Climbing against climate change

French climber Alain Robert, who has taken to climbing skyscrapers instead of cliffs -- so far he has made more than 70 urban ascents -- scaled the New York Times building June 5. Before being arrested, Robert unfurled a banner reading, "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 each week." Robert targeted the Times building as the perch from which to make his point because of its green qualities. Although the New York Times Company and its architect, Renzo Piano, did not seek LEED certification, the utilizes efficient HVAC systems, daylighting, and other green features. Technically, climbing the building isn't much harder than climbing a ladder, due to the ceramic rods that cover much of the exterior. While meant mainly to limit the sunlight entering the building, the rods also greatly reduce the likelihood of birds crashing into the windows, a problem particularly with large expanses of uninterrupted glass. (For more on that, read this EBN article. Some have criticized the building, however, for its lack of bicycle parking -- it lacks outdoor racks or an indoor bike storage room, although space for a handful of bicycles has been make in an ad hoc fashion. Piano put perforated steel members on the facade at street level, which are excellent for locking bicycles to, but the building's management will not allow that, and threatens to cut any locks that are secured to them. As is usual in reportage of direct-action attempts to get across a political point, press reports concerned themselves mostly with Robert's antics rather than his message. Robert's mention of September 11 on his banner must be disquieting to many, and his use of the Times building as a symbolic site weirdly echoes the 9/11 terrorists' use of the Twin Towers. It also resembles many Greenpeace actions, except that rather than hanging a banner at a site being protested, Robert hung his on a site he wished to laud. But most striking is the quixotic claim that global warming is killing more than 3,000 people each week. How does it do that? How can one know? Does it matter how climate change compares to 9/11, or would it be sufficient to draw attention to the seriousness of the problem? It seems all too likely that linking global warming concerns to a half-baked claim and an arguably loony risk of life does Roberts' cause more harm than good.