This year marks the 70th year that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have issued a verdict on the safety of the planet. This week they reset their Doomsday clock from 3 minutes to midnight to two and a half minutes to midnight – the closest it’s been since the 1950s.
When they began the project just after the Second World War, the scientists focused on the nuclear threat. As they put it:
‘In 1947 there was one technology with the potential to destroy the planet, and that was nuclear power.’
Not surprisingly they have now expanded the range of threats that they take into account and climate change features high on their list:
‘Today, rising temperatures, resulting from the industrial-scale burning of fossil fuels, will change life on Earth as we know it, potentially destroying or displacing it from significant portions of the world, unless action is taken today, and in the immediate future.’
But to move the clock’s hand so close to midnight is a stark warning to all humanity. It is based on the following three concerns:
- the lack of any serious movement toward disarmament, with North Korea adding to the nuclear crisis
- the need to make continued progress to contain climate change
- the rise of "strident nationalism," including in the United States, with the election of Donald Trump, and its implications for nuclear weapons proliferation and its disbelief in the scientific evidence of climate change
It is worth reading their full statement which concludes with a number of policy recommendations including the need for the US and Russia to return to arms reduction negotiations, the reduction of the production of climate change gasses, and the need for the Trump administration to acknowledge the scientific evidence about climate change and to put a price on carbon emissions.
We can’t say we haven’t been warned.