12/7/2023 0 Comments Doomsday clock![]() ![]() (Humanity’s best showing was in 1991, when the bulletin announced that the Cold War was over and set the clock a relaxing 17 minutes to midnight.) As we’ve learned during the pandemic, people have trouble focusing on catastrophes for more than even a few weeks at a time asking them to fixate on the potential demise of civilization for decades is a tall order. As Lawrence Krauss, a former member of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year, it’s hard to take the clock seriously when it has remained frighteningly close to the apocalypse for … over 70 years. The Doomsday Clock has a similar problem. At that point, will all of those “12 year” warnings feel like crying wolf? When 2030 (the most popular “ climate deadline”) rolls around, my guess is that we’ll still be spewing some carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - and, hopefully, human civilization will still be standing. And then there’s the problem of what happens when the allegedly catastrophic moment actually arrives. Research shows that most people can only handle so much fear, devastation, and “the world is ending!” messaging before they tune out. But dangling the apocalypse in front of the public over and over comes with a downside. If you hear the world is ending in a little over a decade, you might be motivated to protest in the streets against human extinction, or skip school to stage a sit-in. The intentions here are good: Deadlines can motivate people to get things done quickly, as every college student (and journalist) knows. There’s even a giant digital clock in Union Square counting down the hours, minutes, and seconds until we have to totally stop burning fossil fuels - or face the consequences. In 2018, after the release of a landmark United Nations report on the overheating planet, Greta Thunberg began saying that humanity only had “ 12 years” to halt the destruction of global warming. The year 2000 was going to cause large-scale electricity blackouts and computer failures in a Y2K apocalypse - and then it didn’t, thanks to the hard work of many computer programmers behind the scenes.Ĭlimate activists have their own set of deadlines and apocalyptic predictions. ![]() The world was going to end in 2012, based on a popular misreading of the Mayan calendar - and then it didn’t. The problem is that there are a lot of these apocalyptic countdowns, and after a while, they all start to feel like background noise. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. ![]()
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