Wow, so many more options when you use firefox instead of safari (mmm... check out them tasty links).

Gretchen's link put me on a little web research kick, found some interesting sites. The Doomsday Clock folks, officially called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have indeed moved up the clock, as of January 17th, to 5 minutes to midnight (three minutes short of the all-time closest, 2 minutes to midnight in 1953), and have also begun to factor in climate change. Here was their accompanying statement on 1/17/07:

We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.

As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization. We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

Even more disturbing, however, is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report coming out any minute now, which basically says we're fucked and there's nothing we can do about it. I'm going to download the full text as soon as it becomes available and try to sift through it, but in the meantime, they have their 2001 report, the one Bush ignored, in .pdf as well as all kinds of other cheerful shit.

Another interesting project on the clock tip is the Long Now Foundation who are, I think, trying to be a countervailing force to the kind accelerated panic many of us are prone to. I'm trying to force myself to think about the ethics of alarmism versus complacency in my own reactions to the big GW (global warming, that is)- what are the dangers and inherent fallacies of equating GW with "the end" and, on the flip side, what becomes of activism if you orient yourself away from apocalyptic thinking and towards... what? Sustainability? Quietism? Bicycling to work?