The Doomsday Clock

No, I’m not referring to the heirloom time piece on your fireplace mantle but the Doomsday Clock (DC), an imaginary device. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), we are now only three minutes from midnight, two minutes closer than previously.

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“Invented“ in the mid-20th century, the DC’s time can move in either direction, forwards and back. When first confronted with that idea, the Swiss watch makers must have been shaking in their boots. Fun apart, there is a serious side to the doomsday clock.

On the Serious Side

Of course, the DC is not a real time-keeping piece rather an allegorical assessment of how close mankind is to doomsday, beginning at 12:00 midnight. According to the DC timekeepers view, we are now only three minutes away from that cataclysmic event. We were that close once before in 1984 and even closer by another minute during the height of the cold war, in the 1950s. The threat of an all-out nuclear war at the time was the reason for its creation in the aftermath of WWII in 1947 by scientists who had worked to create the atomic bomb (Wiki). More recently, the U.S. as well as Russia are in the early stage of modernizing their nuclear arsenals. Other countries currently in possession of nuclear bombs may follow suit and yet others are in the process of developing such capabilities. Altogether good reason to adjust the DC closer to midnight. While the nuclear threat has increased since the DC’s longest interval of 17 min to midnight in 1991, simply due to the number of countries in possession of such powerful bombs, their actual total number in the world has steadily declined over the last three decades. This is largely a result of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) between the United States and the Soviet Union signed in 1972 and related treaties, widely known under the term “Megatons to Megawatts.” Since then, an estimated 20,000 former war heads and precursor material have been dismantled and their uranium is still being used to generate electricity in nuclear power plants. However that secondary supply of fissionable uranium is eventually running out and demand from power plants is expected to keep rising for the next two decades as shown below (A-Cap Resources Ltd.): Most of that new demand is expected to come from nuclear power plants. Worldwide, their current number is 450 or so, not all in operation. Another 100 plants are currently being planned or under construction and a further 200 are to follow much later. The distribution of these new plants is shown in the graph below (www.world-nuclear.org). It should also be noted that not all nuclear power plants are equal. There are several basic technologies in use, some of which create fissionable (bomb-material) byproducts and other that do not. Also, operational safety controls and potential damage from natural events varies strongly. Overall, however, nuclear power plants have been extremely reliable and safe. Worldwide they now provide approximately 400,000 MW of electric energy or less than 1% of all electricity consumption of 21x10^ GWh/year. In many western countries this percentage is much higher, more in the order of 20+%. Now back to the clock and the first (major?) reason for the change in time – would you have guessed it? – the politically-correct all-around-standby reason for anything: climate change.

The Far Reach

The BAS claims that "Unchecked climate change…. pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity…” in their decision to advance the clock. That, of course is a far reach. In order to see how irrelevant to the remaining doomsday minutes the supposed human-caused climate change and its postulated cause, the vital gas carbon dioxide (CO2) really are, one just needs to compare the DC time graph (top figure) with the CO2 concentration in air as measured routinely at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii, shown below (NOAA). If you can see any correlation between these two graphs, please send me a note explaining it. Frankly, I never can decide whether I should laugh or cry at all the claims about climate change one can find. There is a website (Numberwatch.co.uk; no longer updated for several years now) that lists all the effects having been ascribed to “climate change” or “global warming” as it was called then. It still is a hilarious read and includes things like the Loch Ness Monster, marital infidelity and other obvious effects. Don’t you think the current “order of the day” of blaming nearly everything under the sun on climate change or carbon dioxide is a bit over the top?

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