"Doomsday Clock" now set at 5 Minutes of Midnight

[j. d. worthington]

While I feel ambivalent about the entire concept, especially given the tendency to cry "doom" so much these days (deserved or otherwise), it is something to take a bit more seriously, given the people involved, than the general media's hype:

Nuclear, climate perils push Doomsday Clock ahead - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The scientists who mind the Doomsday Clock moved it two minutes closer to midnight on Wednesday -- symbolizing the annihilation of civilization and adding the perils of global warming for the first time.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons, advanced the clock to five minutes until midnight. It was the first adjustment of the clock since 2002.

They pointed to North Korea's first nuclear test, Iran's nuclear ambitions, U.S. flirtation with "bunker buster" nuclear bombs, the continued presence of 26,000 American and Russian nuclear weapons and inadequate security for nuclear materials.

But the scientists also said destruction of human habitats wreaked by climate change brought on by human activities is a growing danger.

"Global warming poses a dire threat to human civilization that is second only to nuclear weapons," they said.

"We foresee great peril if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change," theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge, a member of the bulletin's board of sponsors, told reporters in London.

Physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland said if humankind fails to change course on global warming, "there's a great possibility that the Earth in the year 2100 will only dimly resemble our planet today -- and as it has existed over the past 500,000 years."

The bulletin created the clock in 1947, two years after the United States ushered in the nuclear age by dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities at the end of World War Two, to symbolize the urgent nuclear dangers confronting the world.


It now stands at the closest to midnight since 1984, when it was three minutes to midnight amid a deepening Cold War.
It has been adjusted 18 times in 60 years. It was set as close as two minutes to midnight in 1953 after the United States and Soviet Union tested hydrogen bombs, and as far as 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 at the Cold War's end.

The story is from Reuters, is by Will Dunham, datelined Wed., Jan. 17, and titled "Nuclear, climate perils push Doomsday Clock ahead".

[Talysia]

I heard about this on the news yesterday. It's kind of chilling to think that scientists are trying to predict the end of the world like this. It's even more chilling that it's "closer to midnight" than it has been in a long, long time.