World's End 2012

Let me paint a little scenario for you…

Let’s say you have no cash in your bank account, and you’re maxed out on all your credit cards.  You’re not getting as much work as you used to any more because the guy across the street does what you used to do cheaper, smarter and better.

You now owe more than a year’s salary to the credit card companies, and they’re about to put their interest rates up.

Do you…

1. Go and get another credit card and keep spending?
2. Cut back on spending so that you don’t have to borrow any more?
3. Cut back even more so that you can start paying off those cards?
4. Start paying for stuff with checks you know are going to bounce?

If you answered (1), then you have an assured career in politics because it seems like that’s the answer you’re going to need.

And this is the problem facing most western economies today.  We spend way more than we earn, and sooner or later, the banks are going to figure out we owe them far more than we can pay back.

The problem, mostly, is that in the west, we just don’t make stuff any more.  We decided to hand the world’s manufacturing capability over to China and turn our nations into “service economies”.

What’s this got to do with 2012?

Well unless you’ve been out on a desert trek for the last couple of months, you’ll have noticed that country after country can’t pay its bills any more, and all teh while, China sits on a pile of cash measured in trillions of dollars.

By next year, 2012, the problem will be exponentially worse, and the ability of those countries that are broke to maintain law and order will be severely compromised.

It’s like I keep saying… disconnect from the grid, stock up that cellar, arm yourself and get ready to bunker down.  We might be in for a rough ride.

I should mention that solar storms aren’t the only dangers facing us over the next few years.

The Northern Hemisphere might have had a taste of one of the others this winter.  Record snowfalls and low temperatures have been recorded right across northern North America, Europe and Asia and there are a number of scientists who think this is just a glimpse of what’s to come.

Before I get into all that, I want to set you straight about Global Warming.  We didn’t do it, or at least, our contribution to what they now call “climate change” is far less than the global warming doomsayers would have you believe.  The earth’s climate changes.  It always has.  It always will.  And sometimes, the change is very rapid indeed.  It’s not the end of the world. 

While there’s no consensus, there’s compelling evidence that rapid changes in climate have been occuring on this planet every 600,000 years or so.  It’s to do with the earth’s orbital path around the sun, which isn’t, as most people imagine, a perfect circle.  In fact, we wobble around like a drunken sailor, sometimes getting a little closer to the sun (the climate warms up) and sometimes straying a little further away (it cools down). 

I read a paper a few years ago… and I apologise, I didn’t save the link so I can’t send you to it, or even tell you who wrote it… that suggested that the pattern we’ve been through over the last hundred years corresponds to the pattern seen on earth at the start of the last great ice age.  Remember, the world experienced rapid warming in the 1930s and despite what the global warming zealots try to tell you, the 30′s is still the warmest decade on record. Then, in 1941, the earth experienced rapid cooling, and our climate continued to grow colder intil the mid 70′s.  I’m old enough to remember dire predictions back then that we were entering a new ice age.  In about 1975, the climate started getting warmer again and continued to do so until about 2000.  Since then, again, contrary to what the alarmists have been telling you, it’s been fairly stable but the last two northern winters have been very cold indeed.

The prediction is a catastrophic one.  If the pattern follows the pattern estimated to have occurred before the last great ice age, soon the Northern Hemisphere will go into a winter and not come out.  It will just keep snowing.

And THAT would be the end of the world as we know it because the food bowls of the American prairies and the Russian Steppes will be out of our food growing equation.

With food shortages will come civil unrest.  Millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions will die of starvation and the world’s great stabilising powers (that is, the countries with all the biggest weapons and the technology to deploy them) will cease to exist in any meaningful form. 

Yes.  This is speculation, and there are plenty of people around who don’t buy the whole “ice age is coming” theory.  Then again, even the global warming alarmists tell us that melting ice sheets and changes in salinity could interrupt the North Atlantic current plunging us into a new ice age (remember the disaster film “Day After Tomorrow?).

Now you have two things to get prepared for.

Is the world really going to end in 2012?

On the face of it, that might seem like a dumb question, or perhaps it’s just the wrong question because what the doomsayers are really talking about is the end of the world as we know it, sometimes referred to by its acronym, TEOTWAWKI.

So, let’s get something absolutely clear from the start… the world will NOT end on December 21, 2012.  OK?  All clear on that?  Whatever happens, short of our sun going supernova (not predicted for another 7 billion years or so), the world will continue revolving on its axis and orbiting the sun at 30km a second for a very long time.

However, something’s afoot, something big enough that, in the worst case scenario, could, according to the US National Academy of Sciences, “shut down the US economy for ten years”.

