Since the beginning of the calendar year, 8700+ wildfires have burnt down over 4.1 million acres of land in California. In the past 3 months, floods in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and India have left thousands dead and destroyed millions of homes. Recent U.S. droughts have been the most expansive in decades and as our climate continues to deteriorate, droughts will become longer and more frequent. The effects of Climate Change are rapidly accelerating, as climate-related disasters continue to pile up. Climate change is no new issue though, and scientists have been warning us for decades about this worsening problem.
` The Metronome, a public art installation in Union Square, was reprogrammed on September 20th, 2020 to show a countdown called the Climate Clock. Honoring Climate Week NYC, the 15-digit electronic clock showed the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds till the predicted climate deadline. Co-creators and artists Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd explain that this deadline is based on a 2018 IPCC(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) special report on Global Warming and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. The Climate Clock website says that if we do not achieve zero carbon emissions by the roughly seven-year deadline, global warming will likely exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. NASA climate scientist Alan Buis writes that a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in world temperature would mean widespread extreme heatwaves, more intense droughts, and possibilities of irreversible damage to both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The IPCC report projects an estimated $54 trillion in damage if this 1.5-degree threshold is passed.
` This Climate Clock is unique compared to other reminders and bad news of natural disasters that most associate with climate change. The Climate Clock emphasizes that time is running out and that no amount of climate change awareness will solve the warming of the earth itself. Unfortunately, news of climate-induced natural disasters and record high temperatures have become commonplace. Hopefully, the Climate Clock’s reminder of how close we are to severe environmental shifts will spur many to fight harder for the future of our planet. Gan Golan, co-creator of the clock, said: “We all have to be on the same timeline. The world is literally counting on us. Every hour, every minute, every second, counts.”
Many environmental advocates are divided between political action and personal action for the best way to help fight against climate change. Commentators like Jay Michealson, Micheal Mann, and Martin Lukacs claim that personal action causes insignificant changes and detracts from the responsibilities that government officials and corporate polluters have. Lukacs even argues that eco-consumerism only expiates personal guilt and only mass movements can alter the trajectory of climate change. However, this reaction to shirk personal responsibility and leave it up to the “big companies” and the “powerful politicians” takes away from the core purpose of climate change. People who feel powerless when faced with the issue of climate change contribute to the stalling and procrastinating of addressing the problem. While it feels wrong that individuals should be responsible for climate issues that corporations mainly caused, we must remember that our time is limited and we are all fighting on the same team.
With the Climate Clock ticking down, people should not look at the choice between personal action and political action as binary. To give ourselves the best chance at limiting the repercussions of global warming, we must harness and organize systemic changes in the form of laws, subsidies, and taxes, while also encouraging individual behavior changes. Luckily these two changes go hand in hand. Individuals that make behavioral changes like buying carbon offsets, switching to renewable energy, and minimize transportation emissions are likely to become those that press government officials to hold corporations accountable for excessive greenhouse gas pollution and educate themselves on mass movements like strikes, protests, and boycotts.
Ultimately, the Climate Clock tells us that now is the time to act. Whether it is buying an electric car, offsetting airplane emissions with carbon offsets, joining protests that demand environmental change, we need to educate ourselves and do something. Only through action can we best protect our planet!