Global Warming Protests Begin Saturday

Participants with the "Sea of People" project march down the street in Lower Manhattan during the Step It Up 2007 rally, Saturday, April 14, 2007 in New York. Americans worried about global warming staged a nationwide day of protests on Saturday, raising their voices everywhere from ski slopes to the Manhattan shoreline. More than 1,300 events were organized in every state under the banner Step It Up 2007 _ a call for Congress to require an 80 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. (AP Photo/Dima Gavrysh) (Dima Gavrysh - AP)

"We have such a wonderful planet and it is really tragic for us to ruin it with global warming," said organizer Jim Stewart of Earth Day L.A. "The bottom line is everybody needs to be carbon-neutral."

In one of the day's first demonstrations, skiers unfurled a protest banner in April snow on Whiteface Mountain near Wilmington, N.Y. Another group made an early morning hike to the summit of Maine's Cadillac Mountain, which is the first spot in the U.S. to be lit by the rising sun.

The Whiteface Mountain skiers fear long-term temperature increases promise trouble for native plants, wildlife and people in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York state.

"It's subtle," said Nola Royce, who has been going to the Adirondacks since 1971. For example, she said, the region's notorious, biting black flies are emerging earlier in the season.

Neil Woodworth, executive director of the Adirondack Mountain Club, said less obvious concerns about warming include pests moving northward. He mentioned tick-borne Lyme disease, now a problem farther south in Connecticut, New Jersey and southern New York, as well as the Sirex wood wasp, hemlock woolly adelgid and Asian longhorned beetle.

"All these tree eaters normally prefer more temperate climates than the Adirondacks," Woodworth said. "And as the Adirondack climate gets warmer in the winters the below-freezing barrier that has held these pests at bay is going to be lost."

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On the Net:

Step It Up: http://www.stepitup2007.org/

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Associated Press writers Michael Virtanen in Wilmington, N.Y. and Laurel Jorgensen in Chicago contributed to this report.