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National Observer

A splash of paint, a flood of warnings: climate protest in a time of acceleration

On June 19, shortly after opening time at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, a young man named Marcel walked up to Pablo Picasso's "L'hétaïre" and threw pink paint across its protective glass covering. It was a climate protest, part of a three-week 'action phase' by the group Last Generation Canada, which is calling on the Canadian government to establish a climate disaster protection agency. It's probably a safe bet that many people would have found Marcel's action incomprehensible. And not just because they find the tactic of targeting artwork baffling — but also because there is such a widening gulf between the escalating severity of our climate predicament and its declining priority in our politics and public opinion. What could possibly cause a young person like Marcel to do something so drastic and provocative? Doesn't he know we have tariffs to contend with and a world filled with more immediate crises? Climate change can wait, we seem to have decided. The drop in public priority is grossly out of sync with the worsening reality of climate change. The past years have seen a marked jump in global heating and most people are blithely unaware of the latest string of spine-chilling scientific observations. Groups like Last Generation stubbornly refuse to look away. And before we take a quick tour of the reasons people like Marcel might resort to seemingly-desperate actions, it's worth hearing from them directly. One of the other organizations loosely aligned with Last Generation was Just Stop Oil, based in the UK. And the reason it's in the past tense is that Just Stop Oil announced this Spring it has put down its cans of paint (and soup) and hung up the hi-vis vests used while disrupting traffic. 'It is the end of soup on van Goghs, cornstarch on Stonehenge and slow marching in the streets,' the group said in a statement. The organization's main goal was to stop the UK from issuing new licenses for oil and gas exploration. The Labour party pledged to stop the process and has maintained the policy in government. There has also been a severe crackdown on disruptive protests in the UK and activists have received lengthy prison sentences. But ultimately, 'We achieved what we set out to achieve,' says James Skeet, a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil. The drop in public priority is grossly out of sync with the worsening reality of climate change and the latest string of spine-chilling scientific observations. But climate activists stubbornly refuse to look away, writes Chris Hatch. Last Generation Canada has a more modest goal — a national climate disaster protection agency. The group highlights the need to tackle climate change and boost adaptation response for those 'whose homes, communities, lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by extreme weather, including wildfires worsened by the burning of fossil fuels.' After he was released by the police pending his court date, Marcel explained his decision to throw paint on the Picasso's glass casing (for the record, museum officials have confirmed no damage was done to the painting itself). 'Art is humanity, art is life,' said Marcel. 'There is no point in protecting a Picasso painting if no one is able … to appreciate it — if they themselves are not protected from the rising climate disasters around the world that are more frequent and more violent every year.' When Marcel goes to court, he will have some serious evidence to present, if the judge is willing to hear it. Acceleration The same day of Marcel's action in Montreal, 60 leading climate scientists released an assessment updating the critical indicators of climate change. 'The news is grim,' said Zeke Hausfather, one of the authors. There's been some dispute among scientists about whether climate change is getting worse at a constant rate or whether it's actually accelerating. That debate appears to be settled. 'Things aren't just getting worse. They're getting worse, faster,' Hausfather said. 'We're actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there's a silver lining. I don't think there really is one in this one.' The scientists created an infographic highlighting the changes measured in 2024, compared to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) last report, which was issued just four years ago: Energy imbalance It sounds a bit wonky, but Earth's energy imbalance is actually pretty simple — a measure of how much heat our planet absorbs from the sun versus how much gets radiated back out to space. It's sometimes called 'the most important metric' in the world because it gets around short-term fluctuations in temperature and inexorably determines our long-term future. It 'is the most important measure of the amount of heat being trapped in the system,' Hausfather said. 'It is very clearly accelerating. It's worrisome.' In fact, another study published in May (this one conducted by 57 scientists) summarized satellite measurements and found that ' Earth's energy imbalance more than doubled in recent decades.' 'The large trend has taken us by surprise,' the authors write. 'It is rising much faster than expected, and in 2023 it reached values two times higher than the best estimate from IPCC … twice that predicted by climate models.' One-point-five is unavoidable Greenhouse gas emissions from burning oil, gas and coal set a new record in 2024. That means we're on track to blow through the remaining carbon budget to stay under 1.5 C of heating within two to three years. That won't come as a surprise to regular readers. But it puts the actions of campaigners like Marcel in perspective. It is, after all, the goal agreed by the nations of the world — 'a political limit countries have decided that beyond which the impact of climate change would be unacceptable to their societies,' said Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. Sensitive Earth We could go on highlighting the wild divergence between the latest scientific observations and public understanding or government action. But let's tie things up with one last exhibit Marcel might offer the judge. The Earth's climate is showing itself to be more sensitive to carbon pollution than climate models had predicted. This question of sensitivity has probably been the biggest question mark in climate science — we know that the Earth heats up when we blanket it with greenhouse gases, but how much does the Earth react? All we've really had to go on are reconstructions of deep history and projections using computer models. But we now have enough years of satellite data that we can check how closely those models track results in the real world. The results were published this month, and the answer is sobering: ' bad news,' says lead author Gunnar Myhre from the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Norway. When you compare NASA's satellite data of the Earth's energy imbalance to the models, you can clearly see that the models are underestimating the real world over the last decade (NASA CERES satellite observations shown in red and the average of models in black; individual models in faded grey). What this means, in the sterile language of scientific papers, is that 'increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases likely will cause even more warming than most current models predict.' In plain language: we have to cut back fossil fuel burning even faster than we thought. The carbon budget to have any chance of staying below the outer limit of 2C is smaller than predicted. When Marcel stands before the judge, he won't just be defending a splash of paint — he'll be defending the right to sound the alarm in a world filled with pressing priorities. The science he brings isn't just abstract charts or distant projections. It's the brutal, accelerating reality we now inhabit: faster warming, tighter carbon budgets, and a dangerously sensitive Earth. His protest, disruptive as it may seem, is a response to something far more disruptive — the unraveling of the stable climate that made human civilization possible. The question dripping from Marcel's pink paint is whether we'll be more scandalized by the tactics of the messenger than by the message itself.