I've heard a couple of commentators today mention that the Bulliten of Atomic Scientists has moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight, but those commentators neglected to say why.
The escalation in Iraq, growing tensions between the U.S. and Iran, even the rumors of a new atomic bomb test in North Korea, would seem the chief candidates. But that's not the reason.
It's the Climate Crisis.
Among those backing the move and making statements today were scientist Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, UK Astronomer Royal. "Humankind's collective impacts on the biosphere, climate and oceans are unprecedented," said Sir Martin. "These environmentally driven threats - 'threats without enemies' - should loom as large in the political perspective as did the East/West political divide during the Cold War era."
As to whether the Climate Crisis poses the same threat to humanity as nuclear war is beside the point, said Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton geoscientist. "The important point is that this organisation, which for 60 years has been monitoring and warning us about the nuclear threat, now recognises climate change as a threat that deserves the same level of attention," he said.
Or as a review of several climate related books in the Times Literary Supplement concludes: "Harding, is right, however, to look towards the only future available to humanity, one in which new ways of living cooperatively with the Earth will have been found. It would be an achievement unprecedented in the whole of human history, and, as Tim Flannery reminds us in the closing pages of his book, ours is the generation fated to begin to take responsibility, “for we are now the weather makers, and the future of biodiversity and civilisation hangs on our actions”.
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