This clock was started in the late 1940s. I think it has become meaningless as a comparative risk measurement metric. It may still be useful as a discussion starter, of course.

The problem is that the clock gets much more press coverage when it gets closer to midnight than ever before, so the incentive is to exaggerate.

We are definitely closer to "doomsday" than before the Ukraine war, but are we really at greater risk than during the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Viet Nam war, or the Brezhnev era? It seems unlikely.

The clock should have remained as a way to measure the risk of nuclear war exclusively. That is still the only doomsday (end of human civilization) scenario that humans have any control over. Maybe add AI and nanotechnology in the future when they become a credible threat to the species.

Nowadays, they include things like climate change, Covid, and the "breakdown of global norms".

These are all big problems, but none of them threatens human civilization with annihilation.

• Covid is largely abating, outside of China
• Climate change could cause 89 million excess deaths (directly and indirectly) by 2100, according to worst-case credible estimates. This is terrible, obviously, but it is unlikely to end civilization. The human population will see a net increase over that time span.
• The breakdown of global norms and trust in institutions does make war more likely, but they made little effort to quantify this risk.