Political Cartoons

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which each year updates the hands on a clock meant to symbolize how close we are to the annihilation of the human race, or midnight. For the last three years, the world was five minutes from the end. Today, we're three minutes away.

The two-minute move is symbolic, but it gives a sense of how grim the outlook some of the best scientific minds have for humanity. The decision to move the hands forward, said Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists executive director Kennette Benedict, came about largely due to the threats posed by anthropogenic climate change and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

"World leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from catastrophe," Benedict said Thursday at an event held in the auditorium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "Stunning governmental failures have imperiled civilization on a global scale."

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the clock in 1947 to use "the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet." The closest the hands have ever come to midnight was 11:58, in 1953, after the U.S. and the then-Soviet Union began testing thermonuclear bombs.

Al Gore might need to dust off his projector. The creative forces behind the Oscar-winning environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth are hatching plans for a sequel to the film that raised global awareness of climate change. "We have had conversations," producer Lawrence Bender tells THR. "We've met; we've discussed. If we are going to make a movie, we want it to have an impact."

The first film certainly did. Released in 2006 by Paramount and Jeff Skoll's Participant Media, the Davis Guggenheim-directed doc grossed nearly $50 million worldwide and helped propel Gore, its narrator, to a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. But Bender believes that during the ensuing years, the fossil-fuel industry has changed the dialogue with a misinformation campaign. "They did a really good job of pushing back and confusing people," he says. "Some people actually believe global warming doesn't exist."

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