Doomsday Clock: ‘A new abnormal’

According to the Doomsday Clock, it’s still 2 minutes to midnight. That’s the same time as last year, and remains the closest it’s been since 1953 at the height of the Cold War.

Each year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit group that sets the clock, decides whether the events of the previous year pushed humanity closer or farther from destruction.

The closer to midnight we are, the more danger we’re in. According to the group, the clock ‘‘conveys how close we are to destroying our civilisation with dangerous technologies of our own making.’’

‘‘A new abnormal: It is still two minutes to midnight,’’ the Bulletin reported yesterday. Former California Governor Jerry Brown, executive chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: ‘‘Humanity faces two dire and simultaneous existential threats: nuclear weapons and climate change. The longer world leaders and citizens thoughtlessly inhabit this abnormal reality, the more likely it is that we will experience the unthinkable. ‘‘We’re playing Russian roulette with humanity.’’

Speaking about climate change, MIT scientist Susan Solomon said that ‘‘if we don’t start reducing emissions in this next decade, it’s pretty clear we’ll have a world we don’t want to live in . . . this coming decade is absolutely critical, and we’re running out of time. Four years is too long to wait.’’ The farthest it’s been from midnight was in 1991 when the clock was 17 minutes to midnight, because of the end of the Cold War.

‘‘If the world seems less dangerous than it did a year ago, it’s because we’re becoming numb to the chaos and instability underpinning the nuclear balance of terror,’’ said Derek Johnson, of Global Zero, a group that seeks to eliminate nuclear weapons.

‘‘We can’t afford to bury our heads in the sand. There is no such thing as an acceptable level of existential risk,’’ he said. ‘‘Whether it’s two minutes to midnight, five minutes, or ten – it’s all too close to global catastrophe.’’

The clock has been maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947. The group was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project.

The scientists created the clock in 1947 using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and a nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the Earth.

The decision is made by the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, along with input from a board of sponsors that includes 14 Nobel Laureates.

Lawrence Krauss – the former Arizona State University physicist who for many years was a prominent spokesman for the Doomsday Clock – was not a part of the announcement this week. This is because of allegations of sexual harassment at Arizona State that surfaced in early 2018, after which Krauss resigned from his position as the chairman of the board of sponsors.

‘‘Humanity faces two dire and simultaneous existential threats: nuclear weapons and climate change. The longer world leaders and citizens thoughtlessly inhabit this abnormal reality, the more likely it is that we will experience the unthinkable.’’

Jerry Brown, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists