Its an interesting question, because I would argue that a Doomsday Clock has properties inherent to it's metaphor. That is to say, a clock ticks.
Sure we can set it to whatever time we want, we can reset the clock. But inherent in the symbol is that the purpose of a clock is to constantly, unrelentingly tick forward, in a single direction. There is an implicit argument here, that the nuclear apocalypse is inevitable, and that if you'll forgive the joke, it is only a matter of 'time'
I almost feel like if we want to engage with what might be a opposite of a nuclear clock, we need to be engaging more with the metaphor, and what implicit arguments said metaphor are making. Something like a pithy political cartoon.
If I had to choose a metaphor for the nuclear fears of the Cold War, I might choose a dartboard. Dead center is the nuclear apocalypse, that doomsday that occurs when all other factors come into alignment. But there were close calls. Perhaps I would label one dart 'The Cuban Missile Crisis', or another one 'Broken Arrow'. We've had a lot of near misses.
But its a more optimistic metaphor than the clock, because a dartboard needs players. If nobody is instigating escalatory incidents, nobody is throwing darts at the board.
The Climate Crisis is a much more depressing scenario to engage with. If I had to come up with a metaphor, I might imagine a man stumbling down a steep hill. It takes a lot of effort and energy to stop his descent, and he will be hurt in doing so, twisting an ankle perhaps. But he is approaching a sheer cliff. If he takes the path of least resistance, he will tumble off. But he needs to climb the hill again to reach safety, which is exhausting, thankless work, which gets harder the further he falls.
Not sure I have any really optimistic thoughts for you today though.
Or. If you read the early IPCC reports about how catastrophic even 1C and 1.5C would be to complex global society… or how 50% of emissions have been released since 1989 when CO2 has a 30 year lag effect… it’s more like the man has already fallen off the cliff and is falling carefree with the wind in his hair, calling out “so far so good!” every 10 ft closer to the bottom.
"It has never made pretensions of being a scientific instrument"
Certainly, but they're perfectly happy to have the media and the general public treat and interpret it as though it was a scientific instrument, measuring something tangible and qualifiable... As opposed to what it really is, which is essentially an infinite emoticon based on opinion.
So I've never seen this extinction symbol before, but I think the slogan "hope dies, action begins" is apt, but not for the reason the coiner thought, as it demonstrates the fundamental emptiness of being a doom screamer.
So there is a distinction that many people don't understand: the difference between pessimism and negativity. The Pessimist as a frontiersman in the old west thinks the winter that is coming is going to be a long and harsh one. But assuming he thinks this in summer, then he has all sorts of actions he can take to deal with this, mainly making sure the cabin is properly weatherproof and he has sufficient supplies. Someone being negative in the same situation will not do anything, since any action they take will be hopeless in the face of the long, harsh winter.
So hopelessness is the death of action. Truth be told I think it is a demonstration that doom screamers only have one rhetorical move: escalation. It's a paradox, though, since it is an attempt to manipulate people into doing what they see as necessary - fight climate change, but only by massive reduction in carbon emissions, with consequent megadeath among the poorest. The fact that one nation doing this and could have their reductions blotted out by others is one flaw in this plan. It also...undermines arguments about addressing climate change, since saying "my way or DOOM" would be an argument for many to not do anything about it.
The short circuiting of reason to create panic is, in itself, a major red flag; it suggests that the doom screamer knows the legitimate political processes in rational argument or democracy will not get them what they want. While democracy has not covered itself in glory in recent years, we've also seen what a small minority undermining these systems to get what they want does, and it's a much more immediate danger. This too undermines efforts to fight climate change, and are much more damaging than Exxon's annual statements on electric cars, or lawsuits from the coal industry, since it suggests the doom screamer is not being honest even in their excessive negativity.
This is a good example of someone in the bargaining phase, or who took one look at the rabbit hole and turned around. Aside from childish labels and strawman attacks, what is the argument here? You haven’t actually tried to engage with the other position, just inflate your own.
Great to see you engaging with this topic. Climate change is the Cold War of our time, and unlike a will they/wont they dynamic it *is happening* and can only get worse. Definitely a radicalizing topic for those willing to dive all the way down the rabbit hole.
