How late is it?

Last week a relic from a past age made its presence felt once again.  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) moved the doomsday clock forward to 3 minutes before midnight.  For those too young to remember the cold war, the BAS, first introduced the Doomsday Clock in 1947 as a way to inform the public of their belief of how close to a global disaster that we were at.

My watch, set nowhere near to Doomsday.

Over the decades the Doomsday Clock has moved forward or backwards depending on the combined opinions of the BAS governing board primarily with regards to the Cold war.  Recently however the BAS has expanded its scope to include such things as terrorism and global warming as possible factors that may lead to a global disaster.

I have to wonder however if the Doomsday Clock is still relevant or even all that accurate.  The governing board of the BAS has stated that the clock is not meant to track all the everyday ups and downs of the world situation but meant to track overall trends.  Not so much a clock but maybe a barometer or perhaps even a farmer’s almanac of doom.

The Clock has two problems.  Firstly, the global situation can change so quickly sometimes.  Sometimes these changes are substantial and the Clock misses these.  I know that they want to predict the overall threat of a global disaster occurring but minimizing or even disregarding these changes makes the clock less accurate.

Secondly the Clock has an image problem.  The general public has become somewhat immune to the Clock’s dire predictions over the years and announcements from the BAS are treated as pretty blasé and unimportant.

If the BAS intends the Clock to be more impactful, then they have to announce the meetings to change the time beforehand and make the deliberations public to let the general population know what they are thinking.

Short little notes like the ones that they currently release cause a flurry of news activity for a few days or weeks but overall they do nothing to affect change.

Really if they intend the Clock to mean anything then they need to change the way that they present the information to the public.