WASHINGTON -– The world crept closer to doomsday on Thursday.
That’s according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which each year updates the hands on a clock meant to symbolize how close we are to the annihilation of the human race, or midnight. For the last three years, the world was five minutes from the end. Today, we’re three minutes away.
The two-minute move is symbolic, but it gives a sense of how grim the outlook some of the best scientific minds have for humanity. The decision to move the hands forward, said Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists executive director Kennette Benedict, came about largely due to the threats posed by anthropogenic climate change and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
“World leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from catastrophe,” Benedict said Thursday at an event held in the auditorium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Stunning governmental failures have imperiled civilization on a global scale.”
The announcement came the day after the U.S. Senate voted to acknowledge that climate change is real, bringing it up to speed with every major world scientific body, but it declined to acknowledge that human activity plays any role.
Decisions on the Doomsday Clock are made by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board. Richard Somerville, a member of the board and a research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, ticked off a list of climate-related reasons for pessimism this year. He cited the latest National Climate Assessment, released in May, the latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the fact that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week that 2014 was the world’s hottest year on record. While those indicators all are grim, world leaders have moved slowly on enacting meaningful limits on emissions… see more
source: huffingtonpost
Tags: Science, Scientists Warning, The Apocalypse
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