It’s safe to say most people have pondered the potential end of the world on a quiet and contemplative day—will it happen? If so, what could happen and when?
Yarra City Council, which presides over a portion of inner-city Melbourne, has sort to put a timeline to this existential question with the installation of a clock made specially to count down the days until the demise of the earth as we know it.
The earth’s expiry date due to climate change is expected to come to pass in just six years, according to Yandell Walton, the Melbourne artist commissioned to install the $18,000 (US$11,000) doomsday chronograph.
Walton, whose works focus heavily on environmental concerns, took 18 months to create the solar-powered clock which now sits in Edinburgh Gardens in Melbourne’s Fitzroy North.
The site of the plinth has housed a number of sculptures over the years, and originally hosted a statue of the late Queen Victoria.
Walton said she created the work, “Zone Red,” to draw attention to climate change.
“A lot of my work looks at shifting landscapes due to human impact or ecological devastation,” she explained in a video about the project.
Walton, who often features doomsday clocks in her works, says the timeline is inspired by the United Nations’ Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts the earth’s average temperature will increase by 1.5 degrees unless emissions are brought down by 2030.
A reflective surface under the panel shows a world map of global c02 emissions.
The artist said the clock would likely turn off on cloudy days, but noted that too, was part of the artistic value as it showed humanity’s reliance on electricity.
Greenpeace Founder Disputes Doomsday Predictions
While the U.N. asserts that 2030 is the point of no return in the race to net zero, prominent voices have disagreed.“Very few people believe the world is not warming. The record is clear that the world has been warming since about the year 1700, 150 years before we were using fossil fuels. 1700 was the peak of the Little Ice Age, which was very cold and caused crop failures and starvation.
“Before that, around 1000 A.D. was the Medieval Warm period when Vikings farmed Greenland. [And] before that, around 500 A.D. were the Dark Ages, and before that, the Roman Warm Period when it was warmer than today, and the sea level was 1–2 meters higher than today,” Moore told The Epoch Times.
He said humanity has always been easily influenced by predictions of doom.
“The Aztecs threw virgins into volcanos, and the Europeans and Americans burned women as witches for 200 years claiming this would ‘save the world’ from evil people. This has been [referred to as] ‘herd mentality,’ ‘groupthink,’ and ‘cult behavior,’” Moore said.
“Humans are social animals with a hierarchy, and it is easiest to gain a high position by using fear and control.”
Moore believes the younger generation has been taught that humans are not worthy and are destroying the earth—making people feel mass guilt and shame.
Moore, a Canadian ecologist, co-founded Greenpeace in 1971.
