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Doomsday Clock 2024 time update says humanity is as close as ever to global catastrophe
(www.usatoday.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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That thing has been at or past 5 minute to midnight my entire life. Can't live your whole life in fear.
Yeah even you, Boomers.
Every generation past has thought they were living in the end times.
Eventually one generation has to be correct.
does every generation deal with the one that came before it, actively trying to bring about the end times?
This clock has never worked, why believe the fear mongering?
At least a stopped clock is right twice a day. Doomsday clock can't even do that right
Just bullshit fear-mongering
I agree, to be perfectly honest. I imagine the folks who initially came up with this clock thought it was a good idea, but at this point it's just a cartoonish shadow of what it was supposed to be. We can only be minutes/seconds from total annihilation for so many years before people shrug and completely lose interest. It's like listening to a Mayan cultist talk about what's coming in 2012, or a Christian fundamentalist talk about the coming rapture. It also ignores basic psychology, in that even if you accept the gravity of the clock's meaning, you're still left utterly powerless to do anything about it, all while thinking...."ok, so what now?"
If the argument is that the long-term trends of humanity are such that we have a significantly higher chance of self-ceasing (an argument that I'd agree with given climate change), then that needs to be stated, especially since the clock has generally been seen as how close we are to imminent destruction.
The question, then, is how to best represent the fact that we're already knee deep in a slow moving global catastrophe, as opposed to on the brink of an imminent one?
I have a graduate degree in climate policy and have worked in the environmental field for almost 15 years. We do not have a high chance of self-ceasing thanks to climate change, and I implore you to stop framing it that way. That kind of language is absolutely and unequivocally unhelpful when it comes to communicating the challenges we face. The fact that laypeople have spent decades saying climate change is going to "destroy the planet" or "kill us all" is exactly the kind of problem I'm talking about. It breeds paralysis because it's something that you can't possibly conjure a constructive response to address. If literal Armageddon is coming, then the solution isn't to try to stop it, the solution is to live your life as best you can, while you can.
Do we face significant challenges as a result of climate change? Absolutely. Is some kind of global food crisis and/or localized famine likely? Absolutely. Will storms and sea level changes displace entire communities of people and worsen an already bad immigration crisis across the globe? Absolutely. Will infrastructure suffer and become increasingly expensive to maintain and adapt? Absolutely. Will changes stress local ecosystems such that extinctions become more likely? Absolutely. Will governments struggle to meaningfully respond when the public purse is constantly stressed by increasingly expensive natural disasters? Absolutely. Will some people die of heat stress, starvation, drowning, etc? Absolutely. Will we "self-cease" as a result?
NO.
So then given that I don't accept your premise that global annihilation is in any way relevant to climate change, and given that the threat of nuclear Armageddon is something the individual is completely powerless to address, I'd like to counter that a "Doomsday" anything that constantly creeps closer and closer to an imaginary red line, is a completely fucking stupid way to communicate the challenges we face.
Let me put it to you this way: if someone told you an asteroid was going to hit the Earth 90 seconds from now, would you try to stop it? Or would you call your friends and family and tell them you love them?
The question remains. The clock is supposed to be about impending doom. Slow moving disasters can include many things and I used climate change as an example. But there are many others. Disease, blight and even an asteroid if it's big enough.
The issue really is that these people don't like the reminder because they don't want to act because they are still comfortable and they know any meaningful action "threatens" their way of life (because they can only think within the box capitalism created for them, making them fear anything outside of it).
They'll tell you they do act until they're blue in the face, but it will come down to things like driving an EV and using a reusable cup at Starbucks. Because it's about making themselves feel better, not fighting the actual problem - same as framing the clock as fearmongering instead of the desperate call to action it has become..
The clock is supposed to be about impending doom.
Which I've already clarified is ridiculous and unhelpful even if a crisis deserves our utmost attention. That's on both a pragmatic and a psychological level. If you want a long series of continuous eye rolls, by all means continue telling people the sky is literally falling.
Slow moving disasters can include many things and I used climate change as an example. But there are many others.
None of which include global annihilation as even a remote possibility.
Disease, blight and even an asteroid if it’s big enough.
Do you think telling people we're seconds from an asteroid hitting will help them do literally anything? What if you tell them that every single day for 40 years? Do you think it'll help them more in 40 years than it does today?
Since you completely avoided meaningfully responding to literally anything I just wrote and fell back on repeating yourself as if I somehow don't understand English, I'll bow out here. Enjoy your masturbatory doom fetish.
How many different ways can I tell you guys that a doomsday clock is the most ludicrous and flatly ineffective tool for communicating the stresses we're facing in the 21st century? Do you need me to send you a telegram? Maybe a passenger pigeon? I can have it written in the sky by a biplane if that'll help. Maybe in another language? Hieroglyphics perhaps?
