The scientists involved in the Atomic Bulletin group seem to have their reasons for taking 'disaster' in our times as global and thus very serious:
"Citing unchecked climate change and the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons, scientists have moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight.
"It is now three minutes to midnight," said Kennette Benedict, the executive director and publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at a news conference in Washington, D.C overnight. "The probability of global catastrophe is very high. This is about the end of civilisation as we know it."
Three minutes is the closest to midnight the clock has been since 1984 during the Cold War. The closest it has ever been to midnight - two minutes - was in 1953, when the hydrogen bomb was first tested. The closer to a setting of midnight it gets, the closer it's estimated that a global disaster will occur.
"In 2015, unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernisations and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity," the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said in a statement.
"World leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth."
The clock is symbolic and has been maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947. The group was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project. The clock has only moved 18 times since its inception.
The scientists created the clock in 1947 using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero), to convey threats to humanity and the Earth.
Before today, the Doomsday Clock was most recently moved ahead from six to five minutes to midnight in 2012, also in a response to nuclear proliferation and climate change.
"Human influence on the climate system is clear," Richard Somerville of the Bulletin said at the conference Thursday. "Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer than any preceding on record."
But other scientists aren't quite so pessimistic.
Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of both geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, said: "I suspect that humans will 'muddle through' the climate situation much as we have muddled through the nuclear weapons situation - limiting the risk with cooperative international action and parallel domestic policies."
The bulletin has included climate change in its doomsday clock since 2007.
"The fact that the Doomsday clock-setters changed their definition of 'doomsday' shows how profoundly the world has changed - they have to find a new source of doom because global thermonuclear war is now so unlikely," Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker said. Pinker in his book The Better Angels of our Nature uses statistics to argue that the world has become less war-like, less violent and more tolerant in recent decades and centuries.
Richard Somerville, a member of the Bulletin's board who is a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the trend in heat-trapping emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will "lead to major climatic disruption globally. The urgency has nothing to do with politics or ideology. It arises from the laws of physics and biology and chemistry. These laws are non-negotiable."
But Somerville agreed that the threat from climate change isn't quite as all-or-nothing as it is with nuclear war.
Even with the end of the cold war, the lack of progress in the dismantling of nuclear weapons and countries like the United States and Russia spending hundreds of billions of dollars on modernising nuclear weaponry makes an atomic bomb explosion - either accidental or on purpose - a continuing and more urgent threat, Benedict said.
But Benedict did acknowledge the group has been warning of imminent nuclear disaster with its clock since 1947 and it hasn't happened yet.
TICKING CLOCK
2012: Five minutes to midnight
Difficulty in ridding the world of nuclear weapons and harnessing nuclear power
Potential for nuclear weapons use in regional conflicts in the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and South Asia described as alarming
Difficulty dealing with climate disruption from global warming
2010: Six minutes to midnight
Belief that civilisation is moving closer to being free of nuclear weapons
Talks between Washington and Moscow for a follow-on agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty are nearly complete, and more negotiations for further reductions in the US and Russian nuclear arsenal are already planned
Dangers posed by climate change are growing, but 'there are pockets of progress'. Most notably, at Copenhagen, the developing and industrialiSed countries agree to take responsibility for carbon emissions
2007: Five minutes to midnight
World described to be at the 'brink of a second nuclear age'
The United States and Russia remain ready to stage a nuclear attack within minutes, North Korea conducts a nuclear test, and many in the international community worry that Iran plans to acquire the Bomb
Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity
Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property
2002: Seven minutes to midnight
Concerns regarding a nuclear terrorist attack underscore enormous amount of unsecured -and sometimes unaccounted for - weapon-grade nuclear materials
US expresses a desire to design new nuclear weapons
1998: Nine minutes to midnight
India and Pakistan stage nuclear weapons tests only three weeks apart
Russia and the United States 'continue to serve as poor examples to the rest of the world'
Together, they still maintain 7,000 warheads ready to fire at each other within 15 minutes
1995: 14 minutes to midnight
Hopes for a large post-Cold War peace and a renouncing of nuclear weapons fade
More than 40,000 nuclear weapons remain worldwide
Concern that terrorists could exploit poorly secured nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union
1991: 17 minutes to midnight
Cold War is officially over and the US and Russia begin making cuts to their nuclear arsenals
1990: 10 Minutes to midnight
One Eastern European country after another frees itself from Soviet control
In late 1989, the Berlin Wall falls, symbolically ending the Cold War
1988: Six minutes to midnight
The US and Soviet Union sign the historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first agreement to actually ban a whole category of nuclear weapons
1984: Three minutes to midnight
US-Soviet relations reach their iciest point in decades and dialogue between the two superpowers virtually stops
The US seems to flout the few arms control agreements in place by seeking an expansive, space-based anti-ballistic missile capability, raising worries that a new arms race will begin
1981: Four minutes to midnight
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan hardens the U.S. nuclear posture
President Jimmy Carter pulls the US from the Olympic Games in Moscow and considers ways in which the US could win a nuclear war
President Reagan scraps talk of arms control and proposes that the best way to end the Cold War is for the US to win it
1980: Seven minutes to midnight
The bulletin describes the Soviet Union and US as 'nucleoholics' - drunks who insist that a drink being consumed is 'the last one,' but who can always find a good excuse for one more
1974: Nine minutes to midnight
South Asia gets the Bomb, as India tests its first nuclear device
The US and Soviet Union appear to be modernising their nuclear forces, not reducing them
1972: 12 Minutes to midnight
The US and Soviet Union attempt to curb the race for nuclear superiority by signing treaty
1969: 10 minutes to midnight
Nearly all of the world's nations come together to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
The deal is simple--the nuclear weapon states vow to help the treaty's non-nuclear weapon signatories develop nuclear power if they promise to forego producing nuclear weapons
1968: Seven minutes to midnight
Regional wars are raging
US involvement in Vietnam intensifies, India and Pakistan battle in 1965, and Israel and its Arab neighbours renew hostilities in 1967
France and China develop nuclear weapons to assert themselves as global players
1963: 12 minutes to midnight
After a decade of almost non-stop nuclear tests, the US and Soviet Union sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which ends all atmospheric nuclear testing
Signals awareness among the Soviets and United States that they need to work together to prevent nuclear annihilation
1960: Seven minutes to midnight
For the first time, the US and Soviet Union appear eager to avoid direct confrontation
1953: Two minutes to midnight
After much debate, the US decides to pursue the hydrogen bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any atomic bomb
1949: Three minutes to midnight
Soviet Union denies it, but President Truman tells the American public that the Soviets tested their first nuclear device - officially starting the arms race
1947: Seven minutes to midnight
As the Bulletin evolves from a newsletter into a magazine, the Clock appears on the cover for the first time
Source: Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
- USA Today, AP
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