What You Need to Know About the Climate Clock.

A devastating hurricane season. A hot Halloween. A pivotal election.

When Hurricane Helene and Milton were passing through Florida approximately a week apart from each other, both times, I was in my home. I was doing as Floridians do during a hurricane—distracting myself from the monstrous storm outside, the only thing shielding me being hurricane-proof windows. We’ve had far too much experience with those.

Like many Floridians, I knew that this hurricane season was different. Back-to-back hurricanes like these were extremely uncommon. I knew, as a climate-anxious person, that these devastations were no coincidence. In fact, climate change has gotten the best of us, as much as anyone can choose to ignore it or save the work for someone else to do. Unfortunately, that won’t make it go away.

While in my home, riding out these storms, I came across the Climate Clock. I knew about it. I had heard about it, at least. But it had never gained so much traction in the media as I had seen it before. 

The Climate Clock: a clock that looms over cities like New York to remind its citizens that they have a certain time left to save the planet from reaching 1.5º C of global warming. That is to say, the point of no return.

Does that make you anxious? Because it should.

A few weeks passed and Halloween came and went. Social media went wild about how hot it was—a whopping 80º F in some states, compared to the usage of fur coats and jackets on the iconic date. Again, as a Floridian, I almost wanted to scream “Oh, joy!” but it seems we aren’t used to temperatures below the 90s.

Then I remembered that most people don’t immediately start sweating when they walk their neighborhoods for trick-or-treating. But they did this year. And again, the Climate Clock came back to haunt me.

A few weeks later, America faced a pivotal election with drastic differences in candidacies. As we all by now know, Donald Trump is now the President-Elect of the United States. With this news, the Climate Clock was one of my first thoughts.

With Donald Trump's promises and policies of his last term from 2016 to 2020, I felt that the Climate Clock could very soon start ticking faster and faster than it is now. 

You see, the Climate Clock is calculated by the rate of greenhouse gas emissions per year—meaning that if the Trump administration begins enacting anti-climate change legislation, therefore adding to the rate of greenhouse gas emissions per year, we may not have the amount of time we think we do right now. 

The Climate Clock organization stresses that there is still time. I’d like to agree; we can’t write off climate change as unsavable, because when we do, that’s when it truly becomes a lost cause. But it isn’t, at least, not yet.

Don’t stay silent. Don’t be complicit. In the near future, we may see many attempts at legislation that is purely capitalistically anti-climate change. But let that be all they are: attempts.