Who's been monkeying with the Doomsday Clock?

Around my house we have a simple policy - if you move the clock up or back for some pointless mind-game to help everyone be more punctual - tell everyone so they can do the internal calculations necessary to be 5 minutes late for every event we attend. You never, I repeat NEVER monkey around with the clock without alerting those who's lives are metered by the tick tick tick of those clocks.

A noble policy to be sure. And one that not only should apply to regular old house clocks, but it should apply to Big Ben, that guy you call to get the time then have to hear a low budget ad then the weather, and say, a metaphorical clock predicting how close we actually are to impending global annihilation .

Imagine my surprise when I stopped over to my favorite location for determining the acceptable green-ness of my next batch of bananas and I see that Global Warming® is now a consideration for the Doomsday Clock. Please, can somebody tell me how in the world the Doomsday clock came to incorporate global warming® in it's simple though prescient machinations? I mean, it IS maintained by the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I mean, what about global warming is ATOMIC?? All my life, I've had one overriding, simple yet crystal fear - an apocalyptic fiery nuclear death. I knew that no matter how nice things got for me I could always count on a gloomy circa 1983 tv movie post-apocalyptic vision to kick me down a notch.

Well here come the global warming® folks to rain all over my parade, and real rain, not the drifting, fluffy nuclear kind. How in the world did a bunch of scientists allow this bit of political nonsense into their pure vision of global termination?

I guess I just wish someone had at least called me to see what I thought - I mean, I've been with the Doomsday clock as long as anybody and I thought we had something.

I guess nothing is forever (except nuclear fallout - ah, yesterday).