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Heard about this yet? I first heard about this Clock sometime in the last six months—maybe from Adbusters or one of the many aware-ness raising documentaries I’ve seen of late (The Corporation, Who Killed the Electric Car, Prescription for Disaster, The Future of Food… and…oh yeah, the Gore-fest one) and then promptly forgot about it. So, I was glad to hear this news that they’ve added global warming and the environmental crisis and then promptly ticked off two more minutes.

The clock—a symbolic and iconic representation of the earths’ collective proximity to utter worldwide disaster (ie. Doom)—is maintained by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and was started in ‘47 when it was set at seven minutes to Midnight. The minute-hand has moved 19 times since then. Up until now, the threat of global nuclear war was the primary consideration, so the hands of the clock moved backward and forward according to how close that particular threat was deemed to be.

Stephen Hawking’s assessment that global warming has eclipsed other threats to the planet like terrorism rings true for me. Because the implications of global warming are not as immediate as nuclear war its hard to give them the same attention. I know I had a few fear-filled years in grade school when we had to learn nuclear holocaust emergency protocols complete with emergency exercises and everything; experiences like that have such a greater impact than seeing the gradual accumulation of smog or melting of ice. I hope efforts like this help to change that tendency.

Jason