#1 They’ve cited climate change and nuclear weaponry as their reasons, and this is the second closest we’ve ever been to midnight – the only closer time was two minutes till midnight in 1953 when the United States and the then-Soviet Union pursued the hydrogen bomb. #2 The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) was set up in 1945 by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project developing the first nuclear bomb. The Doomsday Clock is their brainchild, and was first introduced in 1947, after their atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was started by the physicists to show the threat of the cold war, and is now a symbolic clock face representing a countdown to possible global catastrophe. #3 The clock was last moved forward, from six minutes to five, in 2012, for the same reasons as it has been this time. We’ve just had the news that 2014 was the hottest year globally on record, so that was probably fresh in the minds of the BAS. “Human influence on the climate system is clear,” Richard Somerville of BAS said at the conference on Thursday. “Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer than any preceding on record.”
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 12:05:19 +0000
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