Environmental Doomsday Clock

Posted by Laurence O'Sullivan Sep 1, 2008

On the History channel I watched a program on the “Atomic Doomsday Clock”, designed for the cover of a nuclear news magazine founded in the 1950s. At the height of the cold war the minute hand of the clock could be moved forward or backward from the stroke of midnight, depending on the world situation at any given time.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the cold war, the doomsday clock lost a lot of its fascination for the world, but I realized that the concept was ideally applicable to the climate change crisis that we now face.

To design my “Environmental Doomsday Clock” I merged a photograph of the earth and one of Mars, both from NASA, to give a clock face. The pre-midnight half is a vibrant living world while the after midnight side is a dead world. I put carbon dioxide levels of 385ppm, 425ppp and 500 ppm at the 10, 11 and midnight time points.

As designed, my clock shows us at 10 minutes to midnight at the present day levels of carbon dioxide. But while writing and researching the article, Carbon Dioxide Tipping Point, I realized that no one knows exactly how close we are to midnight, and indeed some scientists think the hand should be past midnight already, or at least much closer than I have designed it.