It’s five minutes to midnight on The Doomsday Clock, kept by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists since shortly the atomic bomb was first used.
In case you don’t know, the clock represents how close the world is to annihilation (midnight). Some confusion here because I assumed it had been at five to midnight since it was invented, but apparently, it hasn’t been this close since the height of the cold war.
When BAS scientists met to assess the current threat level, they targeted climate change due to carbon emissions as the new villain. They don’t mean that climate change itself will trigger doomsday but that its impact will lead to wars, which combined with the proliferation of nuclear materials and technology will be likely to go nuclear.
This is a very important point and worth making over and over. And it’s a good use of an image that hits home the message.
All the same, I’m a bit sceptical of the assumption that they have an authority beyond their own field because they are nuclear scientists. Stephen Hawking is brought in to push the message home with his added mystical authority. The message is coming across as “we, as a group who understand the science, also understand the politics, so this is a scientific conclusion.” It’s not “science” but an attempt to make a point about the social consequences of science.
It certainly isn’t science. I don’t know the timescale they are using so it’s not clear if five minutes represents a year, a century or five standard minutes. It’s not possible to predict the social consequences of the mutually reinforcing interactions between atomic technology and environmental change. There aren’t a set of equations that can predict global politics. This lessens the impact of their very powerful “five minutes to midnight” image. It doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as anything other than a conceptual device.
They are obviously intelligent and have reached the obvious conclusions from the evidence. Maybe people will pay some attention. I certainly hope so, although I would rather they didn’t have to set themselves up as secular popes to get the message across.
Tags: Science, Bad Science, doomsday, climate, Carbon Emissions, Global warming, Nuclear Science, Doomsday Clock, Philosophy, society