Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight, Signaling Concern Among Scientists – The New York Times. It moves! All by itself! (I wrote about this little piece of ridiculousness last year.)
UPDATE: Here’s another example:
The Doomsday Clock now reads two and a half minutes to midnight https://t.co/OOcF2snLmr
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) January 27, 2017
The way journalists try to get us to take this ridiculous ongoing superannuated publicity stunt seriously is by attributing agency to a wholly metaphorical clock: It moves closer to midnight; it now reads 2.5 minutes to midnight. As though it is operating in complete independence of human judgment and merely bears witness to the horrible truth. As I wrote last year, “no actual science goes into the decision of where to place the hands of the clock. The scientists who make the decision have no particular expertise in geopolitical strategy, military and political risk assessment, or even climatology (relevant since they incorporate climate change into their assessment). They just read a bunch of stuff and take their own emotional temperature.”
