Hawking warns: We must recognise the catastrophic dangers of climate change January 19, 2007.
“Climate change stands alongside the use of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats posed to the future of the world, the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said.
Professor Hawking said that we stand on the precipice of a second nuclear age and a period of exceptional climate change, both of which could destroy the planet as we know it.
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“We are here today to outline the results of the Bulletin’s recent deliberations and to warn the public about the deteriorating state of world and planetary affairs by moving the hand of the clock,” Professor Hawking said.
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[The board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists] “As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilisation. We have concluded the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm.”
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Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight January 17, 2007.
“The world is nudging closer to nuclear or environmental apocalypse, a group of prominent scientists warned Wednesday as it pushed the hand of its symbolic Doomsday Clock closer to midnight.
The clock, which was set two minutes forward to 11:55, represents the likelihood of a global cataclysm. Its ticks have given the clock’s keepers a chance to speak out on the dangers they see threatening Earth.
It was the fourth time since the Soviet collapse in 1991 that the clock ticked forward amid fears over what the scientists describe as “a second nuclear age” prompted largely by standoffs with Iran and North Korea. But urgent warnings of climate change also played a role.
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This is the first time the bulletin has explicitly addressed the threat from climate change.
“We are transforming, even ravaging the entire biosphere. These environmentally driven threats - threats without enemies - should loom as large as did the East-West divide during the Cold War era,” said Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of science.
“Unless they rise higher on international agendas, remedial action may come too late,” he added.
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Climate resets ‘Doomsday Clock’ January 17, 2007.
“Experts assessing the dangers posed to civilisation have added climate change to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind.”

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