The Climate clock shows how many years, days, hours and minutes humanity still has before an irreversible climate catastrophe.
It was almost a week ago — to be precise, Saturday the 19th — when two American artists, Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd, unveiled their new installation, Climate clock, to passers-by in Union Square in Manhattan.
It is a digital clock that tells not just the time, or rather not any ordinary time: in red it ominously announces how little time remains before humanity faces an irreversible climate emergency, and in green the percentage of energy from renewable sources that is currently available. The idea is simple: the second figure needs to reach 100 per cent before the first reaches zero, or at least ahead of it.
Many passers-by, unaware of what it is, look up and wonder whether it might be something else — perhaps the national debt or the time remaining until the presidential elections — even though the numbers don't add up. The climate emergency and the changes the world is increasingly and forcefully experiencing feel like a distant shore, almost a postcard, and that goes a long way towards explaining why we perhaps needed a clock to make us feel the urgency.
For several years now, scholars, scientists and experts have been trying to prompt the world and its governments to pay attention before it is too late: temperatures exceeding 1.5 degrees centigrade would be enough for the planet to face unprecedented heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, insufficient water for everyone — and the list goes on, unfortunately touching places and human lives without distinction.
The idea for the clock came to Golan after the birth of his first child, a week before the release of one of the many Ipcc reports with its dire predictions for the future and the catastrophic consequences it would bring. It was not, however, the first time he and Boyd had engaged with this subject: in September 2019, a few days before her celebrated speech to the UN General Assembly, climate activist Greta Thunberg had asked the two artists to make her a portable clock showing exactly what is now before the eyes of New Yorkers — and all of us — on the project's official website.
In the same virtual space, there is also the opportunity to learn how to build one yourself — one that will keep running even after 27 September, when it disappears from Union Square — and perhaps to keep it close at hand, as Thunberg does. Behind the installation, for the record, are not only Golan and Boyd, but also Katie Peyton, who served as research director, and Adrian Carpenter, who handled the technical side — not to mention scientists, activists and other artists.
Once, in the spot where a countdown now ticks towards something that will change the life of the planet and its inhabitants, there stood an astronomical clock, built in 1999 and conceived by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, to explore the relationship between the city and time. The Passage showed how much time had passed since midnight and how much remained before it came around again. Today we look up, or open a website on a screen, and explore our relationship with the place we live in and what we are willing to do to prevent its collapse before it is too late. Will 7 years, 98 days, 23 minutes and 11 seconds be enough?