Climate Emergency': Activists Calling for Civil Disobedience Scale the Gates of Buckingham Palace

(The Blaze/AP) -- Climate change activists scaled the gates at Queen Elizabeth II's Buckingham Palace home on Saturday, locking themselves to railings to demand more urgent action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The group, from the Climate Siren environmentalist movement, wore T-shirts with the slogan "Climate emergency. 10 percent annual emission cuts" and chanted through a loud hailer.

London's Metropolitan Police said the group had climbed up a gate at the front of the palace and secured themselves to it, sitting with their legs through the railings.

The protesters unfurled a banner quoting a 2008 speech by Prince Charles, the queen's son and heir, warning over a lack of progress on tacking climate change. It read: "`The doomsday clock of climate change is ticking ever faster towards midnight."

In a letter to the queen posted to the organization's website, the activists claim they are carrying out the protest to draw attention to the stalled progress on environmental issues, while comparing the effort to WW2.

"We believe that our national security is at stake now, no less than it was during the dark days of the last Great War, albeit in a very different way.  As you celebrate this year’s Jubilee you must find it impossible not to view with consternation the dark clouds that once again are gathering to threaten the future of this island, with which your name has been so closely associated these last sixty years," the letter reads.

"These are the dark clouds of what looks increasingly likely to be a much greater global tragedy than the last World War."

Climate-Siren.com, the website listed on the group's Twitter page, dramatically elaborates:

We are calling for a great effort of civil disobedience in the UK.

We are calling for this great effort of civil disobedience in order to demand urgent, concerted and meaningful action to tackle the unprecedented national and global emergency presented by the catastrophic destabilisation of global climate.

We have been watching with quiet anger and deep despair the relentless approach of an unprecedented tragedy.

Since the path of human history is so littered with pain, cruelty, catastrophe and tragic folly it is hard to imagine something yet more unspeakably vast in the sheer scale of human anguish that it will encompass. Yet we can see the spectre of such a monumental tragedy approaching with a clarity that increases almost as fast as the time we have left to prevent it slips away.

No amount of wishful thinking or double talk can obscure the fact that the science is brutally clear. Without a radical change of course we will see the deaths of billions of the world's population before the century is out. It will simply be the biggest catastrophe ever in human history. Given the course we're currently on, any outcome less calamitous is now clearly unrealistic even if the precise nature and ultimate scale of this oncoming catastrophe is impossible to predict.

[...]

We are calling for a great effort of civil disobedience as a clarion call for urgency that will break the paralysing spell of apathy, creeping despair, ignorance, myopia and self-deluding make-believe. If there ever was a time when such an effort is needed it is now. If there ever was a time when such an effort was justified it is now.

About 100 people stood at the scene, watching the protest, the Associated Press reports.

Siobhan Grimes, a 24-year-old from east London, said she agreed that there was a need for more urgency on green issues.

"Our politicians aren't doing enough. We're hoping to inspire people to wake up to the consequences of catastrophic climate change," she said.

The queen was not at the palace Saturday, since she was attending a horse racing event in Ascot, southern England.