Strengthening Public Awareness on Climate Change Risk (General Operating Support)

The Bulletin respectfully requests a general operating grant of $12,000 from the Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation to strengthen our capacity to report on existential risks, engage the public in informed dialogue, and amplify our content across our platforms. The Foundation’s continued investment will help to ensure fact-based, expert, scientific analysis on climate change, nuclear risk, disruptive technologies, and biosecurity reaches the public and policymakers when it matters most.

OVERVIEW OF THE BULLETIN

The move of the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight – the closest the clock has ever been to global catastrophe – is a call to action to recognize, reduce, and roll back existential threats.

The Bulletin is a nonprofit science and technology outlet focused on existential risks: nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies. We publish articles digitally in two formats: on our open-access website, which has more than 500,000 readers each month, and in our bimonthly subscription magazine, which can be found in 1,000 inboxes and 7,500 libraries around the world. We also host the iconic Doomsday Clock set annually by our internationally recognized Science and Security Board (SASB) and provide regular online and in-person events so that the public, policymakers, and scientists have the information needed to reduce threats to our very existence.

The Bulletin stands as the publication of record in the space of nuclear and interconnected risks. We invest heavily to ensure we remain the trusted source for experts and global audiences for information on and expert analysis of rapidly evolving technologies and existential risks.

PROGRAMS

Reporting on Existential Risks

The Bulletin was founded on the understanding that science is advancing rapidly, raising political and ethical questions whose answers will shape the future safety and security of our planet. Bulletin editors work with authors and scientists from around the world to publish approximately 500 authoritative articles on our website and our bi-monthly magazine each year.

Climate Change.  In 1978, decades before climate  change was acknowledged in the mainstream press, the Bulletin published a cover story titled “Is mankind warming the Earth?” The answer then, as now, was an “unqualified ‘yes.’” The Bulletin covers all aspects of the causes and wide-ranging impacts of this existential crisis, from glacier retreat and sea level rise to drought, extreme weather, and intense wildfires. We also investigate the most promising ways to slow and eventually halt global warming, probing uncertainties, and irreversible tipping points in the Earth’s climate and biosphere that threaten all life on Earth.

Popular Bulletin articles on climate change include:

• “The fires of Hiroshima and Los Angeles: Apocalypse redux” (more than 17,300 views), by Richard Turco and Owen Brian Toon, outlines the impacts of climate change and the recent catastrophic fires in California, and their relation to the firestorms of 80 years ago; “We have suddenly become more keenly aware of the rising threat of wildfires to society, while at the same time having largely forgotten about the atomic firestorms in the last millennium.”
• In “A rising danger in the Arctic” (more than 19,600 views), Valerie Brown warns that the world isn’t paying enough attention to the potential threats posed when permafrost melts and microbes emerge. This creates conditions that could foster the development of new diseases or the re-emergence of previously eradicated diseases.
• “The shrinking of the Greenland Ice Sheet can’t be stopped—but it can and must be slowed,” by Twila Moon (nearly 6,000 views), explains that while ice loss in Greenland is already largely irreversible, the pace of this loss is not set in stone. She asserts that what humans do in the next decade to slow the loss will determine the severity of its impact.

Nuclear Risks.  The Bulletin is best known for its sway among decision-makers, academics, and thought leaders in the nuclear space and the systems that intersect with nuclear risk. Our authors include the world’s leading experts in the fields of nuclear weapons and their delivery platforms, nuclear security, nuclear safety, nuclear energy, and nuclear waste policy. These experts and a staff of editors work together to provide accessible, authoritative articles for policymakers and the general public.

In addition to regular reporting in our bimonthly magazine and website, since 1987, the Bulletin has collaborated with top experts from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) to publish the Nuclear Notebook, an authoritative accounting of world nuclear arsenals. The Nuclear Notebook is widely considered to be the most accurate public source for information on global nuclear arsenals for all nine nuclear-armed states. The partnership with FAS ensures that the Notebook is seen by an exponentially larger audience and individual country reports reached more than 7,300 views in 2025. Because of its importance to researchers, governments, and citizens around the world, the Nuclear Notebook is always free to access.

Disruptive Technologies.  The Bulletin’s disruptive technology coverage tracks scientific and technological advances that could—either in the present or the future—pose an existential threat to humanity. These advances include: generative artificial intelligence and its deployment in various industries; autonomous weapons; digitized surveillance systems, biosecurity and biological threats; and cyber-enabled information warfare that can pollute, and cause chaos in, the world’s information ecosystem. In a “AI goes nuclear” (more than 26,000 views), which explores how Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and others are exploring how the energy industry can—or must, in their view—keep pace with AI’s rapid growth while also enabling Big Tech to meet its climate commitments.

Engaging the Community

The Bulletin engages academics, other nonprofit organizations, policymakers, and citizens from around the globe by creating opportunities for them to present ideas, debate solutions, and make policy recommendations. These forums take place through in-person events and webinars and strengthen experts’ impact. Programs are designed to engage supporters, subscribers, readers, and the general public with authors, members of the Bulletin’s SASB, and noteworthy scientists to discuss reporting from the magazine and website and current events. They provide an opportunity for our readers and supporters to unpack critical and complicated issues while providing us with an interactive way to engage our audience with our content. Examples include:

