Climate Change As Threatening As Nuclear War? Tick-Tock Goes The Doomsday Clock

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Posted to SciTech on Wed Jan 24, 2007 at 02:00:39 PM EST (promoted by 1fastdog). RSS.

The board of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group which maintains the "Doomsday Clock," has moved the hand of the clock forward once again, to five minutes to midnight. The group has also expanded its mandate; as the Bulletin's editor Mark Strauss told The Associated Press, "There's a realization that we are changing our climate for the worse," he said, "That would have catastrophic effects. Although the threat is not as dire as that of nuclear weapons right now, in the long term we are looking at a serious threat."

The Doomsday Clock was conceived in 1945 a graphical measure of the perceived risk of nuclear war. For the past sixty years, the clock has measured the rise and fall of nuclear tensions. It was moved closest to midnight in 1953, when it was set at just two minutes away; it was furthest away in 1991, following the end of the Cold War and the demise of the USSR.

The clock has long served as a chilling reminder of the damage humanity can do to the world, but some would argue that in recent years the clock has been moved a bit more than necessary. Before the current movement, it was dialed up two minutes in 2002 over the perceived threat of nuclear terrorism, and in 1998 it was moved up five minutes due to India and Pakistan's nuclear tests. The current two minute movement was done, in the words of Bulletin member Stephen Hawking, because,

As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth,"

"As citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change."

Considering how aware the public is in regard to the sometimes conflicting information on climate change and global warming, will the inclusion of climate change as a further measuring device, dilute the effectiveness of the Bulletin's anti-nuclear war message?