For 75 years now, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moving the minute hand on a quarter of a clock face. According to the Bulletin: “The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.” We at Treehugger try to be a cheerful and upbeat bunch looking for solutions, but the Doomsday Clock can’t be ignored.
Surprisingly, they have left the clock at 100 seconds to midnight, the same as it was in 2020 when Melissa Breyer, Treehugger editorial director, described nuclear tensions, climate change, and cyber-based disinformation. Perhaps if they had a modern digital clock instead of a quarter of an analog one made of wooden sticks they might have moved it, because it sure seems that things have got a lot worse in the last two years.
One of our regular skeptical commenters complained in Breyer’s post: “Climate change doesn’t occur swiftly enough to be a ‘doomsday’ scenario. Pandemics and nuclear war do, but you can’t predict pandemics so really we’re just talking about nuclear war with the clock.” Sure enough, two months later we had a full-blown pandemic.
This year, the pandemic is indeed in the latest news of fresh disasters, along with other biological threats. As the Bulletin notes in its “OMG we’re all gonna die” statement:
Biological Threats
The Climate Crisis
As to our skeptical commenter’s statement that climate change doesn’t happen swiftly enough, tell that to the people in Canada’s British Columbia who last year seemed to have a climate crisis every week, from cold snaps to heatwaves to catastrophic floods; to the people in the U.S. states of California and Oregon, who had to breathe smoke from what seemed endless fires; to the people of Henan province in China who got eight months of rain in one day. Meanwhile, the Bulletin complains about what can only be described as predatory delay in Glasgow, Scotland.
The Nuclear Threat
Then there are the nukes that started it all with the first Doomsday Clock. The Bulletin says, “During 2021, some nuclear risks declined while others rose.” They note that “the February 2021 agreement between the United States and Russia to renew New START for five years is a decidedly positive development.” But there is no mention of Ukraine. Perhaps they hammered this all out on the old Underwood next to the old clock before the rumbles of invasion and war were heard. China is rattling swords over Taiwan; centrifuges are revving up in Iran.
There are also domestic crises that we never dreamed of. The Bulletin notes that “as the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol demonstrated, no country is immune from threats to its democracy, and in a state with nuclear-weapons-usable material and nuclear weapons, both can be targets for terrorists and fanatics.”
The Age of Disinformation
Climate arsonists and skeptics have always been a problem, but the combination of election and vaccine denial in the U.S. has taken disinformation to a whole new level.
Is It Time for a New Clock?
The Doomsday Clock was designed by artist Martyl Langsdorf and was first shown on the cover of the 1947 edition of the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.” They describe how it came about:
But it is hard to show a hundred seconds on a traditional 17th-century analog clock face, and we are in the 21st century when clocks can display milliseconds. It also isn’t going to be nearly as impressive a symbol to young people who, according to the British newspaper The Telegraph, apparently can’t even read analog clocks anymore.
Even my iPhone does one-hundredth of a second on its stopwatch. Maybe they should just use one of those, or make an app, because it just doesn’t feel right that the hand hasn’t moved in three years. If they are not ready to go to 99 seconds, at least they could go to 99.50.
