Group Members: Mikko Hallikainen & William Dolan

In 1947, artist and designer Martyl Langsdorf was commissioned by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to create a cover image for the upcoming issue of their annual publication; something to communicate the urgency of nuclear weapons and the hitherto unprecedented stakes of the issue (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, n.d.). The resulting design was as simple as it was evocative, a quarter clock face with seven minutes till midnight. In the ensuing 70 years the clock has become a symbol of existential threat communication, annually updating as the shifting landscape of nuclear weapons (and now climate change, AI, and biological agents) move us closer to the brink of a proverbial apocalyptic midnight. Few visuals can claim the evocative and iconic status of the doomsday clock, but for all its communicative power, its limitations are starting to become apparent as it attempts to represent more modern progressive existential threats like climate change in addition to nuclear proliferation. Now more than ever there is need for a doomsday clock visual for the age of progressive existential threats, building on the strengths of Martyl Langsdorf’s original design while accounting for the fundamental differences between nuclear risk and the progressive threats that have emerged in its wake.

“Minutes to midnight” did not become part of the global lexicon by accident, and much of the clock’s strength can be attributed to its simplicity. A clock is a universally understood visual, readable at a glance and easily updated to show the changing proximity of the threat. This simplicity paired with the evocative nature of the visual, a literal timer counting down to doomsday, make it an ideal conversation starter; a simple conduit to start complex conversations. The design of the clock also uniquely expresses the sense of urgency needed in understanding the then novel idea of a man-made existential threat. The idea of a “nuclear midnight” accurately imparts the dueling nature of nuclear armageddon, simultaneously a near instantaneous annihilation in the single stroke of a clock and the cumulation of the minutes and seconds of armament and proliferations that lead to the brink.

However, the clock is not without major issues, the most pressing of which is its nihilistic framing. While the visual is intended to be moved back and forth as nuclear risk rises and falls, the fact of the matter is that people understand clocks in their daily lives as only moving forward following the ceaseless precession of time. Paired with the clock’s historical trend towards midnight, the effect is to paint nuclear armageddon as an inevitable end; a forgone conclusion waiting on the horizon that can only be delayed but never defeated. This sense of nihilistic hopelessness is counterproductive to the goals of the Bulletin and to existential threat management more generally as it engenders a passive disengagement with existential threats as battles already lost rather than active participation when it is needed most.

Moreover, while the singular nature of “nuclear midnight” is well suited to understanding nuclear proliferation, it is poorly equipped to communicate progressive existential threats like climate change or AI development risks. Nuclear armageddon is instantaneous, tantamount to the stroke of a clock, but how would one even define “climate midnight?” Is it when earth passes the 1.5 C threshold? The 2 C threshold? When climate change casualties are equivalent to those of nuclear exchange? All of these metrics engender passivity in the face of climate change, either fixing climate midnight as a moment so far off in the future that it hardly seems relevant to the present, or marking it as a moment that has already passed, leaving us to a doomed planet beyond repair. Neither of these notions is accurate to the contemporary realities of climate change or productive in our efforts to understand and adapt to its effects.

Lastly, the doomsday clock has been criticized for its opaque methodology. While the annual unveiling of the clock is accompanied with an explanation of evolving existential threats and an elaborate announcement ceremony, the exact process by which the Bulletin comes to a consensus around the clock’s time is a closed door affair. This opacity frames existential threats as a topic exclusive to experts rather than an issue of universal concern and results in questioning of the Bulletin’s judgment. These concerns are most frequently expressed as “how could we possibly be closer to midnight than we were in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis?” representing a general frustration with an inability to understand the Bulletin’s reasoning. Even when the readings accurately reflect current nuclear risk, the difficulty in explaining the clock’s methodology makes it difficult to reconcile its differences from public perception of nuclear danger.

With these positives and negatives in mind, our goal is to iterate on the design of the Doomsday Clock and build a new set of visuals more appropriate for the progressive existential threat of climate change. Like the clock, we intend for these visuals to be evocative and understandable at a glance, a springboard to wider and more complicated conversations, and to accurately impart the urgency these issues demand. However, unlike the clock, we want to pay special attention to avoiding engendering passivity, either through hopeless defeatism or procrastination. This necessarily entails depicting the evolving face of the existential threat, including both past barriers we have already broken through and future goals we must act to achieve. We aim to show that we are missing climate change; that things are getting worse but that we are also striving towards improvement, be that in the areas of prevention, adaptation, or mitigation. Lastly, wherever possible, we aim to have our visuals rooted in transparent methodology and data, not only to elucidate the reasons behind the visuals updates, but to illustrate that both progress and decline rests in the power of the public as well as their leaders.

