Climate Activists Spray-Paint Warning on Charles Darwin's Grave [View all]

Two climate activists affiliated with the group Just Stop Oil have painted Charles Darwin’s grave at London’s Westminster Abbey with a stark message: “1.5 is dead.”

The protest was a response to the news that global temperatures in 2024 exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Staying below this threshold was one of the commitments set by the Paris Agreement in 2015.

“We have already passed through the 1.5 degree [threshold] that was supposed to keep us safe,” said one of the activists during the protest, per video footage released by Just Stop Oil. “Millions are being displaced, California is on fire and three-quarters of all wildlife has disappeared since the 1970s.”

On Monday morning, the two protesters—Alyson Lee, 66, and Di Bligh, 77—used orange spray chalk to deface Darwin’s gravestone in Westminster Abbey’s Scientists’ Corner, which is also the burial site of renowned figures such as Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking.

Lee, a retired teaching assistant, says that if Darwin were alive today, “he would be as upset as us with the government for ignoring the science,” per PA Media.

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