Humanity is rapidly waking up to the fact that time is running out to take action to mitigate the effects of climate change. Ironically, climate change itself, primarily caused by the release of greenhouse gases via the burning of fossil fuels, could help delay a time-related crisis.
Currently, we keep official time using around 450 ultra-precise atomic clocks to keep Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which was first defined in 1969. A more traditional historical method of time-keeping uses the rotation of Earth. But because Earth's rotation fluctuates, since 1972, the alignment between these two measurements has been maintained by adding 27 "leap seconds" to the official time standard.
