By Denise Chow and Minyvonne Burke

Humanity is just two minutes from Armageddon, the same as last year but still the closest the world has inched to symbolic doom since 1953, at the height of the Cold War.

That was the bleak outlook from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Doomsday Clock — the symbolic timepiece that represents humanity’s perceived proximity to a human-caused apocalypse.

Citing nuclear arms races, threats of cyberattacks and ongoing climate change, the clock’s minute hand was not moved from 2018, the organization announced Thursday morning, saying we are living in a time with multiple existential threats.

“We are calling this the new abnormal, a disturbing reality in which things are not getting better,” Robert Rosner, a theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago and chair of the Bulletin’s science and security board, said at a news conference. “We appear to be normalizing a world in which the risks of nuclear warfare and climate change, unchallenged, are ever more present and are not being effectively dealt with.”

Continue reading at NBC News…

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Areas of Focus: Climate Change
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Climate Change
Climate change is an urgent global challenge. EPIC research is helping to assess its impacts, quantify its costs, and identify an efficient set of policies to reduce emissions and adapt...
Environment
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Environment
Producing and using energy damages people’s health and the environment. EPIC research is quantifying the social costs of energy choices and uncovering policies that help protect health while facilitating growth.