Five years, that's all we've got!

Humming along to David Bowie while the Climate Clock counts down

I was walking through midtown Manhattan last week, and I spied this curious sight near Union Square:

When I first moved to the area, I believe this sign was used to tally up the national debt or something like that. I recalled that a few years ago (in 2020, it turns out) it had changed to something new: the Climate Clock, counting down “the critical time window remaining for humanity to act to save itself and its only home from the ravages of climate chaos,” as its website explains:

To stay under 1.5°C warming, and prevent the worst effects of climate change from becoming irreversible, in September 2020, the Clock told us we have an alarmingly short 7 years, 102 days, and counting to make a radical transition off of fossil fuels. It struck a nerve across the world, and quickly established itself as an iconic reference point for the urgent need for climate action.

What I thought when I saw it this time was, oh, a little over five years — that’s apt. One of my favorite songs, from even before I started bathing in apocalypses, is David Bowie’s “Five Years,” the first track from his groundbreaking 1972 glam concept-album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

“Five Years” is a great track, and having it start off an album like Ziggy Stardust is just so striking. The slow fade-in really makes you feel like you’re entering into some kind of other world, and the ballad’s lyrics are a master-class in world-building science fiction as pop song:

Pushing through the market square
So many mothers sighing
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in

News guy wept and told us
Earth… was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying

I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs

My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there

And all the fat, skinny people
And all the tall, short people
And all the nobody people
And all the somebody people
I never thought I'd need… so many people

[…]

We've got five years, stuck on my eyes!
Five years, what a surprise!
We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot!
Five years, that's all we've got!

What the song has always done for me, since the first time I really, truly listened to it (which was either late high school or early college), is conjure up a mindset. What would you do, and feel, if you knew the Earth only had five years left? How would you spend that time? What choices would you make?

The song never specifies the nature of the disaster in “Five Years,” which is what keeps it from being an “issue song,” in part — it really wouldn’t work, narratively, if it was about an alien invasion, or climate change, or an asteroid strike, or whatever. And it would probably have dated itself much more acutely.

In interviews, Bowie doesn’t seem to have elaborated on the catastrophe he had in mind. For him, it was primarily part of the quasi-concept album set piece (Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars were a band for the end of the world), although he once said that it was about the Earth running out of resources. Which would fit with the time period as a threat more than, say, nuclear war (the naturalistic apocalypticism of the early 1970s was more about things like economic collapse and resource depletion than it was about nuclear war or nuclear meltdowns).

Which brings us back to the Climate Clock. Do we have only five years left before disaster is “baked in” to our present world? I don’t know — I’m sure there are those who say yes, and those who say no (including those who say that it is actually a shorter interval, or already has been baked in). I don’t need a lot of convincing to think that we’re careening towards a cliff on climate matters, personally, even if I am unsure of the specifics (and unsure that anyone is sure of the specifics).

The more interesting question for me is: What kinds of emotional and practical responses does the Climate Clock evoke? What kinds of goals is it trying to achieve? The short answer is that the goal is to capture attention and generate a sense of urgency, and the website of the organization that runs the clock has lots of possible places where people can pledge their time (and money) if they are so moved to do so. My guess as to the emotional state they are trying to conjure up is… Anxiety? Unease? Fear? Urgency?

Is this kind of thing the best approach to getting action on climate change? I don’t think there are easy answers, there, and I am positive that if you sampled a large group of relatively informed people you’d get different perspectives. Even if you did controlled experiments on a representative sample of people, you’d certainly get different results based on things like age, education, and (of course) political ideologies. I’m aware that within the climate communication community, there are really divergent views on the value of “scare tactics” as a way of provoking either urgent action or long-term engagement.

The main argument against them is that the can easily encourage a numb fatalism, especially over time. This is the case even with, or perhaps especially with, people who believe climate change is a real and urgent threat, like myself. It’s almost too easy to conclude, after years of seeing this kind of message (almost literally) shouted from the tops of buildings, and feeling like the actions being taken are all underwhelming and inadequate. And every step forward seems like it comes with the possibility of ten steps backwards; there are real reactionaries out there, and they would literally burn the planet down just to spite the people who care about it. It’s almost too easy, and too tempting, to just throw one’s hands up and say: fine, if you can’t see reason, if you can’t see beyond green, then enjoy your hellscape, I won’t be here for it.

Which is certainly not a useful attitude. And it is not an entirely accurate one: progress may be inadequate, but that’s not to say it is non-existent. The future is yet to be written — we should not, like the reactionaries, embrace a dark nihilism about it, even though that is psychologically much easier than grappling with the frustrations involved.

I wrote an op-ed in 2023 for the Los Angeles Times about one of the real difficulties with applying the “clock” visual metaphor to climate change. This was in the context of the more famous Doomsday Clock, which was created as a metaphor for nuclear war risks in the late 1940s. I think the clock metaphor works pretty well for nuclear war, which is a disaster that, if it happens, will probably unfold relatively quickly, and whose risk can wander backwards and forwards depending on the political winds. Climate change, however, works somewhat differently:

Climate change is a different kind of risk altogether. There won’t be some single abrupt event that ends the world. It’s what scholars call a “slow disaster,” something that will unfold over decades, even centuries. It’ll just be a world that gets harder to live in, with devastating local disasters, worsening weather extremes and growing systemic problems. But there will be no single Earth-killing moment. The symbol of this kind of threat isn’t a clock — it’s one of those ever-proliferating graphs that shows the temperature going upwards into new highs.

I’m not all that sure that anyone will be able to say that the Climate Clock’s countdown will trigger much action. I’d be happy to be wrong, though. Wouldn’t it be nice, if they could shut it down before it got too close to zero? But that seems… unlikely. I wonder, to what degree, the Climate Clock’s creators have planned to do when it approaches zero. I guess we’ll see.

Bowie’s song assumes that the reaction to the newsman announcing a five year lifespan for Earth is mostly chaotic and sad. There is one section, where the verse switches to talking about “you” in the second person, which hints at another possibility:

I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour
Drinking milkshakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine
Don’t think you knew you were in this song

This happy, blissful, beautiful person doesn’t realize they’re in an apocalypse, they don’t get that they’re in a song about the end of the world. Is the milkshake-drinker someone who is ignorant, a denialist, or just someone who isn’t trying to focus on the daily dread of having a gigantic timer looming above their head? What kind of figure are they, really, and what should our attitude be towards them?

Are we in this song? And if we are, do we know it?