• Beyond the Threshold: The Urgency of Climate Change (April 2025 – more than 11,300 views) brought together Alexandra Bell (Bulletin – moderator), Inez Fung (University of California, Berkeley and member of the Bulletin's Science and Security Board), Robert Kopp (Rutgers University), and Femke Nijsse (University of Exeter) to explore the risks of climate change and explain what planetary shifts are inevitable, and which are solvable.
• The Climate-Nuclear Nexus (January 2024 – 1,000 views) featured Sherri Goodman (Council on Strategic Risks), Jamie Kwong (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), and Theo Kalionzes (Stimson Center) discussing what climate change means for nuclear security, covering topics like how climate change acts as a “threat multiplier,” what policymakers think of this issue, and what we can do to mitigate impacts from new threats in a world of increasingly complicated climate reality.
• In Iran Update: What Happens Now (May 2025 – 700 views), Bulletin President and CEO, Alexandra Bell hosted Kelsey Davenport (Arms Control Association), Richard Nephew (Columbia University), and Sina Toossi (Center for International Policy) who discussed the current status of US-Iran nuclear negotiations. Bell, Davenport, and Nephew returned in June for Experts React: Israel and Iran to discuss the implications of Israel’s targeting of Iran's nuclear facilities and military leadership, including Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel.
• Within days of the August 2025 meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the Bulletin offered Trump Meets with Putin: Experts React with Mariana Budjeryn (MIT), Rose Gottemoeller (former Deputy Secretary General of NATO and member of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors), Steven Pifer (former US Ambassador to Ukraine), and Alexandra Bell unpacking key takeaways from the summit. 

Finally, our Doomsday Clock Announcement provides a unique opportunity to engage high-profile scientists and political leaders with our reporting. The 2025 announcement, which moved the clock to 89 seconds to midnight, was joined by former President of Colombia and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Juan Manuel Santos, and the 2024 announcement was joined by famed science communicator Bill Nye. The 2025 announcement forced a conversation about catastrophic risk and options for reducing those risks. It was cited by world leaders ranging from UN Secretary General António Guterres to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and featured in the largest news outlets in the world. Finally, The New York Times, The Times, TIME, BBC, CBS, CNN, and others covered the 2025 announcement, which earned more than 8,500 mentions in other publications.

Amplifying Content to Expand Our Impact

In today’s highly competitive media environment, the Bulletin regularly adapts our approach to capture and keep the public’s attention and increase the reach of the Bulletin’s work. We monitor communication trends and invest in the people and technologies needed to expand our impact.

Our audience skyrocketed from 1.8M unique views in 2018 to 6.9M unique views in 2024. At the same time, our twice-weekly newsletter increased from 20,000 to more than 90,000 subscribers today. Throughout this explosive growth, we have maintained a coveted demographic: 42% of our audience is younger than 35, and our gender demographic has shifted from 25% to more than 30% female. Our social media presence has grown from 87,000 followers across three platforms in January 2020 to 270,000 followers across ten platforms.

Bulletin articles routinely reach or exceed 100,000 viewers, an industry benchmark, with 50% of our audience outside the United States. Bulletin authors and articles are regularly cited by influential news outlets such as Al Jazeera, America Latina en movimiento, The Atlantic, BBC, Bloomberg News, CNN, The Guardian, Hindustan Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, to name a select few. 

The Bulletin’s three-pronged approach of reporting on existential risks, programming to strengthen the community of experts, and amplifying both, has proven cost-efficient. Benchmarking research from SimilarWeb, the leading independent source for a comprehensive view of digital traffic, shows the Bulletin's audience far exceeds comparative media outlets, and does so on a much smaller budget. MIT Tech Review, for example, has approximately three times the Bulletin’s audience at eight times its budget. Mother Jones’ budget is nearly four times that of the Bulletin, but its audience is only slightly more than two times larger.

CONCLUSION

As we mark the 80^th year of the nuclear age, and of the Bulletin, we find ourselves at a reckoning point. There are questions about how we manage escalating existential threats that remain unanswered or ignored. With the comparative advantage of being a well-known and well-respected publication with strong connections to the existential risk community, we can provide our readers with pragmatic and scientifically supported responses to those questions.

Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation’s continued investment in the Bulletin will help to ensure that we can reach our audience with scientific fact-based reporting and engaging programs on nuclear risks, climate change and disruptive technologies. The Bulletin plays an essential role in making clear that the world faces many challenges, but none so great as the threat of annihilation.

Links to articles and programs:

•  Is mankind warming the Earth? (https://thebulletin.org/premium/2020-12/1978-is-mankind-warming-the-earth/)
• The fires of Hiroshima and Los Angeles: Apocalypse redux (https://thebulletin.org/2025/02/hiroshima-and-los-angeles-compared-apocalypse-redux/)
• A rising danger in the Arctic (https://thebulletin.org/2024/11/a-rising-danger-in-the-arctic-microbes-unleashed-by-climate-change/)
• The shrinking of the Greenland Ice Sheet can’t be stopped—but it can and must be slowed (https://thebulletin.org/premium/2025-03/the-shrinking-of-the-greenland-ice-sheet-cant-be-stopped-but-it-can-and-must-be-slowed/)
• Nuclear Notebook (https://thebulletin.org/nuclear-risk/nuclear-weapons/nuclear-notebook/)
• AI goes nuclear (https://thebulletin.org/2024/12/ai-goes-nuclear/)
• Beyond the Threshold: The Urgency of Climate Change (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M72Sfu4B0WI) 
• The Climate-Nuclear Nexus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzzJs3-vdFI)
• Iran Update: What Happens Now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E624BahiL3I)
• Experts React: Israel and Iran (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EkRUrG4nwk)
• Trump Meets with Putin: Experts React (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-Qih8V4Y4)
• Doomsday Clock Announcement (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/)