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The doomsday clock has been ticking for exactly 75 years. But it’s no ordinary watch.
It tries to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world.
The clock was set to 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday Seconds to midnight — closer than ever to an hour, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which created the clock in 1947. Midnight represents the moment when we will have made the earth uninhabitable for mankind. From 2020 to 2022 the clock was set to 100 seconds to midnight.
According to the Bulletin, the clock is not designed to definitively measure existential threats, but to stimulate conversations on difficult scientific topics such as climate change.
The decision to advance the clock by 10 seconds this year was largely due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the increased risk of a nuclear escalation, the Bulletin said in a press release. The ongoing threats posed by the climate crisis, as well as the breakdown of norms and institutions needed to reduce risks related to biological threats such as Covid-19, also played a role.
“We live in a time of unprecedented peril, and the doomsday clock reflects that reality,” said Rachel Bronson, President and CEO of the Bulletin. said in the publication. “This is a decision that our experts do not take lightly. The US government, its NATO allies and Ukraine have a variety of channels for dialogue; We urge leaders to fully explore them all to turn back the clock.”
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was a group of atomic scientists working on the Manhattan Project, codename for the development of the atomic bomb during World War II.
It was originally designed to measure nuclear threats, but in 2007 the Bulletin made the decision to include climate change in its calculations.
Over the past three-quarters of a century, the time of the clock has changed based on how close scientists believe the human race is to total destruction. Some years the time changes, some not.
The Doomsday Clock is set each year by the experts of the Bulletin’s Science and Safety Committee, in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 11 Nobel Prize winners.
Though the watch has been an effective wake-up call when it came to reminding people of the cascading crises the planet is facing, some have questioned the usefulness of the 75-year-old watch.
“It’s an imperfect metaphor,” Michael E. Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN in 2022, emphasizing that the watch’s frame combines different types of risks, which have different characteristics and in which they occur different periods of time. Still, he adds, it “remains an important rhetorical device that reminds us, year after year, of the weakness of our present existence on this planet.”
Each model has limitations, Eryn MacDonald, an analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, told CNN in 2022, adding that each year the Bulletin made thoughtful choices about how to draw people’s attention to existential threats and can direct the necessary measures.
“Although I wish we could go back to talking minutes to midnight instead of seconds, but unfortunately that no longer reflects reality,” she said.
The clock never reached midnight, and Bronson hopes it never will.
“If the clock is midnight, that means there has been some kind of nuclear swap or catastrophic climate change that has wiped out humanity,” she said. “We I never really want to get there and we won’t know when we do.
The clock’s time is not intended to measure threats, but to stimulate conversation and encourage public engagement on scientific issues such as climate change and nuclear disarmament.
If the watch can do that, then Bronson sees it as a success.
When a new time is set on the clock, people listen, she said. At the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK, in 2021, Prime Minister Boris Johnson cited the doomsday clock when discussing the climate crisis the world is facing, Bronson noted.
Bronson said she hopes people will discuss whether they agree with the Bulletin’s decision and have fruitful conversations about what are the drivers of change.
Moving turning back the clock with bold, concrete action is still possible. In fact, the hand moved furthest from midnight — a whopping 17 minutes to the hour — in 1991, when the administration of President George HW Bush signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union. In 2016, the clock stood at three minutes to midnight due to the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement.
“At the Bulletin, we believe we can reduce these threats because humans created these threats,” Bronson said. “But it’s not easy, and it never has been. And it requires serious work and global commitment at all levels of society.”
Don’t underestimate the power of talking to your colleagues about these important issues, Bronson said.
“You may not feel it because you’re not doing anything, but we know that public engagement drives (a) leader to do things,” she said.
To make a positive impact Climate change, look at your daily habits and see if there are small changes you can make in your life such as: Things like how often you walk or drive and how your home is heated, Bronson explained.
Eating seasonally and locally, reducing food waste and recycling properly are other ways to mitigate or manage the impact of the climate crisis.