It’s 2017 and vampires, werewolves and witches are no longer that Scary. Been there, done that.

Here are some things that should really frighten the bejeezus out of us this year.

This from news that insect abundance has fallen by 75% over the last 27 years.

Whether its icecaps, or sea-ice or Huge shelves of ice ripping free from Antarctica, it’s all a depressing picture.

The top two pictures are related – improper use of Antibiotics over the past few decades has created new bugs that are resistant to almost all known bacterial killers. At the same time, new antibiotics have failed to keep pace. The world is finally waking up to this huge crisis.

One hundred years ago, a flu pandemic killed between 50 million and 100 million people in a period of months. Smaller pandemics have happened since, but it is a matter of time before a virus of similar lethality makes it’s comeback.

And it’s not only a damaging flu that could make its presence felt. Old diseases like measles and whooping cough are coming back too, due to different pressure groups who believe, despite decades of medical evidence, that vaccines don’t work and are harmful. Some kids depend on the rest of us to be vaccinated in order to be protected against these diseases.

Kind of a hard one to draw, but there is increasing evidence that our oceans are becoming more acidic. This is having detrimental impacts on shellfish and other ocean organisms, which then propagates up the food chain.

We thought that common sense had finally prevailed against the use of nuclear weapons as an option in international politics. We thought wrong.

The rise (and seeming acceptance) of extremist hate groups is particularly worrying, given that the world has been there before and the consequences were so disastrous. Both media and politicians have been stoking up this hatred for quite a while.

For us on this side of the pond, we’re still waiting to understand how Britain will prosper from a withdrawal from the EU – particularly if, as expected, there is no deal. Pro-Leavers are great on rhetoric, but thin on the details of how Britain is expected to thrive economically when leaving a successful partnership that gave us 70 years of peace in Europe. The only thing we have seen so far is an increase in xenophobia and companies deciding to move out.

And finally, the biggest ongoing threat to all our lives and livelihoods – the ongoing destruction of democracy and democratic values by politicians on the make.

Now these, to me, are scary as hell.