With these design goals in mind, we have built three visuals we hope can act as quick references for the state of climate change as a progressive existential threat. We understand it is unlikely any of these will develop the iconic status or cultural staying power of the doomsday clock, but through their construction we hope to illustrate how progressive existential threats can be better communicated and how our framing of these threats can better motivate action.

Our first visualization is a modified version of Ed Hawkin’s Warming Stripes (2018. Creative Commons 4.0). The project consists of a series of colored vertical stripes that represent the gradual increase of global temperatures since the 1850s. Each colored stripe color corresponds to the difference between the global average temperature of a single year and the average temperature from 1970-2000.

The project’s most significant virtue is its interpretability. It makes use of common cultural associations relating color to temperature and danger, and it does not include numeric scales that may prevent a wider audience from making sense of the visual. Anyone can quickly look at Warming Stripes and understand that over time, the world is getting warmer and that this warming is cause for concern. The project also has a clear methodology and can be updated yearly with new data, turning the project into a regular conversation piece that encourages further inquiry into climate change. These factors have enabled its worldwide incorporation into climate messaging, ranging from the viral #ShowYourStripes campaign (Eli Kintisch, 2019) to the logo for the US House Committee on the Climate Crisis (NARA Archive, 2022).

However, because the visualization solely represents information on warming, yearly updates do not immediately reflect international climate victories. Even if worldwide emissions are reduced to zero, warming would continue to reflect actions taken in previous years and the next 20-30 stripes would become increasingly red. This further engenders passivity and instills a sense that current victories have overall failed to significantly impact the trajectory of climate change.

Our modified design of Warming Stripes introduces a second axis of “energy stripes,” where each stripe represents the percent of global energy production from renewables. The energy stripes are placed directly under the warming stripes and are positioned such that a single column contains both the warming and energy stripes for a given year. We chose to visualize the adoption of renewables as an opposing metric to global warming because it is immediately responsive to human actions and because it represents the culmination of numerous climate victories on both an international and domestic scale. While carbon emissions are still increasing each year the proportion of energy gained from nonrenewable sources is steadily decreasing. The color scheme, in addition to accessibility concerns, was chosen to represent humanity’s increasing investment into a brighter future. At a glance this piece communicates that while effects of the climate crisis are worsening and the crisis is as urgent now as it ever was, the global community is making measurable progress towards solutions.

We also present a variant of this design with a large section of empty stripes. These stripes, which will annually be filled in with new data, aim to remind the audience that climate change is a progressive threat. There is no “victory moment” for solving climate change, and humanity will need to remain permanently cognizant of their actions to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Additionally, the empty stripes aim to encourage continued investment into climate action by reminding viewers that, while many targets for climate action will not be met and we will face consequences from these failures, we still have a significant opportunity now to take actions towards securing a better future.

This piece however still fails to communicate that the climate crisis is a multifaceted issue. Any attempt to represent it using two specific metrics will exclude important issues such as air pollution, ecological collapse, and potential climate-driven migration crises. The abstract representations of these two metrics makes it difficult to attribute individual stripes to specific actions, and annual releases of new stripes may fail to capture conversation beyond “the stripe is more red/green this year.”

Our next design pulls from an unconventional source: board games. Play is a universal human instinct, and throughout history board games have not only been tools of leisure, but reflections of cultural values and societal narratives (Dauenhauer & Dauenhauer 2023, 1). Moreover Board Games are recognizable and involve active participation; You are not watching the clock, you are playing the game. We wanted to avoid pulling from the iconography of chess, go, checkers, or similar “war games” given their reflection of militarism and competition towards a net zero victory (Dauenhauer & Dauenhauer 2023, 1-2), which is generally counterproductive towards the understanding and reaction to progressive threats like climate change.

