Nuclear, climate threats keep Doomsday Clock close to apocalypse

By Peter Szekely

 

Members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (L-R), Lawrence Krauss, Robert Rosner and Sharon Squassoni move the 'Doomsday Clock' hands to two minutes until midnight at a news conference in Washington, U.S. January 25, 2018. REUTERS/Leah Millis

 

(Reuters) - A renewed nuclear arms race, rising greenhouse gas emissions and the emergence of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns have left the modern world as close to annihilation as it was at the height of the Cold War, atomic scientists said on Thursday.

 

The Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as an indicator of the world's susceptibility to apocalypse, remained at two minutes to midnight for a second year running in what the scientists called a dangerous "new abnormal."

 

"Though unchanged from 2018, this setting should be taken not as a sign of stability but as a stark warning to leaders and citizens around the world," the Chicago-based group said in a statement.

 

Humanity's two simultaneous existential threats of nuclear war and climate change were exacerbated during the past year by the "increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world," the group said.

 

"In many forums, including particularly social media, nationalist leaders and their surrogates lied shamelessly, insisting that their lies were truth, and the truth 'fake news,'" it said.

 

Since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016, the clock has closed in on midnight in successive 30-second moves in 2017 and 2018, in part because of escalating tensions with North Korea over its nuclear program.

 

The last time the clock was as close to midnight as it has been in the past two years was in 1953, when the U.S.-Soviet arms race escalated as Moscow tested a hydrogen bomb in August after the detonation of an American H-bomb the previous November.

 

Despite a softening of barbed rhetoric between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over the past year, the group saw rising threats in nuclear-armed nations' programs of "'nuclear modernization' that are all but indistinguishable from a worldwide arms race."

 

On climate, the group said carbon dioxide emissions resumed an upward climb in the past two years.

 

To turn back the clock, it recommended steps including fortifying and extending U.S.-Russian nuclear treaties with limits on modernization programs, adopting safeguards to prevent peacetime military incidents along NATO countries' borders, citizen demands for action on climate change and multilateral talks to discourage the misuse of information technology.

 

The bulletin was founded by scientists who helped develop the United States' first atomic weapons. When the clock was created in 1947, it was set at seven minutes to midnight.

 

(Reporting by Peter Szekely in New York; Editing by Tom Brown)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2019-01-25

And now a major conflict brewing of world powers over the Venezuelan fiasco.

Hope that cool heads prevail and the clock holds steady.

54 minutes ago, webfact said:

"In many forums, including particularly social media, nationalist leaders and their surrogates lied shamelessly, insisting that their lies were truth, and the truth 'fake news,'" it said.

Well this is interesting. Just in the last week we had the Buzfeed fiasco and it's hysterical and gleefull coverage by news outlets. We then had the fake narrative that the racist catholic kids were bullying an elderly native American and the gleefull and hysterical coverage by news outlets - until social media users who had seen the whole footage discovered the opposite was true. It was recently exposed that CNN's 2014 journalist of the year award winner Claas Relotius was a total and complete fraud and made up stories to suit the extreme left bias of mainstream media, and has since admitted he needs help for his addiction to making up fake news. And yet, implausibly we now read that nationalist leaders(I am reading Trump as intended by the author) are the liars and that the fake news is the truth. This is stretching the bounds of responsible journalism.  Trump's tweets are worth more than the whole of MSM combined.

 Now as to where the doomsday clock should be, who knows. But thanks to Trump the Guam citizens are not hiding in bunkers waiting for the minutemen to start raining down on them. Might I humbly suggest that in reality we are at slightly less of a dire situation than last year. I know, I know, one mustn't give Trump any credit for anything, orange man bed etc etc, but really, we are a bit better than at the end of 44's term.

This doomsday clock is clearly just a bit of bogeyman propaganda for the globalists to show their displeasure that they haven't been getting their way lately. If ever we should understand that fake news is real it should be after the last few weeks. Anyhow their clock is very broken. It's not even right twice a day like a normal broken clock

Edited January 24, 20197 yr by canuckamuck

It's fascinating to see the globalist progressives, with their lock on bureaucracy, academia and the legacy media, increasingly turn to outright falsehood to try to salvage their agenda. They are so certain they are right, employing a combination of unearned moral self-righteousness and intellectual snobbery, to justify their actions.

 

Far from learning from the twin shocks of 2016 in Brexit and the election of President Trump, they have doubled down since then, declaring the elections invalid or tainted (voters lied to, voters didn't understand the issue, and anyway, the Russians did it) and done everything in their power to overturn these democratic decisions and get their vanity projects back on track.

 

The end, in their view, justifies any and all means. Their mix of arrogance, self-delusion and resentment is very toxic to our societies. But maybe that's the way they prefer it.

20 minutes ago, RickBradford said:

Far from learning from the twin shocks of 2016 in Brexit and the election of President Trump, they have doubled down since then, declaring the elections invalid or tainted (voters lied to, voters didn't understand the issue, and anyway, the Russians did it) and done everything in their power to overturn these democratic decisions and get their vanity projects back on track.

Can you please cite the scientific journals where the results of that referendum and that election were peer-reviewed and published?

Edited January 25, 20197 yr by bristolboy

1 hour ago, RickBradford said:

Their mix of arrogance, self-delusion and resentment is very toxic to our societies.

