All those nukes...
They're still out there.
Doomsday Clock says 3 minutes to midnight. Again
The famous Doomsday Clock, which has been showing anywhere between 17 and two minutes to midnight since 1947, has advanced to three-minutes-to for the third time – on this occasion due to a perceived increase in the menace from human-driven climate change. The organisation which runs the Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic …
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Friday 23rd January 2015 15:15 GMT Pete 2
Re: All those nukes...
> They're still out there.
In theory, yes.
However, it's 50 years since anyone's put a nuke on a rocket, lit the blue touchpaper and had a successful "boom" - rather than a <phut>, ooops or "oh crap it's heading back in our direction". That means that the last people who did it (assuming they were in their 20's and 30's) are now retired and the people they trained and passed on the "tricks of the trade" to are now getting on and have (presumably) passed on all the folklore to a new generation.
So would a system that was last end-to-end tested half a century ago, with all the subsequent innovation, upgrades, redesigns, changes and cost-cutting have any realistic chance of working? I can't see much hope for it - but I hope nobody reads this and decides to try it out.
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Friday 23rd January 2015 15:22 GMT John Sanders
Re: All those nukes...
"""So would a system that was last end-to-end tested half a century ago, with all the subsequent innovation, upgrades, redesigns, changes and cost-cutting have any realistic chance of working? I can't see much hope for it - but I hope nobody reads this and decides to try it out."""
The engineering and science bits resound yes.
Any modern IT system introduced in the last 30 years not so.
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Friday 23rd January 2015 19:14 GMT Matt Bryant
Re: Pete2 Re: All those nukes...
".....So would a system that was last end-to-end tested half a century ago, with all the subsequent innovation, upgrades, redesigns, changes and cost-cutting have any realistic chance of working?......" IIRC, shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, one of the ex-Soviet Republics found itself with dozens of Russian ICBMs, and managed to launch a salvo of four by accident. Thankfully, two failed to launch out of their silos and the other two both failed shortly after launch.
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Saturday 24th January 2015 21:31 GMT David Given
Re: Pete2 All those nukes...
Oo. Got a link? I'd be fascinated to know more.
I've always wondered whether *anyone* has done a proper end-to-end test of a nuclear tipped ICBM. (Probably not.) If nuclear war ever broke out, and it turns out that design flaws in the missiles on all the different sides meant they all failed to work, then it would be hilarious. Also, somewhat of a relief.
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Friday 23rd January 2015 15:36 GMT Martin Gregorie
Re: I don't understand it
Why is it always near midnight? ...in this case because, though things may not get nasty for some time, we're very close to the point where the our fate becomes inevitable no matter what we do in the future.
We're probably already past the sustainable human population, but is anybody taking notice apart from, amazingly, the Pope? And, even he's not about to admit that two kids would be a lot better than three or to promote contraceptives.
I still don't see any serious attempt to de-carbonise energy production outside of China, and even there they're only doing it because their hand has been forced by a country-wide smog problem that rivals Victorian London. Carbon sequestration is a bad joke due to its appalling overall energy efficiency and a severe lack of very long term guaranteed non-leaking storage. No serious attempts at producing enough low or zero carbon energy, such as desert-based solar-electric or thorium nukes, to replace our current sources are evident, which means they're 20-30 years away at best.
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Sunday 25th January 2015 01:09 GMT Kiwi
Re: I don't understand it
Carbon sequestration is a bad joke due to its appalling overall energy efficiency and a severe lack of very long term guaranteed non-leaking storage.
This should make you feel a bit happier. Carbon is quite safe to handle and doesn't need any special storage. You can touch it and eat it if you want with no harm (unless you eat too much). If you want to put it somewhere try in your garden, you might get some interesting results with plant growth that way :)
No serious attempts at producing enough low or zero carbon energy, such as desert-based solar-electric or thorium nukes, to replace our current sources are evident
I love the idea of renewables and nukes, but I think desert solar could be a serious environmental disaster for the area - blocking natural sunlight from large parts of that eco system (yes, even deserts have life!) can't exactly be good for it. Nukes will be much better.
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Saturday 24th January 2015 00:07 GMT DropBear
Re: I don't understand it
Bit of a wind-up indeed - considering I don't ever remember having seen it more that five minutes "away from midnight", I find it difficult to not just bin it straight with the boy who cried "wolf"; much like a terrorist alert that never goes below orange, it just ends up failing to impress anyone...
