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Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight, due in part to climate change

by Opal04Epbqih Posted on January 23, 2020

Humanity is now the closest it has ever been to total annihilation. That might sound like something a character in an Avengers movie would say, but it’s actually a statement made by a group of 19 scientific experts and backed by 13 Nobel laureates. The Doomsday Clock, a symbol created in 1947 to represent humankind’s proximity to global catastrophe, is now just 100 seconds to midnight for the first time ever.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group that manages the metaphorical clock, said the dual threats of nuclear war and climate change, compounded by the threat of “cyber-enabled information warfare” — which undermines society’s capacity to address these threats — has forced the globe mere seconds from midnight. “We now face a true emergency — an absolutely unacceptable state of world affairs that has eliminated any margin for error or further delay,” Atomic Scientists president and CEO Rachel Bronson said in a statement.

The experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists did not make this deliberation alone. For the first time, the group’s scientists were joined by members of The Elders, a network of global leaders assembled by Nelson Mandela in 2007. The hands of the Doomsday Clock have inched forward in three of the last four years thanks to a combination of nuclear proliferation, climate change, and civil unrest around the globe.

The clock was originally set at seven minutes to midnight in 1947, and has shifted forward and backward 23 times since then. In 1991, the clock was at 17 minutes to midnight — the furthest from apocalypse ever. In the past, scientists have moved the clock closer to midnight in response to developments like hydrogen bomb testing in the Soviet Union in 1953 and Cold War escalations in 1984.

There are ways to keep midnight at bay, scientists say. The U.S. and Russia could come back to the arms control negotiating table and reduce the risk of a nuclear arms race. The signatories of the Iran Deal could come together to limit nuclear development in the Middle East. The world’s nations could commit in earnest to the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement. Perhaps most important for long-term stability, the Bulletin says the international community should work to penalize the misuse of science, a trend that is on the rise thanks in part to the efforts of the Trump administration.

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Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight, due in part to climate change

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Just a reminder: The world is perilously close to annihilation!

by ErnestiCardell Posted on January 24, 2019

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The world’s most eminent predictors of doom, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, gathered Thursday to announce just how close humanity is from irreversible collapse. The answer: pretty damn close.

The Doomsday Clock is two minutes from midnight (read “the end of everything”), thanks largely to climate change and the threat of nuclear annihilation. That’s exactly where it was last year, when the collection of scientists set it at 11:58, the nearest it’s been to midnight since 1953 when the Soviet Union and the United States were testing nukes.

The current state of climate and political doom is starting to feel familiar. The Bulletin’s name for it is the “new abnormal.”  

“The longer world leaders and citizens carelessly inhabit this new and abnormal reality, the more likely the world is to experience catastrophe of historic proportions,” said Robert Rosner, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Chicago, during a press conference announcing the Doomsday Clock’s settings in Washington, D.C. The most serious global threats — climate change, nuclear, and information warfare — are all being denied or ignored, Rosner said.

Since 1947 when the Cold War was getting underway, the Doomsday Clock has been used to bring awareness to the biggest existential threats. The first team behind the iconic clock came from The Manhattan Project, the scientists and engineers who produced the first atomic bomb. For most of the clock’s history, nuclear war has been the largest threat (it started at seven minutes to midnight). Yet since 2007, climate change has become a growing risk, nudging the clock’s minute hand closer to Doomsday.

The scientists noted that there’s another way to measure of our proximity towards doom: carbon dioxide levels. “Every year that we continue to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, irreversibly ratchets up the level of human suffering and ecosystem destruction that will occur due to global climate change,” said Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist and professor at MIT, at the announcement.

After years of remaining stable, global emission levels rose in 2017 and reached an all-time high in 2018. Part of the reason is that the United States, China, and other big polluters have increased their emissions, which Solomon called an “act of gross negligence.”

That the clock didn’t tick this year is a sign that we’ve made no progress on avoiding impending disaster. “The new abnormal climate that we already have is extremely dangerous,” said Solomon. “And we’ve moved onto a path that will make our future much more dangerous still.”

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Just a reminder: The world is perilously close to annihilation!

