Midnight on the Doomsday Clock looms. Will we ever learn?

More pandemics, old and new, are in the wind. A war is raging on Europe’s doorstep. And joy of joys, Donald Trump has secured a second term in the Failed Sate of the US. It seems the only thing we learn from history is how to repeat it.

The Doomsday Clock’s ticking is now hastened by the Climate Crisis. Picture: istock

In the mid- 80s, as the newly appointed chair of Barry Jones’s Commission for the Future (an organisation that brought together scientists, pollies and the public in the hope of better long-term policies), I sought advice from some of our greatest scientific minds. At a formal dinner in Canberra I asked this simple, ominous question: “How will the world end? With a bang or a whimper?”

It was a time when the Cold War was at its height – the Doomsday Clock near midnight – and the doomed War on Drugs was raging. The science around genetically modified organisms was in its infancy. Ditto the internet. Elon Musk was a teenager.

One by one the scientists counted down the existential threats, beginning of course with nuclear war. Next came the prospect that we humans would somehow render ourselves redundant. (This was vividly imagined even prior to the invention of artificial intelligence – a technology that might perhaps reduce humans to the status of pets, or creatures of curiosity to be kept in zoos.)

In 2025, nuclear war still threatens us all. Picture: istock

No one mentioned pandemics. But the final threat – more or less unknown to some at the dinner – was the inexorable rise in carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere. After listening to the story of the time-bomb tick of rising carbon dioxide in one colleague’s laboratory – and in labs around the world – a consensus emerged. The evening ended with total agreement: the Commission for the Future must first and foremost warn Australia about the Greenhouse Effect. So we organised national and international conferences on what would later become known as Global Warming and, later, Climate Change. Way back in the mid-80s we linked Town Hall meetings around Australia via primitive satellite links, beaming in global and local experts. Yet thanks to a combination of fossil fuel industry chicanery, wilful ignorance, determined denialism and delaying tactics by gutless governments, it was all to little effect.

Fast-forward to 2025. Nuclear war still threatens us all – again the Doomsday Clock is seconds from midnight, its ticking now hastened by the Climate Crisis (the latest term) in its dread calculations. Genetically modified crops are increasing, the bees are dying, and artificial intelligence is on the march.

The Climate Crisis is worsening, too. Bigger storms, deeper droughts, fiercer fires, coral bleaching, extinctions. Already Pacific nations are imperilled by rising sea levels. Ditto Bangladesh. This will be the century of countless millions of environmental refugees.

And apart from the self-inflicted wounds of climate change denialism, there are the wounds of the US-declared War on Drugs, arguably the world’s greatest public policy fiasco. It continues to criminalise the pandemic of addiction, causing unprecedented corruption, clogging policing and court systems and overcrowding prisons. (The US clearly repressed the memories of Prohibition.)

More pandemics, old and new, are in the wind. A war is raging on Europe’s doorstep. And joy of joys, Donald Trump has secured a second term in the Failed State of the US.

Seems the only thing we learn from history is how to repeat it. Well, it was a nice planet while we had it.