I agree with the phrase “hope dies, action begins”. You see so many (online at least) unknowingly stuck in the stages of grief, and hope is the earliest and biggest one to catch people - living in and and longing for a preferred, imagined reality in our heads instead of engaging with the unpleasant and dispreferred reality of our world as it actually is. The goal is not to be *hopeless*, but ‘hopefree’ as the late Michael Dowd would say.
Only after a sober and calculated look at this reality can one actually act to change it, within their actual scope of influence rather than what they’d like it to be.
There's something peculiar about the nature of time under the aegis of the Doomsday Clock. It's not just not monotonous (in the mathematical sense that it can "tick back") it's also [subjectively] endless: it's not a midnight we can experience the last chime of. Perhaps the end result is one of unstable stasis: rather than a graduated sense of distance to doomsday there's a back and forth between the binaries of being close enough to it to see the border and far enough that --granted a deliberate effort to look down-- we don't, and therefore the border doesn't exist.
So one of many dimensions along which an opposite could be build might be, if you'll excuse the overly vague metaphor, its topology: not a line [although it does feel closer to a boundary point] but (at least) a surface with multiple potential paths --including multiple potential doomsdays-- with real time one of the dimensions.
The most straightforward version I can think of is a time series of the total destructive power of arsenals and some sort of threshold for survivability-if-used (which we have been above of for a long time), although a reasonable iteration would be a time x total power x readiness/tension/risk/etc cube, with history a line on it and the "event horizon" a surface parallel to time at the (survivable total power used x risk = 1). I'm being a bit vague, I know. In any case what might be worth exploring is not just surface differences but which ones of those induce changes in the lived experience --and perhaps the actions-- under it.
Somehow this blog felt like a cool palate cleanser. And wanting to read Kolbert’s lovely essay has persuaded me to renew my New Yorker subscription. Cheers!
I've often wondered if the originator of the extinction symbol wasen't a huge fan of the late '60s sci-fi series "The Time Tunnel"? The resemblance between the symbol and the fictional Project Tic Toc logo are a little too close to be a coincidence : )
Its an interesting question, because I would argue that a Doomsday Clock has properties inherent to it's metaphor. That is to say, a clock ticks.
Sure we can set it to whatever time we want, we can reset the clock. But inherent in the symbol is that the purpose of a clock is to constantly, unrelentingly tick forward, in a single direction. There is an implicit argument here, that the nuclear apocalypse is inevitable, and that if you'll forgive the joke, it is only a matter of 'time'
I almost feel like if we want to engage with what might be a opposite of a nuclear clock, we need to be engaging more with the metaphor, and what implicit arguments said metaphor are making. Something like a pithy political cartoon.
If I had to choose a metaphor for the nuclear fears of the Cold War, I might choose a dartboard. Dead center is the nuclear apocalypse, that doomsday that occurs when all other factors come into alignment. But there were close calls. Perhaps I would label one dart 'The Cuban Missile Crisis', or another one 'Broken Arrow'. We've had a lot of near misses.
But its a more optimistic metaphor than the clock, because a dartboard needs players. If nobody is instigating escalatory incidents, nobody is throwing darts at the board.
The Climate Crisis is a much more depressing scenario to engage with. If I had to come up with a metaphor, I might imagine a man stumbling down a steep hill. It takes a lot of effort and energy to stop his descent, and he will be hurt in doing so, twisting an ankle perhaps. But he is approaching a sheer cliff. If he takes the path of least resistance, he will tumble off. But he needs to climb the hill again to reach safety, which is exhausting, thankless work, which gets harder the further he falls.
Not sure I have any really optimistic thoughts for you today though.
Or. If you read the early IPCC reports about how catastrophic even 1C and 1.5C would be to complex global society… or how 50% of emissions have been released since 1989 when CO2 has a 30 year lag effect… it’s more like the man has already fallen off the cliff and is falling carefree with the wind in his hair, calling out “so far so good!” every 10 ft closer to the bottom.
"It has never made pretensions of being a scientific instrument"
Certainly, but they're perfectly happy to have the media and the general public treat and interpret it as though it was a scientific instrument, measuring something tangible and qualifiable... As opposed to what it really is, which is essentially an infinite emoticon based on opinion.