I want you to think about that.  The National Academy of Sciences is probably the most highly respected scientific body in America.  In a report it presented to the US Congress in 2008, a special committee warned that the US economy could be shut down for ten years in the face of just one of the possible natural phenomena that may be coming our way.  You can read that report HERE .  And that’s just one of the several natural challenges the human race might be facing in the next year or two.

Ok.  I’m being overly dramatic, but let me start at the beginning and explain where all the talk of the world ending in 2012 comes from.

In 1790 a huge stone calendar of Aztec origin was unearthed in Mexico City.  It’s properly called the Cuauhxicalli Eagle Bowl and it was created in 1479.  Some scholars say it predicts “the end of the world” on December 24, 2011.

The Mayan Calendar, on which the Eagle Bowl was based, makes a slightly different prediction, setting a date for “the end of the world” on December 21, 2012.  That’s the date you might have read about, the one the media hype and histeria revolves around.

And finally, the Chinese I-Ching Calendar is also said to predict the end on December 21, 2012.

I should mention, in case you think it’s too much of a conincidence that two civilisations with no connection could have picked the same date, that this date happens to be the Winter Solstice, and both the Chinese and the Mayans were exceptional astronomers.  Superstitiously, if you’re an ancient astronomer and you’re going to pick a day, that’s the one you’ll pick.

However, as with all good doomsday predictions, there’s some slither of truth buried in there.

Overlaying these ancient calendars is a predictable astronomical phenomenon, the 11 year cycle of the sun.  THAT’s what the National Academy was talking about.

You see, we’re coming into Solar Storm season.  It’s just started and it will reach its climax in… yes… you guessed it, December 2012.  Solar storms, or solar flares can bombard the earth with trillions of watts of charged particles.  Depending of the orientation of these storms to our margentic field, they have the potential to do some serious damage to key infrastructire, and especially the power grid.  Indeed, just this week, communication systems in some parts of China were taken down by solar storm activity.

We learned about the power of these storms to disrupt our lives way back in 1859 when a super storm caused widespread damage to telegraph stations.  Indeed, if it hadn’t been for those stations, we probably wouldn’t have even known the earth was being bombarded because they were about the only pieces of electrical infrastructure around at the time.  Today’s world is a very different place.

The last time there was major disruption was in Quebec in 1989 when a solar storm plunged that state into darkness for more than 9 hours.  How?  Well that massive electrical charge has the potential to induce a current in copper coils.  In Quebec, the current tripped circuit breakers but parts of the network were still damaged.  And this is by no means an anomylous event.

In March 1940 a solar storm caused widespread blackouts in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Quebec and Ontario.  Another storm in February 1958 caused a power transformer failure at the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority and in August 1972, a power station in Watertown, South Dakota experienced 25,000 volt fluctuations. Similar voltage swings were reported by Wisconsin Power and Light, Madison Gas and Electric, and Wisconsin Public Service Corporation.  A 230,000-volt transformer at the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority exploded, and Manitoba Hydro in Canada recorded power drops from 164 to 44 megawatts in a matter of a few minutes, in the power it was supplying to Minnesota.

“So,” you’re thinking, “there might be blackouts in 2012.”  Big deal, right?  Wrong.  It’s a very big deal because this solar storm season is predicted to be severe and transformers like the one that exploded in Canada in 1972 can’t be replaced overnight.  And there are thousands of them across the network.

It might take months, or even, as the National Academy wanred, years, to get the power grid back up.

Now imagine what life in our cities would be like without power for a couple of months.  No water… it’s pumped by electric pumps.  No sewage either… it’s also pumped electrically.  No refrigeration, and that means no fresh food.  No electric lights, so the night time might actually be dark again.  No traffic lights.  No gasoline pumps.  No subways.  No major underground tunnel networks (they’ll all flood because there won’t be pumps to keep them dry).  No telephones, cellular or otherwise.  No internet.  In fact, nothing that our modern cities are built around will work.

The world’s experienced something a little like that before.  When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 537AD, victory was achieved simply by cutting the aquaducts that fed water to the city.  The population dropped from more than a million to less than ten thousand overight. 

Ok.  So there are some big “ifs” here.  For a solar storm to severely disrupt things here on earth, a solar eruption from the sun has to be facing the earth in the first place.  It also has to be aligned with our magnetic field.  If it’s inverse, the energy is simply dissipated at the poles.  And it has to be huge.

If we get all three (and we’ve had all three before), then there’s some trouble coming and you’d better be prepared.