Doomsday Clock stuck at 100 seconds to midnight

After last year’s climate disasters, and U.S. diplomacy on the brink with China and Russia, we’re lucky it isn’t worse.

. . . . The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit founded 75 years ago by Albert Einstein, set its annual Doomsday Clock this morning at 100 seconds to midnight, the same as it’s been since 2020.

Given the threatening rise in climate disasters last year and the fact that U.S. diplomacy is currently on the brink with both Russia and China, we’re lucky it wasn’t worse. But 100 seconds is still dangerously close.

The announcement by Dr. Rachel Bronson, CEO of the Bulletin, and science blogger Hank Green, is the annual wake-up call from the science community and is taken seriously by media and government. I’ve gotten to know Bronson and some of her team as part of my climate work and found that the Bulletin issued one of the early warning signs about climate change decades ago.

Now that it is upon us, with 2022 already starting with major heat emergencies in South America and Australia, the work of the Bulletin is more important than ever. Not since the Cold War have we been in such a standoff with Russia. And China’s threat to Taiwan is real.

But it is the climate warnings that I take most seriously. Diplomacy can often prevail but global warming is going to move that clock closer and soon if we can’t agree on technologies and government programs to decarbonize our economies. It’s on this Doomsday Clock announcement day each year that I wonder what Einstein would say. . . .