Australians to create ‘black box’ to hold world accountable for climate crisis

Australian scientists and artists are looking to hold the world accountable for the Earth’s future by creating an “indestructible” storage device to record humanity’s handling of the climate change crisis.

Inspired by an aeroplane’s flight recorder, the “Earth’s Black Box” will be built in 2022 on the remote west coast of Tasmania, an area deemed geographically and politically stable, its creators, ranging from marketing communications company Clemenger BBDO to the University of Tasmania, said in a statement.

It comes after UN climate talks in Glasgow ended last month with a deal that kept alive hopes of capping global warming at 1.5 Celsius.

“Earth Black Box is a structure and device that will record every step that humanity takes towards or away from the impending climate catastrophe,” said Jim Curtis, the executive creative director at Clemenger BBDO, which came up with the idea for the black box.

He said not only would the box provide the world with a wealth of data on climate change, the information recorded would help hold leaders accountable and leave lessons for future generations.

“If the worst is to happen and as a civilization we crash as a result of climate change, this indestructible box will be there and will record every detail of that,” Curtis said.

“So whoever’s left, or whoever finds it afterwards, learns from our mistakes.”

The 10m long steel monolith was designed to withstand natural disasters and will be powered by solar and thermal energy.

The device, which will be connected to the internet, will use an algorithm to regularly scrape data relating to climate change using a set of 500 metrics and will store it automatically.

It will be filled with storage drives containing climate-change related data such as average temperatures and global energy consumption.