Doomsday Clock: Does It Still Make Sense?

For climate changeinstead, it is difficult to draw such sharp lines. On the one hand, the world is heading towards a more secure future than it would have been if the world’s governments had remained silent on the climate. According to the Climate Action Tracker, with le current policies we are heading for about 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. This increase in temperatures will have devastating consequences, but it is still a step forward from the situation envisaged in 2013, when existing measures were leading the planet towards a heating of 3.7 degrees. Historic milestones such as the Paris Accords demonstrate that making a significant impact on climate change is possible.

At the same time, however, the annual emissions of CO₂ they are still growing. If on the one hand the future looks better, therefore, at the moment things keep getting worse. For the scientists responsible for the apocalypse clock is a brain teaser difficult to resolve: is it better to base one’s assessments on future commitments or on the current context?

“In my opinion, and in the opinion of many of us, every year that we continue to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the clock should make a small leap forward towards the end of the world“, says Pierrehumbert. But there is a limit to how many times you can move the hand minutes towards midnight. While inserting other intervals would be useful to give more nuance, setting the clock to 99.4 seconds from midnight would certainly not have the effect its creators originally had in mind.

The countdown to midnight is an intuitive way of thinking about nuclear war: either the world is in a nuclear conflict or it isn’t. Again there are nuances – the deployment of a tactical nuclear weapon, for example, is not the same as large-scale nuclear war – but very generally, the nuclear war that the Bulletin’s early scientists envisioned represented a relatively binary state. Climate change, on the other hand, is a much more multifaceted concept. Most scientists agree that there is no obvious tipping point when it comes to global warming. On the contrary, we see a slow acceleration of global catastrophes and an increased probability of critical momentswhich cause the sudden and irreversible alteration of certain systems.

Outdated metaphor?

These high-impact, low-probability events are poorly understood, but they’re not the only ways climate change can have devastating effects on the planet. How he noticed existential risk scholar Luke Kemp, a much warmer world is also less resilient to other catastrophic risks. In a world experiencing catastrophic levels of warming, it is harder to imagine humanity recovering from a major pandemic or nuclear war. Besides being an apocalyptic threat in itself, climate change is also a risk multiplier which increases our vulnerability to events of all kinds.