My dude, I studied this. I have two graduate degrees in these subjects. I'm no stranger to the very real problems we're facing as a global species, and in fact I've dedicated my entire career to fighting environmental degradation, often at the expense of my family, my finances, and my health.
A DOOMSDAY CLOCK IS STUPID AND HASN'T HELPED ME OR ANY OF MY COLLEAGUES AT ANY POINT IN OUR ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL CAREERS.
God fucking damn y'all are dense.
Oh yeah the clock is stupid, lol, but we should prepare for collapse by 2030, 2050 at the latest.
Whatever the fuck you do in the comfort of your own basement is your business, chief.
Thank you!
It broke in the 90's. History was "over" so they kind of adjusted the scale, and now that shit's real again they keep having to shave off tiny increments closer and closer to midnight.
We're still way better off than during the Cuban missile crisis, imminent existential risk-wise.
Yeah but the Cuban Missile Crisis was theoretically solvable in a short time period and none of our current problems are.
I guess the crisis itself could be and was, but at the time nobody was really talking about the concept of a cold war, and the nuclear threat stayed heightened for decades. Actually, opinions vary on how long a nuclear-power conflict can reliably stay cold, even now.
AI and nuclear war seem like the main direct threats right now. Climate change will suck and I'll miss coral reefs, but it's not planet killing unless it sets something else more deliberate off. The world looks unstable, but I'm not expecting WWIII this year, and AI isn't going to be very dangerous by 2025 either. The Cuban missile crisis should have ended the world as we know it in the span of a few months. We basically just won a few coin flips in a row; I bet other parallel universes weren't so lucky.
but it's not planet killing
That’s cool except no one is arguing about it killing the planet. What it will do is kill our environment which is the part that determines the survival of our species.
It's not environment-killing either, at least as far as growing wheat and tomatoes is concerned. Environment-damaging, sure, but we could potentially starve a lot of people and keep going (though we shouldn't!), and it's not even clear agricultural output will go down rather than just relocating.
Don't get me wrong, I like having wild animals besides rats and flies, and I don't love the idea of a giant global mass-migration crisis as Bangladesh sinks into the sea and we fight over farmland in what used to be an icecap, so I still think we need to crack down on fossil fuels a lot harder. We're pretty adaptable, though, and some sad little human world will exist on the other side if that's all.
Tell that to the crop failures.
Not only is your opinion absolutely wrong but it’s a dangerous one too because it removes the need to change and to do so quickly.
This is why nothing will ever change and why humans will continue polluting and destroying our habitat.
Humans are fucking stupid.
Crops in western America might fail, but the whole world isn't America. Yields move, and 2023-2024 was a record harvest globally.
Don't take my word for it, there's an actual scientist elsewhere in the thread.
Humans are fucking stupid.
Well, we can agree on that. The human reaction to "the world is ending" is usually giving up. Which is why we shouldn't say that unless the science supports that, which it doesn't quite.
Unfortunately we lost the coin toss that gave us Wilson rather than Teddy Roosevelt for The Great War.
Quit edging us and dooms our day, damnit!
How's that giant LSD psychic squid coming along..?
Coomsday Clock edges closer
If we take into consideration that we started the year with a Genocide taking place in Palestine, that doesn't sound surprising to me.
Our daily dose of doomerism and fear mongering.
"Could be worse. Could be 89 seconds till midnight."
~ The Glass Is Half Full Person
Well, what's it waiting for? Get on with it already!
What the hell is this title. It's like it's some alien device planted here in the dawn of time and it just all of a sudden updated itself.
Some people decided things are looking ~~black~~ bleak based on things other people say. 🤷♂️
Some people decided things are looking black based on things other people say. 🤷♂️
Is the same line used by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers.. 🤷♀️
(I'm the last person to say blindly follow or even respect authority, but this isn't about authority, it's about knowledge, which the people who make these decisions have significantly more of than you, or me)
Also, you'd have to have your head reaaaaaal deep up your own ass to think things are going well on this planet, it's not as if they're even saying anything outlandish or far fetched.. 🤦♀️
I'm not going to debate this, because I'm not on either side of this debate. I've seen enough (valid scientific) arguments on both sides to realize that I/we simply know too little to get into it with.
I'm not a climate change denier either. The change has happened and is happening. Everyone is noticing it without having to use any measuring instruments.
Not really the point I was trying to make though anyway. I'm not from America so I don't partake in their black-and-white type of argumentation. "Either this or that", you know?
I'm just simply saying the doomsday clock isn't some magical device saying "we're fucked now guys", but that it's updated by humans.
I think it's spreading fear unnecessarily by saying "LOOK AT IT, WE'RE GONNA DIE" instead of focusing on what we can do. There's my two cents.