Those two risks are the key influencers of the hands of the Doomsday Clock. “The pandemic serves as a historic wake-up call, a vivid illustration that national governments and international organizations are unprepared to manage complex and dangerous challenges like those of nuclear weapons and climate change, which currently pose existential threats to humanity,” Bronson said at the conference. COVID-19 has killed more than 2 million people as a mass of - sometimes contradictory - online content created what the World Health Organization called an infodemic. The Bulletin has warned in recent years of the threats of climate change and online misinformation, encouraging citizens to insist on facts in the face of lies from world leaders.īut “in 2020, online lying literally killed,” according to the Bulletin’s 2021 statement. The world is at a moment in history where the “danger is high, and the margin for error is low,” Bronson said.

The Doomsday Clock, which began two years later, is a warning - but it also presents an opportunity to change. Scientists founded the Bulletin in Chicago after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945 to highlight the threat of nuclear weapons. “The Doomsday Clock continues to hover dangerously, reminding us about how much work is needed to push the hands of the clock away from midnight,” said Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin, at Wednesday’s virtual news conference. This is the closest the hands have ever been to this symbolic Armageddon. When the Bulletin unveiled this year’s clock time at a news conference on Zoom, the hands remained at 100 seconds to midnight, just as they were at the start of 2020.

Beginning last year, the clock displayed the time in seconds, rather than in minutes. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Wednesday announced the 2021 time for its historic Doomsday Clock, which counts down to a “midnight” apocalypse. On the heels of a year plagued by a pandemic, tied for the top spot as the hottest on record and pushed to the limits of science denial and misinformation, scientists caution the world is poised at a decisive moment.Īct now, before it’s too late, they warn.

The doomsday clock