finding the world to be no safer than it was last year at this time
January 21, 2022 10:38 AM Subscribe
At doom’s doorstep: It is 100 seconds to midnight The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (about) updates their Doomsday Clock.
This decision does not, by any means, suggest that the international security situation has stabilized. On the contrary, the Clock remains the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse because the world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment. In 2019 we called it the new abnormal, and it has unfortunately persisted.
Reasons for the chronic gloom include threats of war, hypersonic weapons, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, an "entirely insufficient" response to COVID-19, cyberwar, tensions in Earth orbit, "[mis]management of the global biological research enterprise," "corruption of the information ecosystem," and the climate crisis.
Previous Clock settings: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2007, and 2002.
This decision does not, by any means, suggest that the international security situation has stabilized. On the contrary, the Clock remains the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse because the world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment. In 2019 we called it the new abnormal, and it has unfortunately persisted.
Reasons for the chronic gloom include threats of war, hypersonic weapons, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, an "entirely insufficient" response to COVID-19, cyberwar, tensions in Earth orbit, "[mis]management of the global biological research enterprise," "corruption of the information ecosystem," and the climate crisis.
Previous Clock settings: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2007, and 2002.
40 years ago when I was a teenager, I'd have loved !00 Seconds to Midnight as a great band name. Now I'm just so fucking tired of watching everything go to shit.
My teen years were gloomed up with the absolute knowledge that we were all going to die in nuclear WWIII. Then AIDS hit. Then the middle east blew up. Then 9-11. War "on terror." Ever expanding inequality across the world. Genocides all over the world. In my home, repeated cycles of economic boom and bust, but mostly bust for the lot of us. The emboldening of fucking nazis. COVID.
I don't even want to wake up anymore.
Was there ever any promise? Has homo sapiens just been heading for this forever?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:35 AM on January 21, 2022 [14 favorites]
My teen years were gloomed up with the absolute knowledge that we were all going to die in nuclear WWIII. Then AIDS hit. Then the middle east blew up. Then 9-11. War "on terror." Ever expanding inequality across the world. Genocides all over the world. In my home, repeated cycles of economic boom and bust, but mostly bust for the lot of us. The emboldening of fucking nazis. COVID.
I don't even want to wake up anymore.
Was there ever any promise? Has homo sapiens just been heading for this forever?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:35 AM on January 21, 2022 [14 favorites]
Oh Christ, did I just write the next 5 lyrics of "We Didn't Start the Fire?" Kill me.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:36 AM on January 21, 2022 [39 favorites]
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:36 AM on January 21, 2022 [39 favorites]
To get the ball rolling with governments that still maybe care whether humanity is around in another hundred years, I propose a unit of measure called a Permian.
The Permian unit denotes our distance from extinction from warming.
Scale the Permian from 0 to 100. (No one tell the Metric Martyrs.)
We can use measurements from 1880 to take a baseline of 1, and the environmental parameters of the end of the Permian era as 100.
Every degree of temperature change (Celsius) raises our Permian score by 10.
We're at 15 Permians or so, currently, on the way to about 20-25 by 2030.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:53 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
The Permian unit denotes our distance from extinction from warming.
Scale the Permian from 0 to 100. (No one tell the Metric Martyrs.)
We can use measurements from 1880 to take a baseline of 1, and the environmental parameters of the end of the Permian era as 100.
Every degree of temperature change (Celsius) raises our Permian score by 10.
We're at 15 Permians or so, currently, on the way to about 20-25 by 2030.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:53 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
And then there’s angry Mama Gaia: NASA scientists estimate Tonga blast at 10 megatons, NPR, Geoff Brumfiel, January 18, 2022. The island of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai as imaged by the satellite company Maxar on Jan. 6 (left) and Jan. 18 (right). It was obliterated in a volcanic eruption that scientists estimate was 10 megatons in size.
posted by cenoxo at 12:56 PM on January 21, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by cenoxo at 12:56 PM on January 21, 2022 [5 favorites]
I feel like a scale of between 1 and 10 or 1 and 100 would be good, given that humans tend to fixate on base 10 numeric and mathematical scales and probably have a better sense of what that might mean. My larger concern is trying to use one system to cover all possible causes. Prior to seeing this article yesterday, I was only aware of this as being the threat of nuclear annihilation back in the 80s, otherwise I would have assumed its only remaining relevances to be historical and the old Iron Maiden song (2 Minutes to Midnight).
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 1:15 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 1:15 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
To me this seems intended to be more like a piece of art than a scientific measurement.
posted by bleep at 1:19 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by bleep at 1:19 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
Art is something we use to tell each other about reality.
posted by bleep at 1:20 PM on January 21, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by bleep at 1:20 PM on January 21, 2022 [11 favorites]
Would the world just end already? The tension is fucking killing me!
ETA: Do not want it to end. The pervasive eschatological nihilism has just gotten to me.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 1:39 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
ETA: Do not want it to end. The pervasive eschatological nihilism has just gotten to me.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 1:39 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
I think these folks are underestimating just how dangerous things got when the fate of the world was in Trump's sweaty orange hands. Say what you wanna say about Biden, but nobody is worried that he's gonna throw a 3 AM tantrum that results in a nuclear exchange with North Korea. We had a guy in charge who was just breathtakingly stupid, volatile and evil, and we're all lucky to have survived him. A hell of a lot is wrong, but in many ways things are so, so much better than they were a year ago.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 7:18 PM on January 21, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by Ursula Hitler at 7:18 PM on January 21, 2022 [6 favorites]
I'd assume that there's some attempt to assign probability to various potential disastrous outcomes. The climate crisis has a probability of 1, it's already occurring. While it's true that relative to normal presidents, Trump was more likely to start a war; but relative to the absolute certainty of the current ongoing climatic disaster, it's not so significant. Also it might take longer for the environment to recover from the climate crisis than from nuclear war.
posted by viborg at 5:40 AM on January 22, 2022
posted by viborg at 5:40 AM on January 22, 2022
The most depressing part of the piece, is exactly what was so depressing in the recent thread about returning to normalcy; so many people believe that there is a solution that involves our leaders. "If world leaders would just..." "Everything would be fine if only..." "If you just vote in more..."
