According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Doomsday Clock is now at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest ever, due to escalating global threats. Key factors include nuclear tensions from Russia’s war in Ukraine and expanding arsenals, climate change with record-breaking temperatures, biological risks like pandemics and bioweapons, AI-driven threats including autonomous weapons and disinformation, and geopolitical instability from U.S.-China tensions and Middle East conflicts. These risks highlight the urgent need for international cooperation, diplomacy, and climate action to prevent global catastrophe.

The first time I heard about this Clock was five years ago, when it was already at 100 seconds to midnight. In just five years, the situation has become even more dire, with the clock moving closer to catastrophe. This alarming trend underscores the need for even more urgent intervention to address these growing threats.

Meteorological organizations and climate research institutions maintain historical weather data and climate records, including temperature measurements from various locations. The Climate Change Institute at the university of Maine is one of those institutions. And according to the data collected since 1976, yesterday, while the US was celebrating its US Independence Day, that day turned out to be the hottest on record in that dataset.

A couple of weeks ago, NASA issued a press release explaining that "Earth’s global average surface temperature in 2021 tied with 2018 as the sixth warmest on record, according to independent analyses done by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration"

The NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was sounding the alarm in the same press release: "Eight of the top 10 warmest years on our planet occurred in the last decade ...". The news was barely covered by the mainstream media, echoing some of the points exposed in the recently brilliant movie "Don't look up" by Adam McKay.

Global warming is real and the issue should be taken seriously by each government and each citizen of this planet.

I have been reading the news for the last few days as the northwestern United States has experienced a strong heat wave that has broken all records in its major cities including Seattle and Portland.

There are even reports that part of the infrastructure of those cities is literally melting due to that heat wave. The PDX airport maintains records of the highest and lowest temperatures every day since 1938 (see charts above) and when observing a graph of these data it is clear that the temperatures of the last days are surprising for that region of the country.

I have been saying it for a while in this blog: Global warming is not a joke!

A couple of days ago I stumbled into the headline ‘Doomsday Clock is now 100 seconds from midnight’, published by space.com. I wasn’t aware, but this clock is a metaphor for how close we are in the world to a man-made global catastrophe. This device was set up in 1947 by the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, when nuclear weapons were considered the main threat. Today, the global warming issue is also considered in the equation on how to calculate this time.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, this time around in 2020, it’s the closest it has been to midnight. 2019 was the second hottest year in history, the growing instability in the Middle East, and even the possible AI use in warfare don’t help to move this time backwards. The picture is not a pretty one, but there is at least one more voice reminding world leaders what is at stake here.

Last summer felt really hot! There were quite a few days when most of the headlines in the news were about how the thermometer was about to break historic records in many cities. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Earth temperature change measured by NASA during the months of June and July was the highest ever recorded.

The "breaking record" headlines are following the same pattern year after year. I don't remember any time in my lifetime when global warming was such a clear and present danger!

Over the last couple of weeks, we have had news stories about Harvey and now Irma. Harvey caused a lot of havoc in Texas, and now Irma seems to be on the same path in the Caribbean islands and Florida. The Hurricane Division of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratories tracks on their website the number of storms per year, and based on the data, it looks like the number is steadily increasing. Sigh... climate change.

It's very unfortunate but not surprising that 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded. NASA revealed the consolidated reports and the data doesn't lie. Global warming is quite real. See the average by season chart.

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The European Union EDGAR database contains useful information about the CO2 emissions per country and worldwide. The previous graph shows the countries with the highest CO2 emissions (USA and China) and the total emissions worldwide. It's within the spike the world experienced since 2000.

According to an article published in the Guardian, the Earth is warming at a pace unprecedented in 1,000 years. I have already discussed this point three times in this blog, but I think it's worth bringing it up, because some people are still not convinced this is a real phenomenon.

Back in February I wrote on this blog how the world was really warming up, and the data from February 2016 is even worse. NASA reported that this month had the biggest temperature rise recorded in modern history:

Again, the world is warming up!

Last Sunday I was reading the breaking news about a cliff that had collapsed into the sea on New Zealand’s South Island following a severe magnitude 5.9 earthquake that happened near Christchurch. I remembered when I visited New Zealand last year that I heard the nickname of this country is the "Shaky Isles" for its constant seismic activity. The two islands that compose this country lie on the margin of two colliding tectonic plates, making them earthquake prone.

The usgs.gov website has an interesting section with statistics about Earthquakes worldwide. Please find the following heatmap table with the data they published there:

There were two particularly deadly years: 2004 when a [tsunami hit many countries in the Indian Ocean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_and_tsunami), and 2010 when a huge earthquake happened in Léogâne, Haiti.

Last Sunday it was really warm here in Berlin. I was able to get on my bike and do a nice ride to the northern part of the city. Nevertheless, I remembered some data I read back in January about how the world is really warming up:

This winter has been really mild in Berlin.