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The Keepers of the Doomsday Clock Are Really, Really Worried About Donald Trump

by SterlingRingros Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical measure of how close humanity is to imminent disaster, jumped to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight today, the closest it’s ever been since the height of the Cold War. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the anti-nuclear weapons group that first set the clock in 1947, said that the reason for the time change is simple: Donald Trump.

Explaining its members’ reasoning, the Bulletin cited the continued threats posed by nuclear weapons and climate change as well as a new one that could make them worse: “a rise in strident nationalism worldwide in 2016, including in a US presidential campaign during which the eventual victor, Donald Trump, made disturbing comments about the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons and expressed disbelief in the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.”

Prior to today’s change, the Doomsday Clock was set at three minutes to midnight. It was also set at three minutes from midnight in 1947 and 1984. Today’s setting is the closest to midnight since 1952, when the United States and the Soviet Union tested the first hydrogen bombs. The furthest the clock has ever been from midnight was 17 minutes, in 1991, after the Cold War had ended and both the United States and Russia were reducing their nuclear arsenals.

Here’s Bulletin‘s full statement for why its members are alarmed by the election of President Trump:

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Final 2017 Clock Statement (PDF)

Final 2017 Clock Statement (Text)

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The Keepers of the Doomsday Clock Are Really, Really Worried About Donald Trump

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For the 97 billionth time: Yes, there is a 97 percent consensus on climate change

by AdriannQCD Posted on April 13, 2016

For the 97 billionth time: Yes, there is a 97 percent consensus on climate change

By on 13 Apr 2016commentsShare

You know how some parents have to check their kids’ bedrooms for monsters every night, even though they know there aren’t any monsters, and deep down, the kids probably know that too? Well, a bunch of researchers effectively just checked the bedroom of every climate denier for lack of consensus on anthropogenic global warming, and just like the mom peering into her kid’s closet for the 100th time, they came up empty.

There IS a scientific consensus on climate change, and it DOES hover around 97 percent, according to a study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The unsurprising results come not from another superfluous survey of scientists and scientific papers, but rather, a survey of those surveys. Meaning the study’s authors, Merchants of Doubt co-author Naomi Oreskes among them, basically just double-, triple-, and quadruple-checked under the bed, beat a dead horse, banged their heads against a wall, wrote up their findings, and managed to do it all while not screaming, “WE JUST DID THIS YESTERDAY. NOW SHUT UP AND GO TO SLEEP!”

That’s because little Suzy is irrational, and so is a lot of America. Despite what people like Ted Cruz want you to believe, we are warming up the planet, and unless we do something about it, Suzy and her little friends are in for a rough future.

Surveys of scientists or studies reporting this not to be the case either conflate experts with non-experts or falsely equate a “no position” stance with denial or uncertainty, the new meta-survey shows. One survey of economic geologists, for example, found only a 47 percent consensus. But that’s a pretty meaningless result, because if Ben Carson taught us anything, it’s that someone can be a smart, well-respected expert in one field and a complete idiot in another.

Now, it’s tempting to just ignore people who deny this clear consensus. Many of them aren’t interested in facts and never will be, so why waste our energy? Because these people aren’t operating in a bubble. They’re using this false narrative to keep the public in a state of confusion and thus hinder any serious effort to address this problem.

John Cook, the lead author on the new study and a fellow at the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland, wrote about this danger today in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He said that years of misinformation and doubt from conservatives have seriously skewed the public’s understanding of where scientists stand on climate change. Just last year, he noted, a survey revealed that a mere 12 percent of Americans knew that the consensus was above 90 percent.

For those of us who think about climate change all day every day, this is pretty hard to believe. But it’s the sad truth, and it’s why we have to continue looking for monsters and beating dead horses. Fortunately, the more the world starts to change, the harder it’s going to be for people to hide behind false or misleading studies. And if that doesn’t give you hope, then maybe this clip of Bill Nye making infamous merchant of doubt Marc Morano squirm will:

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For the 97 billionth time: Yes, there is a 97 percent consensus on climate change

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We Haven’t Been This Close to the Apocalypse Since 1984

by MichaleFeierabe Posted on January 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In 1947, the specter of nuclear holocaust prompted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to come up with a “Doomsday Clock.” The clock was meant to highlight just how close humans had come to wiping ourselves off the map. Midnight on the clock represented global catastrophe—the end of civilization as we know it.

