Counting Down to Catastrophe: The Climate Clock’s Urgent Warning of Doomsday
Media provided by Olivia Calatozzo ‘27
In the heart of Union Square lives a giant clock, a device that, rather than keeping the time, is counting down.
Though it may appear as your average New York City spectacle, it is your wake-up call for doomsday. As the clock ticks down towards zero, humanity strives closer to the tipping point of where Mother Earth is too far gone to reverse climate change. It has been more than four years since the launch of the New York Climate Clock in Sept. 2020, but the building, neon, urgent, impossible-to-ignore clock keeps ticking, leaving one question:
Will we act before time runs out? Or will we, as a planet, hold profit and greed in a higher regard than the life of our planet?
“Now is the time to get to work,” said Micah W ‘26, a co-leader of the high school’s Green Griffins, “The next five years are going to dictate the future of our planet for the next 500 years.”
The team behind the Climate Clock was not the first to erect a landmark, emphasizing the time we have until it is too late. In 2009, according to the Climate Clock’s own website, Deutsche Bank created a “Carbon Counter” billboard above New York’s Times Square, which highlighted the alarming rate of carbon emissions. Years later, in 2015, the musician and activist David Usher, with the help of scientist Damon Mattews, started an online climate clock at Concordia University’s Human Impact Lab.
The idea of a Climate Clock started to pick up at this time, inspiring new web pages and news corporations to create their own clocks to help bring awareness to this unavoidable issue. In 2018, an art project by Andy McWilliams and Amay Katari was uploaded online, which eventually became featured in art galleries around the world. This installation was called The 2º Window, a name spotlighting the true goal behind all of these efforts. Humankind must restructure our global energy and economic infrastructure to avoid raising the global temperature past 2 degrees Celsius.
Then, 2019 came around; a milestone year that excelled climate activism initiatives years further by pushing them into the public spotlight. Someone who led our society to this pivotal year was the renowned Greta Thunberg (when she was 16 years old). So when the newly made Climate Clock startup team got an email reading, “Greta wants a clock,” a clock is what she got. Greta planned that she would hold up this clock in front of the United Nations General Assembly, and she needed the Climate Clock’s team of creative minds to help her with this task. While the UN security barred the clock from being let into the assembly at the end of the day, the snowball had already begun to roll; a monumental change was coming. As the team at Climate Clock writes, “A monumental challenge requires… a monument.”
Even without Greta’s speech at the UN having the first generation of the Climate Clock in the background, her speech was still heralded as one of the most transformative speeches in climate activism. The momentum that Greta had built could not be slowed down in any way, leading to the assembly of the New York City Climate Clock.
To get into more of the logistics behind the clock, it is important to understand the “one deadline” that the clock is counting down to. The Climate Clock deadline shows how long there is left until the carbon budget runs out. The budget was declared in 2018 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It was the first attempt to put into numbers the amount of budget necessary to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. A temperature agreed upon by 196 parties in the United Nations Paris Agreement. At the rate humanity is going, the Climate Clock will continue to tick down until it reaches zero. At this point, the carbon budget will have fully run out, and humanity will have gone too far to reverse climate change.
This doomsday outcome is highly likely but not inevitable. There is a lot anyone can do to make a significant impact in the fight against climate change. Along with the “one deadline,” the Climate Clock also features many lifelines. The monument displays the percentage of global energy coming from renewable sources. This is the first lifeline of eight listed on the Climate Clocks website. To advise on how to participate in helping the world avoid Armageddon, the co-leader of Green Griffins, Grace’s environmental club, Micah has his piece to say about this.
Micah recommends websites such as the Library of Congress, which, since the 1960s, has contained decades of documents and research on climate change. He also recommended the United Nations website, which has an array of resources, and which Micah joked as “surprising,” actual human beings. Members of the Grace community like Kim Chaloner are also a great resource for understanding more about climate change; “She knows a mind-boggling amount about this stuff,” Micah explained.
When people see the climate clock ticking down, when people see that wildfires are destroying Los Angeles, or when people see that we are hitting record-hot years, most turn their heads in fear. Micah reminds us that contrary to what many would believe, these problems “should not ever give you fear, [they] should give you motivation.”
Micah has been pursuing climate action for years now, campaigning for change and raising thousands of dollars. He has seen that the last decade has been crucial for the future of our planet, but now more than ever, he encourages all people to understand the impact of every single action.
Micah, in cooperation with Green Griffins, has raised over a thousand dollars for the California wildfires. Even making the small decision to buy a cookie at a bake sale can make a positive impact toward a better world.
Today, the question is, will we take action before it is too late, or will we prioritize wealth, the laziness to act, and greed over the survival of our planet? A quote used around the world to inspire action against climate change was spoken by Canadian filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin: “When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.”
Caleb Lopata ‘26, the author, is a staff writer for The Grace Gazette.