Collapse is near, scientists warn

The apocalypse of civilization is now closer than it has ever been in the whole of human history.

That’s the latest assessment of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. You know, the chaps who devised the Doomsday Clock, back in 1947, after inventing the atomic bomb and then realising, oops, we may just have signed humanity’s death warrant.

They have just reset the clock at 85 seconds to midnight – the closest to absolute catastrophe it has ever been, even compared with the fearful depths of the Cold War and its mad nuclear arsenals.

This time the reasoning is based on not only on an out-of-control nuclear arms race – but also on the mad behaviour of some of the world’s most powerful countries, galloping global heating, the emerging threat of crazy scientists creating deadly new plagues and the ungoverned use of disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, especially in the military sphere.

“Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic. Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers,” says Doomsday editor John Mecklin.

The trouble is that the latest assessment omits at least seven other global catastrophic threats which combine to place us a lot closer to midnight than the Chicago group have calculated. But first to what they are actually measuring in the human death-wish.

They noted an escalation in the threat of nuclear conflict between Europe and Russia, as well as Ukraine and Russia, and – with the withdrawal of the USA, the likely creation of a new European arsenal. The threat was also magnified between India and Pakistan as well as between Israel and Iran, while North Korea has traded its troops as Putin’s cannon-fodder in exchange for Russian nuclear weaponry. Meanwhile the anti-nuclear treaties have mostly fallen in a heap.

“In 2025, the world slipped closer to normalizing nuclear risks. There was an almost complete absence of communication on strategic stability among nuclear adversaries and no sustained pressure from non-nuclear weapons countries for engagement. Also worrying is a lack of leadership on nuclear issues, with no country stepping up to stem the growing sense of disorder and breakdown of norms,” the group reported.

On climate it found: “Record-breaking climate trends continued in 2024 and 2025. Globally averaged temperature in 2024 was at the warmest level in 175 years of record-keeping. Likewise, atmospheric carbon dioxide—the greenhouse gas most responsible for human-caused climate change—reached a new high of 152 percent of 1750 levels.”

The average time between major climatic disasters like floods, droughts and hurricanes has decreased from 80 days in the 1980s to just 12 days now. Quote that to those who say nothing has changed.

Meanwhile the Trump, Putin and Al Salman regimes, along with others, are doing everything they can to bake your kids as quickly as possible. Even if all the world’s carbon reduction schemes were implemented, the world is still going to +2.5 degrees this century, the Chicago group warns.

Their third major threat of a global wipeout is the recent warning that biotechnology and AI can now be combined to develop a plague capable of destroying not only humans, but most life on Earth along with them.

Dozens of scientists have now proposed creating “mirror life” from living disease organisms in the laboratory. These are organisms with an opposite chirality (molecular shape) to existing pathogens, which means that nobody (and maybe no animal) would have any immunity to them, since our immune system is adapted to molecules of a particular shape.

Scientists and policymakers recently agreed the threat of this happening is real – but there are no global means of controlling or preventing it from happening, especially by malicious actors, the Doomsday Clock authors warn.

The global fascination with Artificial Intelligence has led to a stampede to apply it in as many new uses as possible, before other countries can do so. And this is what is arming and driving the race to use AI to build ever-more dreadful nuclear and biological weapons systems.

At the same time “Increasing chaos, disorder, and dysfunction in the world’s information ecosystem threaten society’s capacity to address difficult challenges, and it is clear that AI has great potential to accelerate these processes of information corruption.”

In short, society will not know if anything is true any longer or not, and will soon lose all ability to make intelligent decisions. It will be reduced to the same informational state as the Dark Age following the fall of the Roman Empire.

Those are the chief factors that caused the Chicago Group to advance the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 85 second to midnight, the harshest warning it has ever uttered.

Despite that, they forgot to mention that:

- Every child on the planet is being poisoned and brain-damaged daily by the ever-growing flood of toxic chemistry released by global society, and hardly anything is being done to halt it.

- The world water crisis is growing worse by the day, and is being exacerbated by global heating. Worldwide, rivers are dying.

- There is an alarming decline in the health of the world’s oceans, due to human activity, while fisheries are collapsing everywhere.

- The world food supply is approaching collapse due to lack of water, loss of topsoil, universal use of poisons and climate change.

- Rates of extinction are accelerating universally with the collapse of ecosystems threatening the survival of humans also.

- Forests are still being felled at unsustainable rates.

- The human population is 8.3 billion and growing at +70 million people a year

- Human demand for resources is now nearly double what the Earth can supply sustainably.

- Seven of the Earth’s nine safety boundaries have now been breached.

If the scientists of the Chicago Group included these other catastrophic threats to humanity, they would probably push the hands of the Doomsday Clock far closer to midnight than in their latest appraisal, which covers only about one third of the major threats to human existence. They are looking at only a fraction of the problem.

The only way out for humanity of the hole we are digging for ourselves is to develop a binding world agreement, and an action plan, to abate all of the threats simultaneously. Not just one or two of them. All of them.

That agreement is the Earth System Treaty, proposed by the Council for the Human Future. Without it we are, quite simply, embracing the Doomsday foretold by the Clock. And sooner than the most informed expect.