The Magic Number

Hi Friends,

We all know that climate change is the big challenge facing our world right now. This is some information from Bill McKibben (the guy behind last years Step It Up campaign)- and an artistic challenge. Read on, and think about trying your hand at spreading the number:

The science around climate change has continued to darken. We all watched the Arctic melt last summer, and an ice shelf six times the size of Manhattan crumble in the southern ocean this winter. James Hansen, our foremost climatologist, has just issued the most important scientific assessment of global warming in many years, which you can read here. Basically, it calls for limiting carbon concentrations in the atmosphere to below 350 parts per million. In fact, Hansen says: "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

* Therefore, our organizing team is launching a new venture: 350.org. The final website won't be ready for a few weeks, but since you're family we're letting you know now. In fact, we hope very much that you'll visit the preliminary website that we've set up and start figuring out how to help.

Here's our goal: We want to take this number, 350, and spread it all over the world. We want every human, if they know nothing else about global warming, to know that 350 represents safety. We want to use protest and music and art and video and the 'net to make that number inescapable, ubiquitous. Everywhere. If we do, it will help move the international negotiations in that direction-just the way that our insistence on 80% cuts by 2050 last spring found its way into the platforms of all the Democratic presidential candidates within days of our demonstrations. This time our target is the international community, which is spending the next 18 months negotiating a follow-up to Kyoto. It may be our last real bite at the apple, so those 18 months need to be well-spent.

If it's going to happen, we'll need to take the creativity and dedication that you all demonstrated last year during Step It Up and go to work on creating an International climate movement. We need your help spreading 350 to your friends and contacts in every corner of the planet. But what we need most right now are your actions and ideas that take the number 350 and drive it home: in art, in music, in political demonstrations, in any other way you can imagine. Already last weekend, 350 Utahns rode their bikes en masse in Salt Lake City. At least for this year, we're not planning on doing everything on a single date; instead, this will be a rolling action. So start thinking how to take this number and get it across!