What we've been learning for the past couple of decades is that every certainty we've heard about politics, foreign policy, economics, is a lie. We've been taught that as long as the "grown-ups" are in charge, everything will be okay. We've been taught that there's such a thing as stability, and we can return to it. We've been asked to ignore the evidence in front of our eyes.
Every time the US pulls back on its emergency stimulus plans, the economy goes haywire. We've poured, what, ten trillion dollars of quantitative easing into the economy, hoping it would lead to investment and stable growth? In the face of a worldwide pandemic, the US government cannot be bothered to take any but the most minuscule steps to help. Rather than finding a peaceful solution to tensions between Russia and Ukraine, we're watching countries ship off weaponry and troops. And everything just keeps getting hotter and hotter.
And so we try to find simple solutions. "If only we could elect two better senators." "If only the President would do an executive order." "If only we'd put a wealth tax in place." "Electric cars!" "Maybe we could have a general strike!" Forgetting that none of these global problems happens for simple reasons, forgetting that there is an entire broken system that has gotten us here, a system vastly more complex than any single country, any single leader, could ever cope with.
Does it matter if Biden throws a 3 AM tantrum or not, if the alternative is a bunch of foreign policy pundits going on the Sunday shows to explain why there is no alternative to war with Russia? Instead of looking at singular personalities--Trump, Putin, Biden, Manchin--shouldn't we be looking at the underlying system that makes these predicaments possible? Because a system that can cause massive collapse, death, destruction, if left to run long enough, will do exactly that.
The end of our world may happen quickly, in a nuclear fireball that nobody actually wanted but that we sleepwalked into. Or it may happen slowly, accompanied by all the unforeseen weirdness we've been witnessing with COVID, as little subsystems we never even knew existed begin to break down. But what we seem to be learning is that there are far, far more ways to collapse, than to hold things together. I just wish, if we had to go down, that we could do it without having to hear the constant chatter of expertise telling us why it had to be this way, why there was no alternative, why free markets and strong national borders were so much more important than the continued existence of our civilization. I'm so tired of being lied to. There are no grown-ups. Nobody understands how the world works. If we're doomed, it's because we placed far, far too much faith in the people who said they did understand.
posted by mittens at 7:47 AM on January 22, 2022 [3 favorites]
What we've been learning for the past couple of decades is that every certainty we've heard about politics, foreign policy, economics, is a lie. We've been taught that as long as the "grown-ups" are in charge, everything will be okay. We've been taught that there's such a thing as stability, and we can return to it. We've been asked to ignore the evidence in front of our eyes.
Every time the US pulls back on its emergency stimulus plans, the economy goes haywire. We've poured, what, ten trillion dollars of quantitative easing into the economy, hoping it would lead to investment and stable growth? In the face of a worldwide pandemic, the US government cannot be bothered to take any but the most minuscule steps to help. Rather than finding a peaceful solution to tensions between Russia and Ukraine, we're watching countries ship off weaponry and troops. And everything just keeps getting hotter and hotter.
And so we try to find simple solutions. "If only we could elect two better senators." "If only the President would do an executive order." "If only we'd put a wealth tax in place." "Electric cars!" "Maybe we could have a general strike!" Forgetting that none of these global problems happens for simple reasons, forgetting that there is an entire broken system that has gotten us here, a system vastly more complex than any single country, any single leader, could ever cope with.
Does it matter if Biden throws a 3 AM tantrum or not, if the alternative is a bunch of foreign policy pundits going on the Sunday shows to explain why there is no alternative to war with Russia? Instead of looking at singular personalities--Trump, Putin, Biden, Manchin--shouldn't we be looking at the underlying system that makes these predicaments possible? Because a system that can cause massive collapse, death, destruction, if left to run long enough, will do exactly that.
The end of our world may happen quickly, in a nuclear fireball that nobody actually wanted but that we sleepwalked into. Or it may happen slowly, accompanied by all the unforeseen weirdness we've been witnessing with COVID, as little subsystems we never even knew existed begin to break down. But what we seem to be learning is that there are far, far more ways to collapse, than to hold things together. I just wish, if we had to go down, that we could do it without having to hear the constant chatter of expertise telling us why it had to be this way, why there was no alternative, why free markets and strong national borders were so much more important than the continued existence of our civilization. I'm so tired of being lied to. There are no grown-ups. Nobody understands how the world works. If we're doomed, it's because we placed far, far too much faith in the people who said they did understand.
posted by mittens at 7:47 AM on January 22, 2022 [3 favorites]
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I genuinely don't know how useful the concept of a clock is. It's certainly a welcome, periodic reminder of things that don't make headline news but are far more important. Whether the number of seconds is meaningful, or whether a countdown is a useful model, leads to arguments that aren't actually important. I'm not sure what would be more realistic and also easy to sell in one sentence. Numbers of dice? That's hard. But, a clock that doesn't move isn't actually a clock, it's something else.
I was going to post another recent article. But, they spent so much time talking about the graphic design of the Clock logo that I couldn't do it without being mean to the authors. This is better. That said, as much as I hate shooting down satellites, that seems like a different category, assuming it doesn't lead to nuclear war.
posted by eotvos at 11:01 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]