Three minutes to doomsday

The title of this week's column was the proclamation of Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group in charge of the symbolic Doomsday Clock. The clock had been at five minutes to midnight since 2012 before it was recently moved forward by two minutes.

The last time the clock was three minutes to midnight was in 1983, 32 years ago, when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was as its peak.

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947. It has changed 18 times since then, ranging from two minutes to midnight in 1953 to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991. (msn.com)

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is composed of a group of prominent scientists and Nobel laureates who contend that climate change and the danger of nuclear war pose an ever-growing threat to civilization and are bringing the world closer to doomsday. Benedict said "Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe."

The Republican-controlled Senate acknowledged earlier this week that climate change is real but refused to say humans are to blame.

I don't intend to rehash last week's column but a couple of things need to be said. First of all, climate change is so gradual that we can't see it, feel it or realize it unless we're old enough to look to the past. 2014 was the hottest year world-wide in history. Fifty years ago Nebraska during the cold winter months looked much more like the northern peninsula of Michigan than it does today. The winters aren't nearly as harsh as they used to be and something is causing it.

One of the television series I record is Air Disaster and it's not rare to find that the cause of a plane crash is a deteriorating section of the plane that over the course of several hundred flights got a little worse each time until it either disintegrated or ripped off. It was barely big enough to notice when it first appeared, even if they had been looking specifically for it, and it grew millimeter by millimeter each time the plane flew until a catastrophe resulted.

Marriages don't go wrong all at once. They go wrong through an accumulation of acts and behaviors that lead to a breaking point.

Children we're raising don't change appearance in front of our eyes because the change is too subtle for us to see but they certainly change for people who haven't seen them in a while.

The point is there is change occurring all around us all the time but it's so slow and gradual that we don't see it and climate change is obviously one of those things. And the question as to who or what is causing it is almost a moot point because we certainly haven't done much to prevent it. An old saying goes, you're either part of the problem or part of the solution and it's not difficult to figure out where human beings are in that scenario.

On top of that, thanks to the increasing muscle-flexing of North Korea, Putin in Russia and the various radical Islamic groups operating around the world, the threat of nuclear extinction is once again a real possibility. I don't think it will come from the leaders of nations but from these radical religious groups who believe that America is the Great Satan and that to kill an American is akin to killing the devil. So it makes sense that the more of us they kill, the closer to Allah they believe they are and the best way to kill the most Americans is by using a nuclear weapon.

It's not very scary living in McCook, Culbertson or Hayes Center but it's a lot scarier living in most other parts of the world and it has been for a long time.

As the leader of the free world, we have to do everything in our power to reduce climate change AND the threat of nuclear extinction before it's too late.