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- What Happens When the Climate Clock Runs Out?
What Happens When the Climate Clock Runs Out?
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Risograph print explainer · 55 seconds · English
A 55-second Risograph explainer: the climate clock counts carbon, not time. On the day it hits zero nothing happens, but the bath keeps filling, and every tonne still counts.
- The brief
- “What actually happens when the climate clock runs out?”
- Style
- Risograph print
- Length and frame
- 55 seconds · 16:9
- Made for
- Lessons and courses
- Also on
- YouTube · YouTube Shorts
How it was made.
The brief was the question, in the Risograph look set for the series. The director answered the hook with “Nothing. No bang.” and explained the carbon budget as water filling a bath.
It ends on the hopeful half of the science: shut off the tap and the warming soon levels off. It cost $5.28 of model spend to make.
Every film on explain.film is made the same way: one sentence in, a storyboard you approve, then the director paints, voices, scores and animates it, and a critic model grades the cut before you see it.
Transcript
- In New York, a giant clock counts down to a climate deadline: about three years away.
- So what happens when it reaches zero?
- On that day?
- Nothing.
- No bang.
- Because it doesn't count time.
- It counts carbon: about a hundred and thirty billion tonnes left, and warming rises with every tonne, like water filling a bath.
- Zero just means the water touches the one-point-five degree line.
- But the tap is still running, so the level keeps climbing, and every inch higher costs more.
- At two degrees, almost every coral reef is gone.
- Yet shut off the tap, and the warming soon levels off.
- So zero isn't the moment it's too late.
- It's proof that every tonne still counts.
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