The 'Doomsday Clock' has been reset to 2 minutes to midnight

[LongTomH]

From the LiveScience blog: Armageddon Update: 'Doomsday Clock' Stands at 2 Minutes to Midnight

The "Doomsday Clock," a hypothetical timepiece that measures humanity's proximity to destruction by our own actions, hovers perilously close to midnight, the time that denotes global Armageddon.

Today (Jan. 25), the clock has crept even closer to the zero hour. This morning, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) — an organization of science and policy experts who assess human scientific advancement and risk — revealed the clock's new "time," with the hands now standing at 2 minutes to midnight.

The time has only ever been this close to midnight in 1953, following hydrogen bomb tests by both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., ushering in the era of the first nuclear arms race. In 2018, it reflects the breakdown of global efforts to reduce reliance on and risk of nuclear weapons; increased posturing and threats regarding the use of nuclear weapons; and an insufficient response worldwide to curb the impacts of climate change.

It is not any one of those factors, but a combination of all of them — and the weakening of public faith in knowledgeable expert voices — that prompted the change to the clock, Lawrence Krauss, chair of the BAS Board of Sponsors and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, told reporters.

"The danger of nuclear conflagration is not the only reason the clock has been moved forward, as my colleagues have described. This danger looms at a time when there’s been a loss of trust in political institutions, in the media, in science, and in facts themselves, all of which exacerbate the difficulty in dealing with the real problems the world faces, and which threaten to undermine the ability of governments to effectively deal with these problems," Krauss said.