Doomsday clock

The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe. The decision to move (or to leave in place) the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made every year by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates. When the Clock was created in 1947, the greatest threat to humanity was nuclear war as the US and Soviet Union were headed into a nuclear arms race. In 2007, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists felt they had to include climate change. In recent years, the Bulletin's panel of scientists and other experts has started to look at other "disruptive technologies," including artificial intelligence, gene editing, and cyber threats.

Civilization-ending nuclear war is a genuine possibility. The world is sleepwalking its way through a newly unstable nuclear landscape. The arms control boundaries that have helped prevent nuclear catastrophe for the last half century are being steadily dismantled.

2019 also brought alarming new evidence of climate change's momentum, and demonstrated its destructive power. In fact, humanity's disruption of climate on land and in the oceans is "unprecedented," according to a report released in September 2019 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body that evaluates the impacts of climate change. Globally, the year was the second hottest since record keeping began in 1880, and the past decade was the warmest on record, NASA reported earlier this month. July 2019 smashed records as the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, after a sweltering heat wave baked countries across Europe and then flowed over Greenland, where it melted 217 billion tons (197 billion metric tons) of ice. Ocean temperatures are warmer than they've been at any point in human history, and they're heating up at an accelerating rate. The world's thickest mountain glacier is retreating, the Sahara Desert expands by about 10%, and the Arctic's most stable sea ice is disappearing.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) for use in weapons that make kill decisions, and its use in military control and command systems is another new cause for concern. Equally troubling is the growing deluge of fake news, and the rise of "deepfake" footage — digitally manipulated video that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from the real thing. By blurring the lines between truth and fiction, these technologies disrupt information and trust, introducing a dangerous global instability.

The threats of nuclear destruction and global warming might seem too big for us to handle, but the BAS’s goal is not to use the Clock as a scare tactic, but to get people talking. What they try to do is give the public the ability to talk about the state of nuclear security and to really pressure their leaders to pay attention to that and climate change and show that they're concerned about it. In fact, the Clock hand has been moved away from midnight almost as often as it was moved closer, the Bulletin said.