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Friday 23rd January 2015 15:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Meanwhile the US Politicians
are voting on the reality of Climate Change.
Vote no and it becomes offical US Policy that Climate Change does not exist.
Perhaps it might be worth sending all those Congress Critters and Senators to places where Climate change is real.
Next they will be voting to make creationism the law in all 50 states and Darwin is branded a blasphemer.
Oh wait...
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Friday 23rd January 2015 16:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: to places where Climate change is real.
Those who Inhabit in the DC Political Ghetto don't know the real world.
Their chauffeur driven limo's with A/C are hardly the best places from which to observe it.
As for those who downvoted the original post I can only hope that your home gets flooded out the next time there is a deluge.
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Friday 23rd January 2015 16:31 GMT Fading
Re: to places where Climate change is real.
I didn't down vote but mightily tempted now - repeat after me weather does not equal climate. Also flooding is a civil engineering problem (well except during Noah's time) there used be a time when humans would find solutions to problems not run around in fear.....
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Tuesday 3rd February 2015 04:13 GMT kiwimuso
Re: to places where Climate change is real.
@ Sorry that handle is already taken.
I think what he meant to say, was that, in the past, they didn't have people who were supposedly intelligent beings, running around over-analysing anything that moved, then claiming that disaster was imminent.
They waited until the problem actually started to manifest itself, i.e. their prime waterfront property got inundated with the rising tide (possibly) so they moved inland a bit further.
Of course, also back then, then was no government to whom they could turn and claim that 'they ought to do something about it", like tax someone else to pay for their stupidity/cupidity/arrogance/etc to actually build an expensive house in an area which just might be affected by water/erosion/etc.
Or not actually building on a cliff-top because of the views and then complain when an earthquake drops several megatons of rock-face from their chosen building site.
Of course, that didn't prevent the soothsayers and other (sometimes religious) doom merchants from predicting the worst, especially if the stars were not in alignment or something.
I was going to add the Joke Alert icon, but I'm not entirely sure whether I am joking or not!!!
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Saturday 24th January 2015 21:17 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Meanwhile the US Politicians
"Perhaps it might be worth sending all those Congress Critters and Senators to places where Climate change is real."
Surely their own backyard, the USA SE coastal regions where the salt water mango swamps are ought to be showing some signs of change?
Obviously, the solution is to damn all the rivers and stop that water ever reaching the sea. When the bath is full, you turn off the taps. A bit like the mighty Colorado.
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Monday 26th January 2015 10:07 GMT fpx
The Missing Link
The article makes a big deal about climate change but does not say why.
Climate change has the potential to upset agriculture and water management. When enough existing farmland turns to dust and entire countries run out of water, then billions of starving people will look to get their food elsewhere, by all means necessary. When rivers such as the Rio Grande, Nile or Euphrates are pumped dry, the countries downstream will get cranky.
There may enough food and water to go around, globally speaking, but it's not distributed equally, and rearranging distribution has the potential to upset existing power structures. What do you think would happen if the US midwest runs dry and there's no trillions of dollars of deficit spending left for food imports? There's wars already being fought for cheap oil. Future wars will be fought for water.
This may happen regardless of whether climate change is entirely human made, partially human-influenced, natural, or god's will.
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Friday 23rd January 2015 15:48 GMT Paul Kinsler
Re: detonation of many tens of thousands of nuclear warheads
while we're on the on the subject, this in an interesting read:
"Environmental consequences of nuclear war", Physics Today, December 2008 (& note the updated predictions/knowledge of enviro impact therein)
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ToonRobockTurcoPhysicsToday.pdf
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday
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Saturday 24th January 2015 14:39 GMT Iain
Re: Ahh the obligatory
As soon as I see a story about the Doomsday Clock, the jukebox in my head involuntarily cues up '2 Minutes to Midnight'
Then I checked to see when it came out, over 30 years ago in August '84. Feeling old now.
In the style of XKCD:
By this September, the song will be closer in time to what it's about (when the Doomsday Clock was at 2 Minutes to Midnight in September 1953) than it is to the present day. Eeep.
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Friday 23rd January 2015 23:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: In situations like this, I find it useful
I have the unsettling music that played at the end of the films as a ringtone. When the Mrs calls me. People of a certain age give me very strange looks. Amazing how films that were never shown are still remebered by even normal, non geeky citizenry. As one who was a kid in the early 80's, when we literally didn't know if we'd be deep fried by an ss20 when we went to bed each night, I laugh at their 3 minutes to midnight. Attention seekers.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
