The Climate Clock - When a Clock Becomes a Countdown

 “Earth has a deadline.” This simple sentence flashes before the eyes of New Yorkers a few times a day, since Sep. 25, 2020. The iconic Metronome clock, facing Union Square in the heart of Manhattan, has a new purpose everyone should hear about.

For more than twenty years the enormous digital installment on the Fourteenth Street building was used for counting the hours and minutes in a never-ending cycle. On Sep. 25 of this year, however, it was programmed to display the time remaining until an irreversible climate change. The numbers are based on a calculation made by Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin –  7:103:15:40:07 – counting the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until global warming becomes irreversible. The chilling phrase “Earth has a deadline,” which appears on the 62-foot-wide screen several times throughout the day, and the public installment itself were designed by two artists, who appear to be passionate about environmental protection – Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd. 

In an interview for The Ted Alexandro Show, Golan said “This is our window, this is the time we have, this is our best shot to keep the worst things from climate change from happening,” and Boyd added, “It’s a very harsh timeline, it’s a lot to reckon with.” In a detailed explanation of the numbers, Golan stated that if people can get to net zero carbon dioxide emission by January 2028, Earth will have a 67 percent chance of staying under the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming. This is a red line that scientists are constantly reminding society not to cross. Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is crucial for avoiding some of the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, such as wildfires, the critical rising of sea levels, and flooding.

Professor Bill Clark, Adjunct Assistant Professor of environmental science at AUBG, explained that change is not going to happen the same way in any two places on Earth. “Change is going to be incremental and uneven, both in terms of time and space. Sometimes the changes will be dramatic, and sometimes they are going to be so gradual that it will be imperceptible,” Clark said. He added that monitoring the changes in California, for example, where wildfires are burning and air quality is bad, would be perceived as a catastrophe. However, in places like Northern Russia climate change will not be a bad thing, because warming up will lengthen the season for growing crops.

“With climate change, there are going to be winners and losers,” Clark said.

In 2018, the United Nations body that works with science, related to climate change – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – conducted a report which states that global warming will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels between 2032 and 2050, if we go at the current pace. Such a level of warming is estimated to increase the damage to numerous ecosystems and cause $54 trillion of financial damage.

The fact that the state of the environment has been critical for years is no secret to anyone. Even though their message seems urgent, in the interview with Ted Alexandro, Golan and Boyd said that the current trajectory of our planet is not unstoppable. However, people have started associating the clock with the end of the world. As a response to that, Golan said “This is not what the clock shows – it is showing our time window for action. The world will go to hell later, but it’s going to be because of what we’re doing now.” He also added, “If you are driving really fast towards a cliff, you cannot hit the breaks at the last minute. You have to hit the breaks long before that.” According to Clark students should think about what the consequences of their behaviors are, especially when it comes to the environment.   

The climate clock actually shows two numbers. The red number is the deadline for people to take action toward limiting global warming. The second number, in green, tracks the growing percentage of the world’s energy, coming from renewable sources. The goal everyone should strive for is the green number to become one hundred percent before the countdown is over.

"The clock being up there is a great example for raising awareness,” Clark said, “but nothing is going to happen when that clock ticks down, the world is going to be pretty much the same ten minutes before it reaches zero and ten minutes after.” It is wonderful that it gives people this idea of urgency. According to Clark that is very important because for the past years so many science writers have given so much weight to the climate change problem that people often seem to tune it out.

Shortly before the Metronome clock was turned into a countdown, Golan and Boyd introduced their project on a website – climateclock.world. The page includes an explanation of the numbers and tracks the growing percentage of the world’s energy, supplied by renewable sources. On the website, people can find information about other climate clocks as well – clocks that work with calculations about global warming within 2.0 degrees Celsius, and even 2.5 degrees Celsius.

“I tend to be optimistic, but I don’t think we are going to make it for the 1.5  degrees Celsius, I think given our behavior until now and the amount of carbon dioxide we’ve put in the air, 1.5 degrees Celsius is almost inevitable,” Clark said. “We might be able to avoid the 2.0 degrees Celsius though.” He explained that when we think about it, 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.0 degrees Celsius doesn’t seem like such a big change, but 2.0  degrees Celsius around the whole Earth is an awful lot of extra energy in the system and the differences could be quite severe.

“We know that the world’s going to end, but first the world will become less and less hospitable for humans,” Clark said. There are going to be more and more places around the globe where people won’t even be able to live because it’s too hot. This has already started to happen in certain parts of India or the Middle East, and those areas are going to expand over time.

The worst part of all is that the places on Earth which will suffer the most from the impact of climate change are the developing countries. “Europe will be affected, North America will be affected, but not like parts of India and Africa,” Clark said, “And I have a feeling that those richer countries are not going to be that serious about the problem because it is not going to affect them that seriously, not yet anyway.“    

Originally, the climate clock was installed on Metronome just for International Climate Week, but Golan and Boyd are currently trying to display it somewhere in the United States permanently. They believe that their message will have its desired effect and it will make a change for the better.

According to Boyd, “You can’t argue with science, you just have to reckon with it.”

“Even though we do not feel the direct impact, it is going to catch up eventually,” Clark said.