During Saturday, September 19 at 3:20 pm at the Union Square metronome in New York the following message appeared: “Earth has a deadline.” After that the numbers 7: 103: 15: 40: 07 were displayed, which refer to 7 years, 103 days, 15 hours, 40 minutes and 7 seconds., symbolizing the time remaining for countries to take decisive action to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 ° C.
This project has the name Climate Clock, being a collaboration of artists, activists and of course climate scientists, among which Ottmar Edenhofer of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) and Richard Heinberg of the Post-Carbon Institute. The methodology they use to estimate the time to the deadline is that of the MCC, which, through data from the recent IPCC Special Report, estimates the possibilities of staying below a dangerous warming threshold.
The MCC It details that the atmosphere can absorb, calculated as of the end of 2017, no more than 420 gigatons (Gt) of CO2 if we want to remain below the 1.5 ° C threshold. But nevertheless, Every year around 42 Gt of CO2 are emitted, that is, 1,332 tons per second. And it is from these data that the deadline for taking significant actions in the necessary energy transition around the world is calculated.
So the world would end in 7 years?
No, but if we continue to use CO2 as we do today, we will reach an amount of emissions which will take us to a destination with a global warming above 1.5 ° C, and therefore, to an increasingly high risk of not having a reverse gear to avoid the consequences that this would bring in the future.
In New York the #ClimateClock refers in red to the time remaining to reduce emissions as necessary, avoiding irreversible changes due to human warming of the Earth.
In green we see the amount of renewable energy that currently exists pic.twitter.com/QNdr68uw63
– Martha Llanos (@marthallanos) September 29, 2020
How do we benefit by keeping the global temperature below this rise instead of 2 ° C?
According to United Nations, by 2100 global sea level rise would be 10 cm lower with global warming of 1.5 ° C. The odds of an ice-free Arctic Ocean during the summer will decline to once per century, rather than once per decade. And coral reefs would decrease between 70 and 90% with a global warming of 1.5 ° C while with 2ºC almost all of them would be lost (99%).
Therefore, it is so important that countries guarantee a decent life to future generations through changes in their energy policiesThis is the reason why under the numbers 7: 103: 15: 40: 07 of the Climate Clock, a number is seen in green which represents the percentage of energy that comes from renewable sources.
Given this, as a population we must try to cast our public election votes for strategies that promote greener energies, in addition to demanding that current representatives increase their useOnly in this way will we avoid finding ourselves in environmental situations that are increasingly dangerous for ourselves.
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