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Perhaps there’s no great time talk about the end of days, but maybe those warm fuzzies left over from the holidays will take the chill off this intriguing story from LiveScience’s Tia Ghose.

One of Hollywood’s favorite themes is an apocalypse of one kind or another, and audiences can’t seem to get enough of a few lone humans battling against overwhelming odds, be they asteroids, zombies, snowpocalypses or a lethal virus run amok.

Here are nine ways scientists believe the worst could happen.

Global warming

The mother of all apocalyptic fears, climate change is the biggest threat facing the planet, many scientists say. Climate change could make extreme weather more severe, increase droughts in some areas, change the distribution of animals and diseases across the globe, and cause low-lying areas of the planet to be submerged in the wake of rising sea levels. The cascade of changes could lead to political instability, severe drought, famine, ecosystem collapse and other changes that make Earth a decidedly inhospitable place to live.

Asteroid

It’s the mainstay of disaster movies, but scientists are legitimately worried that a space rock could wipe out Earth. A meteor impact probably doomed the dinosaurs, and in the Tunguska event, a massive meteoroid damaged about 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of the Siberian forest in 1908. Even more frightening, perhaps, is that astronomers only know about a fraction of the space rocks lurking in the solar system.

Pandemic threat

New deadly pathogens crop up every year: Recent pandemics have included outbreaks of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), bird flu, and, most recently, a coronavirus called MERS that originated in Saudi Arabia. And because of our highly interconnected, global economy, a deadly disease could spread like wildfire.

“The threat of a global pandemic is very real,” said Joseph Miller, co-author (along with Ken Miller) of the textbook “Biology” (Prentice Hall, 2010).

Full story at LiveScience.

Doomsday science.

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