Back then, the Bulletin set the clock to 11:53 p.m. The group has revisited the setting each year since, occasionally adjusting it forward or backward to reflect changes in world events.

On Thursday, it moved the clock forward two minutes, to 11:57 p.m.

That’s the closest it has been to midnight since 1984, at the Cold War’s peak. The only time humanity has been closer to self-destruction, according to the clock, was from 1953 to 1960, when it read 11:58 p.m. thanks to the nuclear brinksmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War’s end turned the clock all the way back to 11:43 p.m. in 1991. So how did we end up right back at 11:57 p.m., just 24 years later?

The answer is that nuclear war is no longer the only plausible, existential threat we face, according to the Bulletin‘s science and security board. The other: climate change. And, more specifically, the world’s lackluster response to climate change. As Lawrence Krauss explained in Slate two years ago, climate change was added to the clock-setting calculations in 2007, along with the dangers presented by biotechnology and bioterrorism. Despite ever-growing public awareness of the problem, global inaction on climate change has only darkened the picture since then. In a statement Thursday, the Bulletin warned:

Current efforts are entirely insufficient to prevent a catastrophic warming of Earth. Absent a dramatic course correction, the countries of the world will have emitted enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by the end of this century to profoundly transform Earth’s climate, harming millions upon millions of people and threatening many key ecological systems on which civilization relies.

This is not a new sentiment. Earlier this week, in his State of the Union Address, President Obama called climate change the world’s greatest threat to future generations. He wasn’t trying to be hyperbolic. And he might be right.

What’s interesting about the Doomsday Clock, though, is that it represents an attempt—albeit an inherently subjective one, by a group of scientists with their own interests and biases—to put the threat of climate change in context. How bad is it? Really, really bad. And yet, in the Bulletin‘s view, the threat of a warming planet is not quite as bad as the nuclear threat in 1953. Nor is it quite on par with the threat of nuclear war in 1984.

Remember, it isn’t only climate change that has us poised precipitously at 11:57 p.m. today. It’s the combination of climate change and some discouraging recent developments on the nuclear-proliferation front. At a press conference Thursday, Bulletin executive director Kennette Benedict emphasized both. About the nuclear threat, she said:

The arms-reduction process has ground to a halt, with the United States and Russia embarking on massive programs to modernize their nuclear forces—thereby undermining existing nuclear weapons treaties. At the same time, other nuclear-weapons states are joining this expensive and extremely dangerous modernization craze.

The two threats may seem unrelated, but it’s worthwhile to think about them in the same breath, because there are some interesting parallels between them. The greatest danger posed by nuclear bombs is not their explosive power. It’s the prospect of a nuclear winter—that is, a form of very sudden, human-caused, climate change.

The chart above shows the settings of the Doomsday Clock between 1947 and 2012. The lower the graph, the higher the probability of catastrophe. Wikimedia Commons

When we talk about the effects of anthropogenic global warming, we talk a lot about uncertainty. Actually though, the threats posed by climate change are not nearly as uncertain as those posed by nuclear proliferation. We may not know the precise effects of a warming planet, but we do know that it’s happening, and we have a pretty good idea of what will ensue if we don’t change course soon: crop failures, extinctions, famines, water shortages, regional conflicts, coastal floods, and more extreme weather events.

In contrast, we really have no idea what will happen if we fail to rein in the world’s nuclear arsenals. In the worst case, it could lead to all-out nuclear world war, which would change the climate far more rapidly than our current pace of greenhouse gas emissions. In the best case, countries will continue to maintain nuclear arsenals, but no one will ever use them again. And of course there are a lot of plausible scenarios in between.

We could spend years arguing about which is more dangerous, climate change or nuclear proliferation. But that would be like standing around in a burning building, arguing about whether it would be worse to die from smoke inhalation or get crushed by a falling beam.

Likewise, we could have a lively debate about whether the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is right that we’re slightly closer to the brink of disaster today than we were a few years ago, or in 1984, or in 1947. But the real point of the Doomsday Clock is to remind us that we have the power to wind it back. We just haven’t been doing much of that lately.

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We Haven’t Been This Close to the Apocalypse Since 1984

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