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Forty-eight climate activists representing themselves and various groups were arrested Wednesday outside the White House. (Photo via Flickr | Tar Sands Action)Forty-eight individuals were arrested outside the White House on Wednesday afternoon as they urged President Obama to take a strong stand on climate change by rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline and embracing a clean energy future without fossil fuels.

Among the notable leaders involved in the civil disobedience were Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, which made news recently by declaring its leaders and membership would end an almost 120 year ban on participating in acts of civil disobedience. Large cheers went up in the gathered crowd of supporters as Brune was led away in handcuffs.

“For the first time in the Sierra Club’s 120-year history, we have joined the ranks of visionaries of the past and present to engage in civil disobedience, knowing that the issue at hand is so critical, it compels the strongest defensible action.” –Michael Brune, Sierra Club

“For the first time in the Sierra Club’s 120-year history, we have joined the ranks of visionaries of the past and present to engage in civil disobedience, knowing that the issue at hand is so critical, it compels the strongest defensible action,” said Brune prior to his arrest. “We cannot afford to allow the production, transport, export and burning of the dirtiest oil on Earth via the Keystone XL pipeline. President Obama must deny the pipeline and take decisive steps to address climate disruption, the most significant issue of our time.”

Other notable arrests included environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Bill McKibben, Founder of 350.org; Julian Bond, civil rights leader and former president of the NAACP; and Daryl Hannah, an actress who has become well known for her climate activism from previous acts of civil disobedience in Washington and elsewhere.

After blocking the sidewalk in front of the White House—with some attaching themselves to the tall iron fence—and refusing to move when asked by Capitol Police, the activists were arrested one-by-one, handcuffed and led away.

“The threat to our planet’s climate is both grave and urgent,” said Julian Bond, who was among the last to be taken into custody. “Although President Obama has declared his own determination to act, much that is within his power to accomplish remains undone, and the decision to allow the construction of a pipeline to carry millions of barrels of the most-polluting oil on Earth from Canada’s tar sands to the Gulf Coast of the U.S. is in his hands. I am proud today to stand before my fellow citizens and declare, ‘I am willing to go to jail to stop this wrong.’ The environmental crisis we face today demands nothing less.”

“We really shouldn’t have to be put in handcuffs to stop KXL–our nation’s leading climate scientists have told us it’s dangerous folly, and all the recent Nobel Peace laureates have urged us to set a different kind of example for the world, so the choice should be obvious,” said 350.org founder Bill McKibben. “But given the amount of money on the other side, we’ve had to spend our bodies, and we’ll probably have to spend them again.”

Wednesday’s action was designed as a smaller but dramatic preface for a rally scheduled for Sunday that organizers say will bring many thousands of activists from all over the country to the White House gates to ask Obama to move “forward on climate”.

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Earlier updates:

Update (1:04 PM): The last of the climate protesters were arrested in the last several minutes, including Sierra Club president Michael Brune, co-founder of 350.org Bill McKibben, and noted civil rights hero Julian Bond.

Update (12:44 PM): Robert F. Kennedy, Jr was the latest to be arrested outside the White House. He got the endearing, if not original, send-off from his fellow climate activists that all those arrested so far also received. “Two, four, six, eight – who do we appreciate? Bobby, Bobby, Bobby… Yeah!” — as he was taken away by police.

Update (12:06 PM): Capitol police issued warnings to amassed protesters that those who did not disperse from the sidewalk in front of the White House would be arrested.

Subsequently arrests did commence, with climate activist and actor Daryl Hannah among the first to be handcuffed and led away.

Satellite data reveal how the new record low Arctic sea ice extent, from Sept. 16, 2012, compares to the average minimum extent over the past 30 years (in yellow). (Credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio)

An “alarming” rate of Arctic Sea ice melt and “far-reaching changes” to the Earth from climate change follow a year of extremes, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday as the third day of climate negotiations take place in Doha, Qatar.

The WMO statement comes a day after the UN Environment Program (UNEP) warned that the looming release of methane in the Arctic could push the world past a “tipping point.”

“The extent of Arctic sea ice reached a new record low. The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far-reaching changes taking place on Earth’s oceans and biosphere,” Michel Jarraud, head of the WMO, an agency of the UN, stated on Wednesday.

“Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” he added.

The Geneva-based group pointed out: “In August, the Arctic sea ice lost an average of nearly 92,000 square kilometers of ice per day — the fastest observed loss for the month of August on record.”

But the climate predictions, as dire as many are, fail to take into account the ticking time bomb of the carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the thawing permafrost.

“Permafrost is one of the keys to the planet’s future because it contains large stores of frozen organic matter that, if thawed and released into the atmosphere, would amplify current global warming and propel us to a warmer world,” UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner stated on Tuesday.

“Its potential impact on the climate, ecosystems and infrastructure has been neglected for too long,” he added.

As the planet warms and the active area of permafrost that thaws and refreezes each year extends, huge of amounts of carbon dioxide and methane will be released into the atmosphere.

“Once this process begins,” UNEP explains, “it will operate in a feedback loop known as the permafrost carbon feedback, which has the effect of increasing surface temperatures and thus accelerating the further warming of permafrost – a process that would be irreversible on human timescales.”

Another threat that has been understated, according to research published in Environmental Research Letters on Tuesday, is the level of sea rise.

Scientists assert in this new study that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sea level projections have been “biased low,” and the sea level is rising 60% faster than the IPCC predictions, heading towards a rise of one meter by the end of the century.

“I would say that a metre of sea level rise by the end of the century is probably close to what you would find if you polled the people who know best,” study co-author Grant Foster told Agence France Presse.

“In low-lying areas where you have massive numbers of people living within a metre of sea level, like Bangladesh, it means that the land that sustains their lives disappears, and you have hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and that can lead to resource wars and all kinds of conflicts,” he added.

“For major coastal cities like New York, probably the principal effect would be what we saw in Hurricane Sandy.