Okay, That's Not a Good Sign. The Doomsday Clock Gets a Second Hand.

The Doomsday Clock no longer marks our future in minutes. They're working in seconds now. And, as the venerable Union of Atomic Scientists now sees it, we're 100 seconds away from, well...

The risk of civil collapse from nuclear weapons and the climate crisis is at a record high, according to US scientists and former officials, calling the current environment “profoundly unstable”.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced its symbolic “doomsday clock” has moved forward to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest to catastrophe that the scientists have judged the world to be at any point since its creation in 1947, at the outset of the cold war. 

“The world needs to wake up. Our planet faces two simultaneous existential threats,” said Mary Robinson, chair of an independent group of global leaders called The Elders, and the former president of Ireland and former UN high commissioner of human rights. 

Robinson said that countries that don’t aim to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions heating the planet and instead exploit fossil fuels are issuing “a death sentence for humanity”. 

She said while public pressure presents a “sliver of hope” for the climate, there is no such pressure on leaders to avert nuclear threats.

Robert Rosner, chair of the Bulletin’s science and security board, said society has normalized a very dangerous world, and that “information warfare” is undermining “the public’s ability to sort out what’s true and what’s patently false”.

Yeah, well, there you go.