Robert Raymond A Sunrise Movement protester in San Francisco on Dec. 11, 2018.

On a clear and sunny morning in San Francisco’s downtown SoMa district, 40 people stand side by side with interlinked arms blocking the entrance to the San Francisco Federal Building. Just a couple of weeks ago this city was shrouded in a suffocating blanket of wildfire smoke that had traveled down from giant blazes in the north. But the haze has since cleared, and its absence has revealed a clarity of vision which stretches far beyond a healthier air quality index. “I’m here today because we have a 12-year deadline,” Lydia Macy, 18, told HuffPost from behind a 40-foot banner that she was helping to hold up. “Climate change is the No. 1 issue that we’re facing in the 21st century, and if we don’t fight we won’t have a world to live in.” A student at Berkeley High School, Macy was joined by hundreds of others in this action organized by the Bay Area chapter of Sunrise Movement — a youth-led organization with the mission to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process. Sunrise Movement’s most recent campaign has been focused on putting pressure on members of Congress to support Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in pushing for a Green New Deal, a policy proposal aiming to ensure a just and rapid transition to a decarbonized economy. Following a day of sit-ins and protests on Monday outside the Capitol Hill office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — which drew in thousands and saw more than 130 arrested — the action in San Francisco on Tuesday also targeted Pelosi, whose local district office was just on the other side of the demonstrators’ human barricade.

Robert Raymond The Sunrise Movement demonstration in San Francisco, where protestors called for a Green New Deal.

Pelosi, likely the next Speaker of the House, will be in charge of shaping the House legislative agenda for the next two years. She has not yet endorsed Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to form a select committee that would take up the Green New Deal. “I took the day off of high school because the science is here and the solutions are clear,” Macy said. “The only thing standing in the way is politics and the people in power.” Macy is part of a growing climate movement which has been occupying forests, shutting down oil pipelines, disrupting fossil fuel conferences, and taking part in many similar forms of civil disobedience and direct action. This movement is filled with young people who don’t see much of a future if we continue on with business as usual. They say they’re done asking politely and are no longer willing to accept the inaction, ineptitude and corruption that pervade the corridors of power. They are willing to put their bodies upon the gears, the wheels and the levers of the carbon economy — and they have very good reasons for it.

NurPhoto via Getty Images Demonstrators at the COP24 climate conference on Dec. 10 in Katowice, Poland, respond to Donald Trump's advisor Wells Griffith saying the U.S. will not reject coal mining or fossil fuel use.

JOSH EDELSON via Getty Images Paradise Elementary School, destroyed during the Camp fire in Paradise in November, California's worst ever wildfire.

And yet the scale and scope of the IPCC’s findings bring us all into the fold. Perhaps not unlike Al Gore’s jaw-dropping emissions chart in “An Inconvenient Truth,” the report seems to have hit a collective nerve. It’s a line in the sand. A point of no return. A warning with apocalyptic implication. “It feels like our future is truly being held in the balance and that I don’t really have a choice anymore,” Isaac Silk, a 26-year-old volunteer with Sunrise Movement’s Bay Area chapter, told HuffPost. “Once you accept the truth of this moment into your heart, there’s no going back.” Sunrise Movement is just one of many organizations channeling the growing movement of youth-driven climate civil disobedience. In the United Kingdom, a group calling themselves Extinction Rebellion has been organizing giant swarms around cities like London and putting together flash mobs that disrupt traffic at high-profile spots. Their aim is to put pressure on those in power and increase the public’s awareness of climate change by disrupting the material flows of the U.K. economy. Larch Maxey is a coordinator with Extinction Rebellion in London. He’s a veteran of the climate justice movement and helped to organize the group’s recent Rebellion Day on Nov. 17. The day of mass civil disobedience drew in around 6,000 people, according to the group, and shut down five major bridges in London.

NIKLAS HALLE'N via Getty Images Environmental activists gather in Parliament Square, London, the U.K., during a demonstration organised by the movement Extinction Rebellion on Nov. 24, 2018.