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Advancing it by 30 seconds seems very similar to a parent who has made some threat that they never intended to carry through, counting 1, 2, 2-and-a-half, 2-and-three-quarters...

If you have such a long established tradition of using "minutes" as some kind of metaphor for upcoming doom, it doesn't feel meaningful to suddenly start talking about half-minutes.

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> a parent who has made some threat that they never intended to carry through, counting 1, 2, 2-and-a-half, 2-and-three-quarters...

As a parent, I've taken this through as far as 2 and 255/256. (Although by that point it had changed from a threat to a math lesson.)

Is that what finally got them to behave? "Noooooooo!!!! Anything but math!!!"

IIRC, the Doomsday Clock was about nuclear war. If we're including "climate change", what other things should we include?

>represented an analogy for the threat of global nuclear war; however, since 2007 it has also reflected climate change,[4] and new developments in the life sciences and technology that could inflict irrevocable harm to humanity.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

It has been this way for nearly a decade. It's also plausible that they are linked - climate change destroying natural resources (land, food, etc.) certainly has the potential to inflict political instability and conflict.

The doomsday clock always strikes me more as a doomsday gauge ;)

I mean, once the clock reaches zero, we are all dead. But nuclear bombs don't fall because the clock reached zero - it's the other way around.