Target: Calamity
This page is an interactive 3D globe and needs JavaScript and WebGL to run. What follows
is a description of what it shows.
What this is
A map of the forces pushing the world toward crisis, and the ones pushing back. Every part
of the globe is tinted by what is happening there: red where the evidence points toward
damage, blue where it points toward repair, purple where strong forces pull both ways.
What the countdown is counting
Some changes cannot be undone once they start. An ice sheet that will not reform. A
rainforest that will not grow back. Scientists publish estimates of when those points are
reached, and the Clock counts down to the earliest one we know about. It is not a
countdown to the end of the world. It is an estimate of how long we still have to change
the outcome, because after that point some of the damage continues no matter what anyone
does.
Where the numbers come from
Everything here is taken from published sources, and every entry keeps its citations so
you can open them and judge for yourself. Each finding is weighed by how much of the world
it affects, so the loss of a global ecosystem counts for more than one country recovering
one species. Where the science gives a range of dates rather than a single year, we keep
the range instead of picking a number.
What it cannot tell you
This is a model, not a measurement. It only knows what it has found and read, and a gap in
what it has found looks exactly like good news even though it is not. The sources are
real, but the judgements about them are made by a language model reading those sources,
and it gets things wrong.
This is an alpha
This is an early proof of concept and should not be treated as more than that. The data is
incomplete and the numbers can change substantially from one day to the next as the method
improves, not because the world changed but because the model did. Please do not cite it,
plan around it, or repeat any figure from it as fact.