The Verge: “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 burning fossil fuels. It’s what’s driving more intense heatwaves, wildfires, storms, and sea level rise. That’s why world leaders agreed, as part of the landmark Paris agreement, to keep the planet from warming much more than it already has. Every fraction of a degree comes with more severe consequences. Every fraction of a degree comes with more severe consequences. The Climate Clock shows how much time is left before continued CO2 emissions lock in at least 1.5 degrees of global warming, a key threshold for global climate goals under the Paris agreement. Today, the time left on the clock falls under six years. In other words, if people keep pumping out roughly the same amount of CO2 pollution over the next five years or so, we’ll no longer be able to limit climate change to just 1.5 degrees of warming…”