Mini-Throughput: The Irrelevance of the Doomsday Clock

Today in things that have long outstayed their welcome:

The Doomsday Clock has been ticking for 76 years. But it’s no ordinary clock.

It attempts to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world.

On Tuesday, the clock was set at 90 seconds until midnight — the closest to the hour it has ever been, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the clock in 1947. Midnight represents the moment at which we will have made Earth uninhabitable for humanity. From 2020 to 2022, the clock was set at 100 seconds to midnight.

The clock isn’t designed to definitively measure existential threats, but rather to spark conversations about difficult scientific topics such as climate change, according to the Bulletin.

The decision to move the clock 10 seconds forward this year is largely due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the increased risk of nuclear escalation, the Bulletin said in a news release. The continuing threats posed by the climate crisis, as well as the breakdown of norms and institutions needed to reduce risks associated with biological threats like Covid-19, also played a role.

OMG! We’re closer to the end of humanity than ever before! Climate change! Nukes! COVID-19! Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!

Ok, no. Having the clock set 90 seconds to midnight and pretending this means something is, frankly, ridiculous.

In my previous writings on this subject, I made a comparison of our present circumstances to the year 1962. In October of that Year, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest we have ever gotten to a full-on nuclear exchange. The belligerents in this crisis were a mass-murdering drunk on the Soviet side and a novice drug addict on the American side. The only reason it was defused was because JFK had the wisdom and temporary clarity to respond to Khrushchev’s drunken remorseful message instead of his drunken belligerent message.

In addition to this, there were active civil wars going on in Laos, Sudan, the Congo, Yemen, Guatemala, Burma, Malaysia and Nicaragua as well as Communist insurgencies in other countries. The United States was starting to ramp up its involvement in Vietnam. And yet, the Doomsday Clock was at seven minutes to midnight.

OK, maybe that’s one year. Let’s leap ahead to 1972. Vietnam was at its height. Civil wars were going in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Rhodesia, South Africa, Bangladesh, Uganda, Malaysia, Cambodia and Sudan. Coups were attempted in Morocco, Qatar, Dahomey, Cyprus and the Republic of Congo. The Yom Kippur War would be launched the next year. Brezhnev was advancing the Soviet Union’s interests on all fronts. And yet the Doomsday Clock was at 12 minutes.

Huh. Well, what about 1982? Same deal. And a year later, the Able-Archer 83 exercise would bring the US and Soviet Union the brink of nuclear exchange. We were four minutes to midnight.

In 1992, the Doomsday Clock was at its lowest setting: 17 minutes to midnight. Yet the world was being roiled in the post-Cold War Era. Russia couldn’t keep track of its nukes. Wars were raging in Bosnia, Guatemala (yes, still), Peru, Mozambique, Georgia, Afghanistan, Djibouti, Croatia, Israel, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan and Somalia. There were many people who thought that the collapse of the Soviet Union had made the world less stable. They were wrong: when the Soviet Union collapsed, two-thirds of the world’s civil wars ended. But there was a lot of chaos as the world settled down from the Cold War that had defined it for two generations.

The simple fact is that we are currently living in history’s most peaceful time. There are fewer wars going on now than there have been in a long time, even with some recent flare-ups. Even the Doomsday Clock’s own dashboard shows that we have fewer nuclear weapons than any time since the 1950’s.

Now the BAS would respond that their clock is no longer just measuring the likelihood of nuclear annihilation. They have advanced it because of concerns about the environment. But is the environment worse now than it was half a century ago? When half the planet was starving, cars were belching lead into the air, you couldn’t breathe the air in LA and rivers were catching fire? Yes, the situation with global warming has gotten worse. But the most recent analyses show that the doomsday scenarios are less likely than we thought. Global warming is bad, but it’s looking more like something that’s an expensive damaging pain than the end of civilization. Alternative energy is soaring. Carbon emissions in much of the world have flattened and carbon intensity — the greenhouse gas produced per dollar of GDP — has plunged. Every day is bringing new advanced in battery tech, nuclear power and energy storage.

And aside from greenhouse gases, most environmental indicators are healthy. Smog is down, sulphur dioxide is down, species are rebounding to the point of being taken off the endangered list, the ozone layer is healing. These are all triumphs. But to hear the BAS talk, you’d think it was Soylent Green out there.

Now I will agree that the Ukraine conflict has moved us closer to a hypothetical doomsday. Putin has rattled the nuclear saber, although mostly to try to terrify the West into abandoning support for Ukraine.¹ The problem is that the Doomsday Clock people have advanced it so far, there’s no room left. In the last ten years, they’ve advanced it from 23:57 to 23:58:30 based almost entirely on climate change at precisely a time when the climate change situation has been getting less gloomy. This would be like, when the Doomsday Clock actually measured something useful, advancing it because the arms reductions treaties weren’t good enough.

Six years ago, I said that the Doomsday Clock was making itself irrelevant. It has made itself even more so since then. It’s clear that this has nothing to do with the human race annihilating itself and everything to do with a bunch of sour-pussed self-appointed ninnies trying to virtue signal on climate and foreign relations.

The Doomsday Clock was never really that important. But we can now consign it to complete irrelevancy. They can stand next to the people with sandwich boards, ringing bells and claiming the end is nigh.

1. It is very telling that the primary response to the Doomsday Clock news was for Russia — currently befouling the planet and fighting an illegal war of aggression — to blame the US and NATO.