sunday news shows (per the article). And Sinclair wasn’t the only one to call out MSM. Huffington Post and Media Matters also took the Sunday news shows to task for ignoring the climate march.

Then there was Monday.

. The ‘Flood Wall Street‘ protest, taking advantage of the many activists who stayed in town an extra day, headed up Broadway at around 11:30 this morning and went past the Wall Street Bull in an attempt to get to the ‘scene of the crime’–Wall Street. Their point is simple. Wall Street provides the funding for the devastation of the planet. It underwrites fracking, tar sands, and shale oil developments. Wall Street pays the money for the continuance of Mountain top removal of Coal. And Wall Street drives a fossil fuel dependence even as the evidence is clear that the carbon freed by the burning of these ancient dinosaurs causes the planet to warm to the point where we face near term human extinction. This despite the ample evidence that we’re running out of old dinosaurs to burn. And protesters aren’t the only thing that could flood Wall Street– rising sea levels would put Wall Street (and much of the five boroughs) underwater in a few years . The last time we had 400 PPM of carbon in the atmosphere, there were no humans, and sea levels were some 23 meters higher than they are now.

As I write this, the arrests are taking place. Broadway has been closed to traffic below City Hall for some six hours. All the action was live-streamed at Huffington Post thanks to the work of this guy. And there’s finally network coverage of what’s going on. Whether the MSM will actually discuss the reason for the protest or simply turn coverage into a ‘he said, she said, they got arrested’ narrative remains to be seen.

And it’s clear from some of the People’s Mic speakouts that the protesters out today know that this is about far more than an appeal for recycling. The word ‘extinction’ came up more than once, and it’s clear that the cat is out of the bag. Where the movement goes from here is a question, but today was no corporate ‘greenwash’ event. As the protesters were being arrested, they chanted “WE’RE DOING THIS FOR YOUR CHILDREN” to the police. Is that reality sinking in anywhere?