Doomsday Clock Stays At Three Minutes To The Apocalypse For Second Year Running

Nuclear war, climate change and a few other cheery potential disasters mean that the Doomsday Clock is staying at three minutes to midnight for a second year running.

That means that scientists and experts agree that we are teetering on the brink of apocalypse, which symbolically occurs at midnight exactly.

The clock was created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947. Three minutes to is the closest the clock has come to midnight since the height of the Cold War in 1984.

“The decision not to move the hands of the clock in 2016 is not good news,” said Lawrence Krauss, who chairs the Bulletin’s board of sponsors.

That’s because you’d think that two years of diplomatic progress like the Paris climate change agreement would have set the minute hand back a bit.

However, the scientists still consider nuclear war, climate change, cyberwarfare and threats posed by IS to be too serious to warrant any positive change.

“We have a world awash in change. There is nowhere you can look and say it’s a world of stable prosperity,” former US cabinet secretary George Shultz said in a webcast from Stanford University.

“It’s a terrible mess.”