Doomsday clock ticks closer to midnight amid climate, nuclear threats

The end of the world is not nigh. But it’s closer.

The venerable Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock ahead to five minutes to midnight — signalling that we’re one minute nearer to global extinction.

That’s a reversal from January 2010, when the University of Chicago-based clock was reset from five to six minutes to midnight, because of an agreement between the U.S. and China on carbon emission reduction, and a warming relationship between new Russian and American leaders Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama that boosted hope for progress on cutting stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

“Two years ago it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face,” said Allison Macfarlane, a nuclear expert and chair of the Bulletin’s science and security board. “In many cases that trend has been reversed.”

The clock was first set 60 years ago to focus on the danger of nuclear weapons. Since 2007, it has also monitored the perils posed by global warming.

The reasons for this year’s setback were alarming but not surprising.

“Faced with the clear and present dangers of nuclear proliferation and climate change, and the need to find sustainable and safe sources of energy, world leaders are failing to change (from) business as usual,” said scientist Lawrence Krauss, a co-chair of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors.

Inaction on climate change and “rising international tensions” motivated the move, he added. “To quote Albert Einstein, ‘Unfortunately everything changed, save the way we think.’ ”

Climate change was one of the most dramatic concerns for the panel of scientists, who deliberated for a year on whether the world was nearer or farther away from doom.

“The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in the Earth’s atmosphere,” said Macfarlane.

That was by no means the only worry.

The main states with nuclear weapons haven’t acted on the international treaty to ban testing for new generations of deadly arms. There has been no tightening of standards for safeguarding nuclear fuel and eliminating dangerous reprocessing for plutonium separation.

The International Atomic Energy Agency still lacks the capacity to adequately oversee nuclear materials and technology development and transfer.

But the scientists were also concerned about the increasingly unscientific treatment of climate change and other complex and globally perilous issues, by politicians driven by political motivations rather than “scientific fact.”

There is a “worrisome trend — notably in U.S. but in many other countries — to reject or diminish what science says,” said Robert Socolow, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, and a member of the Bulletin’s science and security board.

Original Article
Source: Star