Climate change protests mark Donald Trump’s 100th day in office

Thousands of people across the US marched in rain, snow and sweltering heat Saturday to demand action on climate change — mass protests that coincided with President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office and took aim at his agenda for rolling back environmental protections.

At the marquee event, the Peoples Climate March in Washington, DC, tens of thousands of demonstrators made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue on their way to encircle the White House as temperatures soared into the 90s Fahrenheit (30s Celsius).

Organisers said about 300 sister marches or rallies were being held around the country, including in Seattle, Boston and San Francisco. A wet spring snow fell in Denver, where several hundred activists posed in the shape of a giant thermometer for a photograph and a dozen people rode stationary bikes to power the loudspeakers. In Chicago, a rain-soaked crowd of thousands headed from the city’s federal plaza to Trump Tower.

“We are here because there is no Planet B,” the Reverend Mariama White-Hammond of Bethel AME Church told a rally in Boston.

The demonstrations came one week after supporters of science gathered in 600 cities around the globe, alarmed by political and public rejection of established research on topics including climate change and the safety of vaccines.