Anyone who has walked through New York City’s Union Square and managed to look up has seen it: A large, multi-numeral digital clock embedded on the side of a sky scraper.
The public art project known as Metronome typically counts the hours, minutes, and seconds to and from midnight. But as of Saturday, it began telling a different sort of time. It now marks the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds that the world has to limit carbon emissions before we reach a critical tipping point.
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Artists Andrew Boyd and Gan Golan reprogrammed the clock to coincide with the beginning of Climate Week in NYC. The “climate clock,” as they call it, will display on Metronome through the end of Climate Week, Sept. 27.
The “deadline” they’ve set is based on calculations from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. It is largely understood that 1.5 degrees of global warming from current global averages will have devastating effects in terms of sea level rise, storms, drought, and more. Based on the amount of carbon used every day (at 2017 levels), 1.5 degrees of warming will occur in about seven and a half years. The Union Square Climate Clock now puts a countdown to that deadline in one of New York’s most public places.
Boyd and Golan have previously installed climate clocks in Berlin and Paris. They’ve also made a personal countdown clock for teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg, who tweeted a photo of herself as a younger child Sunday displaying “how fast we’re racing in the wrong direction.”
This is me at the age of 2 in 2005.
Since then about one third of ALL our fossil fuel CO2 emissions have occurred.
Over half of our CO2 emissions have taken place since 1990.That sort of gives you an idea of how fast we’re racing in the wrong direction.#FaceTheClimateEmergency pic.twitter.com/AzEBPAmVgz
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) September 20, 2020
The Climate Clock is an open source project, and the artists even include instructions for how to make one on their website.
Along with the coronavirus pandemic, racially biased policing, and Supreme Court justices, climate change looks to be a prominent issue in November’s presidential election thanks to the fires engulfing California and Oregon. Last week, Trump claimed “I don’t think science knows” that the record-breaking West Coast wildfires are linked to climate change (they most definitely are). Trump is seen as a disaster for the climate.