As such, we decided to pull from a different board game tradition: Moksha Patam, otherwise known as Gyan Chauper or Snakes and Ladders. The game has hundreds of years of history, with variations associated with Indian, Nepalese, Jane, Hindu, and Muslim cultures, all of which center around vice, virtue, and the ebb and flow of moral living (Topsfield 2006, 143). It is, at its core, a game about moving forward, working through setbacks, and celebrating successes. While it is competitive like chess the victory condition is not tied to destroying your opponent but merely reaching the top of the board, and should the game continue after the first victory, it is possible for all players to win. This avoidance of a net-zero competitive framing and a focus on progress in the face of setbacks make it an ideal and globally recognizable framework to build off of. With this in mind, we present our second visual.

The snakes and ladders chart is designed to highlight the ongoing and mixed nature of progressive threats. As time progresses and the climate crisis deepens through a mix of inaction and locked in change, the snake grows longer and gains additional scales. However, our failures are not the whole story and to focus on them exclusively risks engendering the sort of passive hopelessness we discussed earlier. This is why we have the ladder on the inverse side of the axis, representing the work being done globally to respond to the climate crisis. Major milestones in policy, prevention, mitigation, and adaptation are represented as additional rungs on the ladder. Combined, the two represent the ebb and flow, successes and failures, steps forward and back as our mutual future is shaped by climate change, or more aptly how our actions shape climate change.

The annual reveal of the chart will focus on the number of additional scales and rungs added, with an associated press statement explaining what each represents. Given its simple design and the near universal popularity of snakes and ladders, the implications of the reveal should be instantly recognizable. That said, we hope the abstraction of the milestones will prompt viewers to read further into the attached release and start conversations about the specifics of the individual scales and rungs, rather than looking at the position on the clock and simply accepting that humanity is more or less in peril. The focus of this chart is human action, both as it improves and worsens the climate crisis. We are all active players in this game.

Lastly, unlike the doomsday clock, the snakes and ladders chart has no defined end point. The snake and ladder could stretch into the indefinite future (although the visual might become hard to read at some point), with each representing the changing landscape of climate issues as they continue to unfold. This is because, unlike nuclear risk, there is no “climate midnight.” Climate change is not an existential threat on the horizon we need to prevent, it’s a state of the world we are already in. The game is in play, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future of the species. The chart seeks not to track its end point, but how we are playing it on a year to year basis.

Lastly, our third design emphasizes global resilience to climate change. The visualization is comprised of bricks that form a metaphorical “sea wall.” Each year, multiple bricks of varying sizes will be added to the wall, representing individual climate achievements and how they defend humanity from the rising tide (both literal and metaphorical) of climate change. Through this design we want to stress the importance of appreciating climate victories in aggregate. While the impact of individual bricks may be limited, together they form a complete wall that protects humanity from the worst consequences of climate change.

The size of new bricks are determined by the effectiveness and equity of their respective achievements. The vertical axis measures the progress that has been made towards complete solutions. Climate change is a diverse threat with many components, each of which need to be fully addressed for humanity to be sufficiently prepared. Rather than advocate for a single “miracle” solution, this axis is concerned with how work across various domains has positioned humanity to be better prepared for specific threats. While some achievements are limited in scope or are otherwise palliative in nature, they still contribute towards our mitigative capabilities and can augment more comprehensive solutions. For example, bricks signifying a country’s successful adherence to their climate pledges could be stacked on top of bricks representing advancements in EV or carbon capture technology, all of which serve to reduce global carbon emissions. Viewers who see relatively tall segments of the wall can quickly understand that we have made significant progress towards mitigating specific threats and that conversely, holes in the wall require additional investment to fill in.

The horizontal axis is focused on the spread and equitability of achievements. The entirety of humanity shares the planet; complete climate solutions require the involvement and cooperation of industry, policymakers, and the global community. While some countries or organizations have achieved significant victories, their work may only impact their own communities or will otherwise be rendered ineffective by macro-level trends. The degree to which individual countries are interested in and/or capable of addressing climate change also varies significantly; equitable and universal climate solutions require investment from all global parties. A wall that only protects a small portion of your house is functionally useless. Notably wide bricks might include major international treaties like the Paris Agreement or positive global datapoints like the slow healing of the ozone layer. Updates that notably expand the width of the wall suggest that humanity’s achievements have given everyone on the planet some shared degree of protection against climate change.

