LONDON: : The world has nudged closer to a nuclear apocalypse and environmental disaster, a trans-Atlantic group of prominent scientists warned on Wednesday, pushing the hand of its symbolic Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight.
It was the fourth time since the end of the Cold War that the clock has ticked forward, this time from 11:53 to 11:55. The organisation warned that the “dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons.”
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded in 1945 as a newsletter distributed among nuclear physicists concerned by the possibility of nuclear war, has since grown into an organisation focused more generally on manmade threats to the survival of human civilisation.
Also, scientist Stephen Hawking described climate change on Wednesday as a greater threat to the planet than terrorism.
Hawking warned that “as citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day.”
