Doomsday Clock Moves Due to Climate Change, Signaling Mankind is Closer to a Global Catastrophe

Eric Zerkel
Published: January 22,2015


 

For the first time in three years, and largely due to climate change, scientists from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have moved the time on the so-called Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, signaling that humanity is much closer to a global catastrophe.
The clock has been used by the group since 1947 as a metaphor to signal the severity of the threats facing humanity. The closer the clock moves to midnight, the closer mankind is to a potential global catastrophe.
Scientists on the Science and Security board of the Bulletin decided to move the clock forward two minutes, from 11:55 p.m. to 11:57 p.m, the closest the Doomsday Clock has come to midnight since 1984, during the height of the Cold War, USA Today reports.
As Mashable notes, this is the second closest the clock has come to reaching midnight. The closest came in 1953, when the clock moved to 11:58 p.m. after the U.S. and Soviet Union both tested hydrogen bombs.
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So why did the board decide to move the clock forward this time? Climate change was one of the biggest reasons, the group said.
"Unchecked climate change... pose[s] extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe," the group says on their website.
"Despite some modestly positive developments in the climate change arena, current efforts are entirely insufficient to prevent a catastrophic warming of Earth."
In fact, climate change was a driving force behind the last movement of the Doomsday Clock. Back in January 2012, the group moved the clock forward a minute from 11:54 p.m. to 11:55 p.m., citing "the nearly inexorable climate disruptions from global warming" and adding that "the pace of technological solutions to address climate change may not be adequate to meet the hardships that large-scale disruption of the climate portends."
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Ahead of their decision Thursday, the group said it would consider "evidence of accelerating climate change coupled with inadequate international action" based on evidence gathered from the recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and December's U.N. climate talks in Lima, Peru. 
And on Thursday, speakers at the announcement were unambiguous about both human's influence on climate change and climate change's impacts on Earth.
"Human influence on the climate system is clear," Richard Somerville of the Bulletin said. "Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer than any preceding on record."