New Delhi, Apr 22 (EFE).- Hundreds of adolescents and adults on Saturday assembled climate clocks, which mark the countdown of time that remains before global warming exceeds the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit – warning the impending crisis before it is too late – with the device reading six years and nine days.
“We are running out of time, time is really ticking and we have to start taking action,” said Chetan Solanki, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and the brain behind the event to mark the Earth Day, backed by the Indian government.
“It is a day to remember mother Earth and to commit to its care,” he said, calling for reducing global emissions and speeding up the transition towards renewable energy sources, such as solar power.
The digital clocks, which young students learned to assemble at a stadium in the Indian capital, are a way to monitor the time remaining until average global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, with the date being calculated based on global emission data.
Climate scientists have warned that this would be a point of no return and after that the world would be susceptible to the worst consequences of climate crisis with barely any scope to stop the warming.
The rising temperatures directly endanger people’s health with increasingly more frequent heatwaves and record extreme temperatures, such as the ones witnessed last week in India, which led to the death of 13 people at a government rally in the western state of Maharashtra.
The sharp uptick in temperatures also has serious consequences on the Indian economy, resulting in the loss of a huge amount of crops.
Last year, the World Weather Attribution – a group of climatology experts from institutions across the world – warned that the climate crisis had multiplied the arrival of early summer in India and Pakistan by 30 times. EFE
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