![]() "The Doomsday Clock is sounding an alarm for the whole of humanity. The clock’s hands have also been set back before, notably to 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. successfully tested its first hydrogen bomb. and the Soviet Union - during which its hands moved to a previous record of 2 minutes to midnight in 1953 after the U.S. ![]() The clock is currently even closer to midnight than it was throughout the Cold War face-off between the U.S. The previous record was set at 100 seconds to midnight between 20 during a backdrop of global political mismanagement in the face of a mounting climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the buildup to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The clock's hands have now moved 10 seconds closer to midnight than ever before. Why do nuclear weapons create mushroom clouds? Is climate change making the weather worse? What's the minimum number of people needed to survive an apocalypse? To assess these dangers, the Science and Security Board's members consult with colleagues in their respective fields and with the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors - 11 of whom are Nobel Laureates - before agreeing on the clock's position. To decide the clock's time each year, the BAS's Science and Security Board convenes two biannual meetings of 18 experts from backgrounds spanning diplomacy, nuclear science, climate change, disruptive technologies and military history to discuss the changing threats posed to humanity by itself. The scientists who had worked feverishly during World War II to create the bombs soon became their biggest opponents - arguing, first in an internal newsletter, then in a bi-monthly magazine, that to prevent armageddon, atomic weapons had to be dismantled and nuclear power safely monitored. In Hiroshima alone, Little Boy killed an estimated 140,000 people (opens in new tab) within five months of its detonation and destroyed or severely damaged more than 60,000 (opens in new tab) of the city's approximately 90,000 buildings. atomic bombs "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ![]() ![]() In 2007, the clock's countdown was expanded to include all human-made existential threats, burdening its hands with the additional representation of climate change, rogue artificial intelligence, war and global pandemics.įounded in 1945 by physicists including Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, who was known as the "father of the atomic bomb", the BAS's formation was inspired by that year's tragic dropping of the U.S. (Image credit: Mark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)Ĭreated for the BAS in 1947 by Martyl Langsdorf (an artist whose husband, Alexander, helped to invent the atomic bomb as a physicist on the Manhattan Project), the Doomsday Clock was first envisioned as a means to plainly signal to the public the dire and growing existential threat posed by nuclear weapons to the world. Sometimes, worst-case scenarios are used to highlight the importance of improved efforts in climate change mitigation or in calls for declarations of climate emergency in order to enable such.A 400-acre wildfire burns in the Cleveland National Forest in this view from Orange on Wednesday, March 2, 2022. In academia, fields that investigate such risks include systems theory and climate security where the latter refers to research and development relating to national and international security risks induced, directly or indirectly, by changes in climate patterns. Ĭlimate apocalypse scenarios are explored in multiple science fiction works, in particular in climate fiction including The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which depicts ecological breakdown through societal collapse American War by Omar El Akkad, which explores the idea of an underwater, war-stricken country or The Word for World is Forest by Ursula Le Guin that engages in space colonization to escape the conditions of Earth. For example, in September 2021 more than 200 scholarly medical journals published an emergency call for action, saying that a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees would bring catastrophic harm to global health from which the world will never recover. Many scientists have repeatedly warned about severe risks up to the level of what may described as "climate apocalypse". San Francisco Youth Climate Strike - March 15, 2019. Simplified conceptual causal loop diagram of cascading global climate failure Marchers holding a banner with the words "Youth vs Apocalypse". Scenario in which human civilization experiences catastrophic events due to climate change
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