By The Climate Clock in New York City’s Union Square in early July 2023. | Image: Climate Clock
An ominous, 62-foot-long clock looms over New York City’s iconic Union Square, and it’s about to tick past a worrying milestone. It’s called the Climate Clock, and it counts down how much time the world has left to stop climate change from becoming exponentially worse.
As anyone who’s experienced the weather lately knows, the situation is already bad. The world had its hottest week on record at the start of the month, according to preliminary data, with heatwaves still smashing local records across the Northern Hemisphere. And that’s just one way climate change is bringing on dangerous new extremes.
Today, the planet is about 1.1 degrees Celsius hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution, thanks to carbon dioxide emissions from…