We also suggest periodic updates to the “cutoff” lines in the visual. These updates signify that additional action is required for humanity to be completely protected from the most pressing aspects of climate change. There may never be a true “victory” moment that signifies humanity’s defeat of the threat, and our current failures may require even more investment from future generations. Viewers of this visualization should understand that climate solutions must be equitable and effective, we have made progress towards both aspects, and that there is still a significant amount of work to be done for humanity to be adequately prepared. Highlighting notable victories alongside our need for more solutions discourages passivity and provides some direction towards specific action.

One concern with this piece is that the criteria for determining notability may be more opaque than desired due to the diversity of solutions and the multifaceted nature of the threat. Our desire for a simplistic visual will require rejecting some smaller, but still significant, climate victories. We suggest that the notability criteria would be decided by an analogous “bulletin” for progressive threats made up of climate experts across both science and policy. Additionally, periodically increasing the cutoffs for each axis may generate hopelessness and apathy. In these instances, the public may feel that current victories are no longer significant or that humanity is incapable of becoming adequately prepared against the threat; always working towards a sisyphean task and never getting anywhere. This would be further compounded when benefits from some victories are not fully realized or are otherwise undone (i.e. signatories of the Paris Agreement fail to meet their pledges).

In their own ways, each of these visuals fails. The Warming Stripes modification is too singularly focused on the metrics of carbon emissions and renewable energy adoption, the Snakes and Ladders chart risks equivocating minor gains and massive losses, and any serious implementation of the Global Sea Wall visual would no doubt be subject to endless litigation over what does and does not count as a “brick-worthy” milestone. Moreover, something we realized too late is that all of these visuals require ever growing canvas space as the years pass, unlike the Doomsday’s Clock’s conveniently static frame.

Perhaps it is through these failures that the visuals come to most resemble the Doomsday Clock. Existential risks are among the most complicated issues of our time, complicated enough that a dedicated university course can only scratch the surface of the most pressing handful. The goals of the Doomsday Clock and any similar visual are in fundamental conflict, aiming to express these ideas accurately while also keeping them digestible and recognizable at a glance. One goal will always detract from the other.

This is not to dismiss the whole effort as a lost cause. The Doomsday Clock’s persistence in global discourse across more than a half century alone indicates that there is utility and meaning in communication efforts like this. There is real power in the immediacy, the simplicity, and the direct nature of these visuals, but those strengths are best used when focused on a single topic. What is needed is not a singular perfect visual that will instantly explain the risks of all existential threats, but a slew of imperfect focused visuals that can together form a mosaicked understanding of global existential threats.

If nothing else, we believe our visuals have succeeded in their avoidance of a “climate midnight” parallel. As mentioned at the start, nuclear midnight inspires immediate action towards the moment of disaster yet to come, while climate midnight is liable to inspire passive hopelessness as a world seemingly on the path to destruction. If our visuals can communicate nothing else than “things are bad and getting worse, but we still have the capacity to save ourselves,” then we will consider them a triumph.

 

Works Cited

Dauenhauer, Eleanor A, and Paul J Dauenhauer. “Quantifying the Vices and Virtues of Snakes and Ladders Through Time.” arXiv.org (2023).

Ed Hawkins, “Warming Stripes”, University of Reading (2018), https://showyourstripes.info/. Accessed March 1, 2024.

Eli Kintisch, “New climate ‘stripes’ reveal how much hotter your hometown has gotten in the past century,” Science, June 26, 2019, https://www.science.org/content/article/new-climate-stripes-reveal-how-much-hotter-your-hometown-has-gotten-past-century. Accessed March 1, 2024.

“House Committee On the Climate Crisis,” NARA Archive, https://www.webharvest.gov/congress117th/20221224173218/https://climatecrisis.house.gov/. Accessed March 1, 2024.

“Martyl Langsdorf, designer of the Doomsday Clock.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. https://thebulletin.org/virtual-tour/martyl-langsdorf-designer-of-the-doomsday-clock/. Accessed March 2nd, 2024.

Topsfield, Andrew. “Snakes and Ladders in India: Some Further Discoveries.” Artibus Asiae 66, no. 1 (2006): 143–179.