If You Laughed at the Doomsday Clock Update, You Should Find This Hilarious
Jimmy Kimmel tonight got uproarious laughter from his audience when he mocked the lackluster announcement by the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that they have now moved the second hand of their Doomsday Clock to within 90 seconds of midnight (destruction of our civilization by nuclear war or climate change), the closest it’s ever been to “Doomsday,” in part, significantly, due to the Ukraine War.
Here’s a still photo of their apparently laughable demeanor:
If you thought that was funny, you should find the following excerpt from a short speech by atmospheric scientist Brian Toon hilarious (in a previous post to Sierra Voices I referred to his talk as “grim poetry.”):
“66 million years ago a mountain-sized asteroid traveling ten times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle, slammed into the shallow seas covering what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. The immense energy of that impact hurled rocks as far north as Canada, and it vaporized the asteroid, part of Mexico and part of the shallow sea. This fireball of vaporized rock and water rose far above the Earth’s atmosphere and spread over the planet. As it cooled, molten drops of rock about the size of a grain of sand solidified into an immense storm of shooting stars. The shooting stars re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and heated the upper atmosphere to a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Standing at the ground, the dinosaurs saw the blue sky become a sheet of red-hot lava. The dinosaurs “broiled to death under the glowing skies.” Then energy in the sky was like that in the glow bar in an electric oven. The glowing skies started everything on fire. Great clouds of smoke rose into the upper atmosphere and blocked the sun, so that no sunlight reached the ground. It became cold and dark. Photosynthesis stopped, and plants and animals in the ocean or on the land, either starved or froze to death. Unfortunately, in our lifetimes, we may experience the same fate as the dinosaurs. But I’m not talking about another asteroid collision, I’m talking about nuclear war.”
He added, “I’ve studied nuclear war for 35 years — you should be worried.”
The tragic fact is that there is a direct connection, not causation but rather a general cultural mood that connects Jimmy Kimmel’s minimizing the fear of nuclear war and the apparent disregard of the danger of nuclear war among world leaders, especially among the bipartisan war parties in Washington, DC, who engineer Biden’s foreign policy and seem to have no fear of provoking Doomsday.
This is a new phenomenon in our time, a general dismissiveness of the very real risk of nuclear war, as if it were inconsequential. A salutary dread of that threat helped JFK negotiate a resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Where’s the dread today? I feel it. Clearly the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board and its Board of Sponsors (which includes 10 Nobel laureates) feel it. But that’s not enough. We should all feel it.
The widespread disregard of the risk of nuclear war increases the likelihood of nuclear war.
Funny, huh?
[Don]
SEE ALSO:
“From 1,020 Seconds to 90 Seconds in 32 Years Spells Potential Doom for Peoplekind”
EXCERPT:
“What’s equally sad about today’s ominous setting at 90 seconds to Midnight? Our government, our media, our citizenry took little note, going about their lives of noisy desperation oblivious to the danger to existence we face. As Chicago once famously sang, “Does anybody really know what time it is?”
One thought on “If You Laughed at the Doomsday Clock Update, You Should Find This Hilarious”
Comments are closed.