So I've never seen this extinction symbol before, but I think the slogan "hope dies, action begins" is apt, but not for the reason the coiner thought, as it demonstrates the fundamental emptiness of being a doom screamer.
So there is a distinction that many people don't understand: the difference between pessimism and negativity. The Pessimist as a frontiersman in the old west thinks the winter that is coming is going to be a long and harsh one. But assuming he thinks this in summer, then he has all sorts of actions he can take to deal with this, mainly making sure the cabin is properly weatherproof and he has sufficient supplies. Someone being negative in the same situation will not do anything, since any action they take will be hopeless in the face of the long, harsh winter.
So hopelessness is the death of action. Truth be told I think it is a demonstration that doom screamers only have one rhetorical move: escalation. It's a paradox, though, since it is an attempt to manipulate people into doing what they see as necessary - fight climate change, but only by massive reduction in carbon emissions, with consequent megadeath among the poorest. The fact that one nation doing this and could have their reductions blotted out by others is one flaw in this plan. It also...undermines arguments about addressing climate change, since saying "my way or DOOM" would be an argument for many to not do anything about it.
The short circuiting of reason to create panic is, in itself, a major red flag; it suggests that the doom screamer knows the legitimate political processes in rational argument or democracy will not get them what they want. While democracy has not covered itself in glory in recent years, we've also seen what a small minority undermining these systems to get what they want does, and it's a much more immediate danger. This too undermines efforts to fight climate change, and are much more damaging than Exxon's annual statements on electric cars, or lawsuits from the coal industry, since it suggests the doom screamer is not being honest even in their excessive negativity.
This is a good example of someone in the bargaining phase, or who took one look at the rabbit hole and turned around. Aside from childish labels and strawman attacks, what is the argument here? You haven’t actually tried to engage with the other position, just inflate your own.
Great to see you engaging with this topic. Climate change is the Cold War of our time, and unlike a will they/wont they dynamic it *is happening* and can only get worse. Definitely a radicalizing topic for those willing to dive all the way down the rabbit hole.
I agree with the phrase “hope dies, action begins”. You see so many (online at least) unknowingly stuck in the stages of grief, and hope is the earliest and biggest one to catch people - living in and and longing for a preferred, imagined reality in our heads instead of engaging with the unpleasant and dispreferred reality of our world as it actually is. The goal is not to be *hopeless*, but ‘hopefree’ as the late Michael Dowd would say.
Only after a sober and calculated look at this reality can one actually act to change it, within their actual scope of influence rather than what they’d like it to be.
There's something peculiar about the nature of time under the aegis of the Doomsday Clock. It's not just not monotonous (in the mathematical sense that it can "tick back") it's also [subjectively] endless: it's not a midnight we can experience the last chime of. Perhaps the end result is one of unstable stasis: rather than a graduated sense of distance to doomsday there's a back and forth between the binaries of being close enough to it to see the border and far enough that --granted a deliberate effort to look down-- we don't, and therefore the border doesn't exist.
So one of many dimensions along which an opposite could be build might be, if you'll excuse the overly vague metaphor, its topology: not a line [although it does feel closer to a boundary point] but (at least) a surface with multiple potential paths --including multiple potential doomsdays-- with real time one of the dimensions.
The most straightforward version I can think of is a time series of the total destructive power of arsenals and some sort of threshold for survivability-if-used (which we have been above of for a long time), although a reasonable iteration would be a time x total power x readiness/tension/risk/etc cube, with history a line on it and the "event horizon" a surface parallel to time at the (survivable total power used x risk = 1). I'm being a bit vague, I know. In any case what might be worth exploring is not just surface differences but which ones of those induce changes in the lived experience --and perhaps the actions-- under it.
Somehow this blog felt like a cool palate cleanser. And wanting to read Kolbert’s lovely essay has persuaded me to renew my New Yorker subscription. Cheers!
I've often wondered if the originator of the extinction symbol wasen't a huge fan of the late '60s sci-fi series "The Time Tunnel"? The resemblance between the symbol and the fictional Project Tic Toc logo are a little too close to be a coincidence : )