The Doomsday Clock remained fixed at two minutes to midnight on Thursday.
Revealed at a news conference in Washington, D.C.,, the dire prediction came due to the threat of nuclear weapons, the challenges posed by climate change, and the use of social media to spread misinformation.
“Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention. These major threats — nuclear weapons and climate change — were exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said in its report.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an independent and nonprofit organization whose executive chairman is now former California Gov. Jerry Brown, update the Doomsday Clock as a symbolic message showing how close humanity is to possible destruction.
In 2018, the clock was moved from two and a half minutes to two minutes from midnight. Before that, the last time the clock was two minutes from midnight was in 1953, when the Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb soon after the U.S. did the same.
The organization cited the threat of an arms race between Russia and the U.S., the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, as well as North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, as reason for extraordinary concern in its 2019 report.
On the climate change front, the organization pointed to the U.S. pulling out of the Paris climate agreement and undercutting a report on the dangers of climate change at a summit in Poland in December.
The report also alluded to President Trump’s attacks on the media as a catalyst in the escalation of global threats.
“Amid these unfortunate nuclear and climate developments, there was a rise during the last year in the intentional corruption of the information ecosystem on which modern civilization depends. In many forums, including particularly social media, nationalist leaders and their surrogates lied shamelessly, insisting that their lies were truth, and the truth ‘fake news.’ These intentional attempts to distort reality exaggerate social divisions, undermine trust in science, and diminish confidence in elections and democratic institutions,” the report said.
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to say the Doomsday Clock remains unchanged from last year.