Right !!

After all it is the fault of our political leaders who are contolled by their greed and power . ( white shirts and neckties ... and above everything ... it is time for a 1789 style revolution ...! )

If they were good and intelligent people , they would have foreseen what was coming , but no , personal greed is their priority .

 

I am 65, well travelled and well informed. I tell you this, NEVER has the world been more unstable in my lifetime. Be warned.

6 hours ago, TopDeadSenter said:

Well this is interesting. Just in the last week we had the Buzfeed fiasco and it's hysterical and gleefull coverage by news outlets. We then had the fake narrative that the racist catholic kids were bullying an elderly native American and the gleefull and hysterical coverage by news outlets - until social media users who had seen the whole footage discovered the opposite was true. It was recently exposed that CNN's 2014 journalist of the year award winner Claas Relotius was a total and complete fraud and made up stories to suit the extreme left bias of mainstream media, and has since admitted he needs help for his addiction to making up fake news. And yet, implausibly we now read that nationalist leaders(I am reading Trump as intended by the author) are the liars and that the fake news is the truth. This is stretching the bounds of responsible journalism.  Trump's tweets are worth more than the whole of MSM combined.

 Now as to where the doomsday clock should be, who knows. But thanks to Trump the Guam citizens are not hiding in bunkers waiting for the minutemen to start raining down on them. Might I humbly suggest that in reality we are at slightly less of a dire situation than last year. I know, I know, one mustn't give Trump any credit for anything, orange man bed etc etc, but really, we are a bit better than at the end of 44's term.

It is easy to cherry pick situations to suit your narrative but the cold hard facts are according to The Fact Checker Database (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.cdf11d0088c6), even before 2018 began, President Trump had already made 1,989 false and misleading claims. However, by the end of 2018, Trump really surpassed himself and had accumulated more than 7,600 untruths — averaging more than 15 erroneous claims a day This is almost triple the rate from the year before and vastly more than any other president in history.

But yeah you go and tell us about the 2 incidents you mentioned (one of which is still highly debatable).

Your beloved leader lies multiple times on a DAILY basis, invented the phrase Fake News (because they have a tendency to point these things out) and has divided a country like never before. 

But yeah. The main stream media is to blame. 

53 minutes ago, johnnybangkok said:

It is easy to cherry pick situations to suit your narrative but the cold hard facts are according to The Fact Checker Database (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.cdf11d0088c6),

Regarding the Washington Post as the repository of "cold hard facts" is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

 

The constantly fake news-spouting BBC has mimicked WaPo's idea with a supposedly anti-fake news initiative that it risibly calls "Reality Check".

 

There's plenty of fake news floating around, no question. These legacy media organisations don't want to eliminate fake news, they just want a monopoly on it, like in the good old days.

7 minutes ago, RickBradford said:

Regarding the Washington Post as the repository of "cold hard facts" is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

 

The constantly fake news-spouting BBC has mimicked WaPo's idea with a supposedly anti-fake news initiative that it risibly calls "Reality Check".

 

There's plenty of fake news floating around, no question. These legacy media organisations don't want to eliminate fake news, they just want a monopoly on it, like in the good old days.

Yeah you must be sick of the liberal mainstream media making Donald Trump look bad by airing raw, unedited footage of things he's actually said and publishing verifiable accounts of things he actually did.

Shame on them.

19 minutes ago, johnnybangkok said:

Yeah you must be sick of the liberal mainstream media making Donald Trump look bad by airing raw, unedited footage of things he's actually said and publishing verifiable accounts of things he actually did.

Shame on them.

No, that's fine.

 

It's all the other stuff they get up to that makes me sick of them.

In this day and age, they could at least invest in an electronic one (atomic clock).

4 hours ago, Grouse said:

I am 65, well travelled and well informed. I tell you this, NEVER has the world been more unstable in my lifetime. Be warned.

 

I've seen a lot of shit too over the last 50 years, major changes many said would never happen. If the 'end is coming' bring er on, a cherry on top of a most interesting life for sure. 

1 hour ago, RickBradford said:

No, that's fine.

 

It's all the other stuff they get up to that makes me sick of them.

But the daily spewing of lies and mistruths from the POTUS doesn't?

Media bias and manipulation aside, surely the role of POTUS should be held to a higher standard than what Trump demonstrates and the media circus that we all see now is a direct consequence of how he has changed the narrative to 'anything goes now; irrespective of how truthful it is'.  

I don't condone media bias but I can understand how it got to where it is today.

22 minutes ago, johnnybangkok said:

But the daily spewing of lies and mistruths from the POTUS doesn't?

Media bias and manipulation aside, surely the role of POTUS should be held to a higher standard than what Trump demonstrates and the media circus that we all see now is a direct consequence of how he has changed the narrative to 'anything goes now; irrespective of how truthful it is'.  

I don't condone media bias but I can understand how it got to where it is today.

I don't condone lies and mistruths from any official source, and on those grounds I consider President Trump the second-worst-ever candidate in a US Presidential election run-off.

 

However, the legacy media has been proclaiming its moral purity, while relentlessly distorting facts to support a radically "progressive" agenda, for many years prior to 2016.

Now is the time for America to develop their Doomsday Device. If America is wiped out so should the rest of the World. It is America's responsibility to be sure this happens if attacked.