Sunday Times 2
Countdown to catastrophe: Doomsday Clock moved closer to midnight
View(s):CHICAGO (Reuters) – Rising threats from climate change and nuclear arsenals prompted the scientists who maintain the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic countdown to global catastrophe, to move it two minutes closer to midnight on Thursday, its first shift in three years.
An adjustment of the Doomsday Clock made in 2002 (AFP)
The Doomsday Clock, devised by the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, now stands at three minutes to midnight, or doomsday.
It has been adjusted 18 times since its creation in 1947. It has been set as close as two minutes to midnight, in 1953 when the United States tested a hydrogen bomb, and as far as 17 minutes from midnight, in 1991 as the Cold War expired.
It was last adjusted in January 2012, when it was moved one minute closer to midnight.
“Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity,” Bulletin Executive Director Kennette Benedict told a news conference.
The change was announced less than a week after U.S. scientists announced that 2014 was Earth’s hottest on record, fresh evidence that people are disrupting the climate by burning fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases into the air.
Benedict said world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale necessary to protect against potential catastrophe, and the adjustment in the clock was intended to inspire action.