The famous Metronome in Manhattan's Union Square has changed its display.
The public art project typically counts the hours, minutes, and seconds to and from midnight but as of Saturday, it began telling a different sort of time.
The 62-foot-wide electronic clock now marks the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds left before the world crosses an irreversible threshold from climate change.
In other words, the Metronome now displays the time we have left to control our carbon emissions before a designated critical point.
Seven years, 105 days, and 22 hours. That is the estimate of the time that the world has left, as of 4:00 p.m. today.
Artists Andrew Boyd and Gan Golan (who also created a personal climate clock for Greta Thunberg) reprogrammed the clock to coincide with the beginning of Climate Week in NYC.
According to Golan and Boyd, the numbers presented on the giant digital wall clock were based on the estimates made by the team from the Mercator Research Institute of Global Commons and Climate Change.
“We felt a monumental challenge like this needed something monumental in scale—a monument,” Gan Golan told the New York Times. “And we also wanted it to be in public, something that you couldn’t push out of sight, out of mind. We wanted something that would bring public attention to the climate on a daily basis, so it’s something that we can’t ignore. This is our way to shout that number from the rooftops."
“We have this incredible stark deadline that we have to reckon with,” Golan continued. “But the good news is that the number isn’t zero. It’s clarifying this time window that we have to take bold action. And so we think of this not just as a deadline, but as a lifeline, as really outlining the opportunity that we have to make the kinds of bold, transformative change that is necessary.”