Doomsday Clock

The crackpots, uh, scientists of the world have moved the clock a bit closer to doomsday. Strange how little credit I'm willing to give them for being able to predict anything.

Scientists on Wednesday changed the time on Chicago’s Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight, or the apocalypse, based on what they said is the “most perilous period since Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” during dual announcements in London and Washington, D.C.

"We foresee great peril if governments and societies don’t take action now” to offset climate change, said astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who has warned that the survival of the human race depends on its ability to colonize space because of the increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth.

“It is now five to midnight,” he said of the clock, which was introduced in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to assess the threat of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War.

The scientists said to avoid disaster, we must reduce the “launch readiness” of the United States and Russia – 2,000 of their 27,000 nuclear weapons are able to launch within minutes — remove nuclear weapons from day-to-day military operations and stop production of nuclear weapons material such as highly enriched plutonium and uranium.

As for global warming, “Through flooding and desertification, climate change threatens the habitats and agricultural resources that societies depend upon for survival. As such, climate change is also likely to contribute to mass migrations and even to wars over arable land, water and other natural resources,” Bulletin scientists said in a statement.

The group specifically singled out Iran and North Korea as examples of the threat posed by countries striving for nuclear technology.

Lately I've become quite cynical about the politicization of many professions. Viewing "historians" take on recent history is a great indicator that a "professional" is as likely to be bent as much as anyone. I don't credit these scientists with any more clear unbiased reasoning than I do historians.

It will be interesting to see where the real tin-foilers go with this.