Doomsday Clock moves back 1 minute.
 

It is 6 minutes to midnight
14 January 2010 We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons. For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable.

These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization--the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change. This hopeful state of world affairs leads the boards of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists--which include 19 Nobel laureates--to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock back from five to six minutes to midnight. By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasize how much needs to be accomplished, while at the same time recognizing signs of collaboration among the United States, Russia, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and others on nuclear security and on climate stabilization.

Very encouraging developments.

Webstral

peace in our time
 

would be a relief

It's the unachievable dream. Somewhere, someone is always going to be waging war on some level. The best that can be hoped for is minimising the impact...

Call me a cynic
"...pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable."

Talk about terrorism.
Climate change will not render the planet nearly uninhabitable. It might become so for us and many species might become extinct although many more will adapt but the planet will still be habitable. And with the potential for climate difference being touted as anywhere from 10C to 5C greater than today, things might get a whole lot warmer and more tropical and animals might get a whole lot bigger - it's happened before and it will probably happen again - but it won't stop humans from adapting to the change either physically or technologically.

The media and politicians, the two biggest sources of fear and misinformation since propaganda was invented. Stop cutting down forests, plant more trees, force companies to adopt pollution control - they're the answers to slowing or halting the gas emissions.

End Of Rant
Climbing off my soapbox now.

Moving up the clock is utterly appropriate, in my mind.

Yes, you're right, we don't have the power, even in a full-on nuclear exchange, to render the planet uninhabitable. But we're making it uninhabitable by us. We can't kill Mother Nature, but we've worked her over as much as Muhammed Ali worked over Joe Frazier. Mother Nature will recover. She survived the Permian Mass Extinction, she'll survive us. But we are engineering a mass extinction -- one that might include us.

And that's my rant.

All very true.

Mother nature seems to be holding her own with the hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, Volcanic activity, etc.

I think we got more to worry about from mother nature then she from us.

Volcanic activity and tsunamis we have absolutely no impact on as a species. Earthquakes we do but only in a very minor sense - extensive underground mining can lead to local minor earth tremors. But hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones are another matter. Climate change science has come a long way in the past few decades and there is data to suggest that some weather events may become both more frequent and more severe as a result of climate change.

I am not suggesting that climate change doesn't happen outside of human interference - of course it does. The ice ages are just one example of that. Heck, it is only because of green plants that the atmosphere is like it is today. Before there were green living things there were purple living things and they enjoyed a very different atmosphere on earth. It seems as though the green things performed chemical warfare on the purple things through terraforming (the purple things were anaerobes (modern survivors of those times include some of the bacteria associated with gangrene)). The new, high levels of atmospheric oxygen killed off the vast majority of purple things and the green things took over.

What is the case however is that, with the exception of major astronomical events such as asteroid strikes, solar fluctuations and nearby supernovas, the rate of climate change on earth is usually much slower. That gives species time to adapt to the new conditions. The activities of we humans seem to be causing climate change which is far more rapid than the norm, and that is where the problems lie.