At the same time, however, the annual carbon footprint is still increasing. The future looks better, but the present is still worse. This is a conundrum for the scientists who set the doomsday clock. Will they carry out their future pledges or the current situation?
“In my view, and in the view of many of us, continuing to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year should nudge the needle toward the end of the world,” says Pierre Humbert. The number of times the minute hand can be brought closer to midnight is limited. Adding more ticks makes Doomsday Clock more nuanced, but setting the clock to 99.4 seconds until midnight he doesn’t quite get the punch the original designers were aiming for.
A countdown to midnight is an intuitive way to think about nuclear war. Either the world is in nuclear war or it is not. There are nuances here. Tactical nuclear weapons, for example, are not the same as all-out nuclear warfare, but on a very broad level nuclear warfare as conceived by the first scientists in the Bulletin was a rather binary situation. Climate change is much more subtle. Most scientists agree that there is no clear cliff edge for disaster when it comes to climate warming. Instead, not only will global catastrophes slowly ratchet up, but climate tipping points will occur where specific climate systems change abruptly and irreversibly.
Events with large and low likelihood of these impacts are poorly understood, but they’re not the only way climate change is having a severe impact on the planet, notes existential risk researcher Luke Kemp. As we do, a much warmer world would be less tolerant of other kinds of catastrophic risks. In a world with catastrophic levels of warming, it is difficult to imagine humanity recovering from a horrific pandemic or nuclear war. A risk multiplier that increases vulnerability.
“If you start from scratch, you might think that you need something like a thermometer for climate,” says Pierrehumbert. But that metaphor also has its flaws. Do temperatures represent current warming, or what we are preparing for the future? Pierre Humbert suggests that a warming that would make the world uninhabitable for about half of humanity could be viewed as an event like the apocalypse of climate change. We are nowhere near this degree of warming, but as Pierrehumbert points out, the risk of climate change will never go away entirely as long as there are fossil fuels left to burn.
One of the downsides of the clock metaphor is that it tends to focus too much on the here and now, regardless of the threat being considered. “This watch does not indicate the danger of nuclear war this year,” says Pierre Humbert. It is intended to be an assessment of the underlying state of risks that could take decades to unfold. Thing. Adding it to the mix makes everything else just a little more uncertain and chaotic over the long haul.
Where will all this leave the doomsday clock? A strong reminder that self-harm disaster is never far away. But it also undermines the complexity of climate change and the way risks spread and interact over time. The Doomsday Clock is a warning from a much simpler time.
