11:57: 'Doomsday Clock' ticks two minutes closer to end times

Regardless of where on Earth you are, it's 11:57 p.m. right now — and this is one countdown to midnight that doesn't end with confetti and champagne.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced Thursday that its Doomsday Clock — a symbol of how close humans are to global disaster — edged two minutes closer to midnight.

The Doomsday Clock began in 1947 as a gauge of the risk of nuclear annihilation, and fresh worries about efforts to curb U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals weighed on the panel of experts convened to "move" the clock's hands. But this year's creep towards catastrophe is also due in part to climate change concerns: "Insufficient action to slash worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases can produce global climatic catastrophe," the Bulletin noted.

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The Doomsday Clock has been this close to midnight before, in 1949 and 1984. Only one other time was the clock even closer to midnight: In 1953, when the Soviet Union was beginning to develop a hydrogen bomb, the clock settled at 11:58 p.m.