Doomsday Clock Moving Forward

This is the Alarmist Age. We are told to worry or fear many things that, on reflection, don't deserve either. But with mass media, social media and those d--- cell phones (but that's something I worry about because they drive me crazy) all are tossed at us every second of every day by our computer driven mediums we have become stressed by it all. Well, an old standby fear monger mechanism, The Doomsday Clock.

A group of atomic scientists from the University of Chicago created the clock in 1947 as a way of declaring the danger the world was in danger of being "blown up" because of the new menace to it, the atomic weapon. and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero), to convey threats to humanity and the Earth. It evolved into a warning of the threats to earth with the time hand representing the  degree of danger. The closer to midnight, the more likelihood the earth could end in nothingness. Three minutes is the closest to midnight the clock has been since 1984 during the Cold War. The closest it has ever been to midnight was at two minutes in 1953, when the hydrogen bomb was first tested.

So much for symbolism.  The Doomsday Clock now seems to be the Politically Correct Clock in fitting with the Alarmist Age. Some very dubious apocalyptic events, like global warming, have been added to the data used to produce predictions of doomsday. So.....citing "climate change" and the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons, scientists this year have moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight. It is now three minutes to midnight.

"The probability of global catastrophe is very high. This is about the end of civilization as we know it. In 2015, unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernization and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity," the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said in a statement accompanying this year's Doomsday prediction. "World leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth."

I'm not an Atomic scientist, but when PC issues like climate change are cited as a reason for moving forward the hands of the Doomsday clock I get "hot' with irritation. If there were no problems the scientists could find, what time would the clock be set?  And how much weight is given to each perceived problem? I'd wager that terrorists originating from the middle east will use a nuclear weapon long before the Sahara Desert is inundated with rising sea levels. But is that possibility and many others far greater than trendy global warming part of the projection? How can one predict the probability of the end of the world when there are limitless scenarios that could do it?

Oh, long before anything serious comes from "global warming", the earth's ecosystem will collapse under the weight of 12 billion human bodies as overpopulation becomes unsustainable. When the Global Warming nuts start discussing how to stop humans from over- breeding, then I'll take they and the Dooms Day clock seriously.