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The doomsday clock doesn't mean anything anymore, at least for atomic war. They started including global warming as a metric in where they set the clock so it's

The doomsday clock doesn't mean anything anymore, at least for atomic war. They started including global warming as a metric in where they set the clock so it's much closer than where it would be by nuclear risk alone. For example we're at 100 seconds to midnight, closer than the 2 minutes during the Cuban missile crises, which is total nonsense

dmarchand90 6y ago
I'm a bit surprised by the down votes, it would be nice to have some comments for discussion... To clarify I'm not saying that climate change isn't a critical thing to address, I'm just saying that the doomsday clock is no longer a measure of how imminent nuclear war as the parent thread mentioned. Yes I do think it's ridiculous that the doomsday clock is closer to zero now than during the Cuban missile crises. I don't think this is a very controversial statement. Would be very nice to get some comments rather than just downvotes.
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  Well, when it was instituted, Nuclear Armageddon was the existential threat to humanity, and therefore that was the metric they chose. Everything else paled in comparison. They weren’t hugely aware of the threat that things like climate change, or trophic cascades, could present. They were pure hypotheticals. They didn’t, however, call it the “Nuclear Armageddon” clock, rather the doomsday clock, because the point was tracking that overarching threat to the continuation of the human species. As we have now recognised that there are other categories of threat which are potentially civilisation-ending, we, in my opinion rightly, include those in the metrics of the probability of doom. Climate change is like having a slow growing but untreatable cancer. It’s going to get you, unless something unexpected and drastic happens. It may even get you sooner than you expect - right now we are tracking the upper bounds of every model, and the worst case scenarios are consistently getting worse. So, nay, it no longer tracks the sole threat of nuclear Armageddon, but I think the estimation of how close we are to midnight is pretty accurate.

dmarchand90 6y ago

I'm a bit surprised by the down votes, it would be nice to have some comments for discussion... To clarify I'm not saying that climate change isn't a critical thing to address, I'm just saying that the doomsday clock is no longer a measure of how imminent nuclear war as the parent thread mentioned. Yes I do think it's ridiculous that the doomsday clock is closer to zero now than during the Cuban missile crises. I don't think this is a very controversial statement. Would be very nice to get some comments rather than just downvotes.

madaxe_again 6y ago
Well, when it was instituted, Nuclear Armageddon was the existential threat to humanity, and therefore that was the metric they chose. Everything else paled in comparison. They weren’t hugely aware of the threat that things like climate change, or trophic cascades, could present. They were pure hypotheticals. They didn’t, however, call it the “Nuclear Armageddon” clock, rather the doomsday clock, because the point was tracking that overarching threat to the continuation of the human species. As we have now recognised that there are other categories of threat which are potentially civilisation-ending, we, in my opinion rightly, include those in the metrics of the probability of doom. Climate change is like having a slow growing but untreatable cancer. It’s going to get you, unless something unexpected and drastic happens. It may even get you sooner than you expect - right now we are tracking the upper bounds of every model, and the worst case scenarios are consistently getting worse. So, nay, it no longer tracks the sole threat of nuclear Armageddon, but I think the estimation of how close we are to midnight is pretty accurate.