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Date Posted: 17:23:43 05/08/07 Tue
Author: Lynx
Subject: Books of Doom, Part 2

Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End, by Lawrence Joseph, Morgan Road Books, $23.95

When I saw this one among the new selections at B&N, I was intrigued by the fact that Lawrence Joseph, an actual mainstream science writer who has written for NY Times and many other mainstream publications, would take on a subject generally associated with far-fringe woo-wooism. I couldn't resist. One of my new passions is observing the sociological aspects of the approaching 12/21/2012 date, and I was surprised and pleased to see a book on the scientific odds on doomsday written by a sane person. I was ultimately informed, amused, and entertained by Joseph's offering, but left somewhat less sure of his sanity.

For the uninitiated, the ancient Mayan longcount calendar comes to an end at 11:11 GMT on 12/21/2012. To the Mayans, this means that at that time we will come to the end of the fourth world, and the beginning of the fifth, a transformation that will be accompanied, as all transformations are, by blood, turmoil, and chaos, from which the earth, and what's left of humanity, will emerge transformed; in other words, the end of the world as we know it. This would be somewhat less disturbing had not the Mayan calendar been quite deadly accurate to this point. For people who didn't even have the wheel, the Mayans had a undisputed understanding of cosmology that still informs scientists to this day.

Joseph examines the likelihood of such an event from the scientific perspective, as well as touching on political and religious aspects. The following points are among those addressed in detail.

1. Since the 1940s, and especially since about 2003, our Mr. Sun has been behaving badly. The 11-year solar cycle has become increasingly tumultuous. For instance, in 2005, a solar minimum year, an unprecedented radiation storm occurred that played havoc not only with earthly communications systems, but with everything affected by the manipulation of earth's atmosphere. If such a thing could occur in a solar minimum year, Joseph wonders what might be in store for us at solar maximum, which is next predicted to peak in 2012, and he reminds us that we could all be fried at any instant. Have a nice day!

2. The earth's magnetic field has begun to dwindle, with enormous cracks developing in it. Many scientists concur that this indicates that we are in the beginning stages of the next pole shift, a catastrophic event in which the earth's crust entirely reconfigures itself. In the past, scientists believed that pole shifts were quite gradual and postulated that they occurred over a period of thousands of years. However, in recent years a growing number of scientists have come to believe that pole shifts happen quite rapidly.

3. Some geophysicists say that the earth has entered an interstellar energy cloud. They believe that this influx of energy is destabilizing the sun and all of the planets' atmospheres, and their predictions for earthly catastrophe resulting from this are in the 2010-2020 range.

4. Physicists at UC Berkeley maintain with 99% certainty that we are overdue for a cosmic megacatastrophe, such as the one that sent the dinosaurs to heaven.

5. That pesky Yellowstone supervolcano is threatening to blow up bigtime, creating a nuclear winter that would ultimately extinguish an estimated 90% of life on earth.
I have to make a personal aside here, having followed the Yellowstone situation for a number of years. When Yellowstone began behaving extremely badly, circa 2001-2003, I was involved in an online forum that discussed the situation. We had contacts in the Yellowstone area who informed us that the government was hurriedly moving heavy equipment out of the park area. At the time, I postulated that Tom Ridge's plastic-and-duct-tape recommendations had a lot more to do with keeping ash out of our homes than with the threat of bioterrorism, and I was roundly ridiculed for such a notion. Then, in 2005, a former Interior Dept. official said in an interview that the government, in 2003, had indeed believed that a Yellowstone eruption was imminent, and that the plastic-and-duct-tape recommendation related directly to that situation. Score one for the Lynx. End of digression.

6. Christians, Muslims, and Jews have latched onto the Mayans' 2012 date in recent years, and the more extreme elements of those faiths are working diligently to precipitate the end-times battle of Armageddon.

Aside from all of the solid scientific evidence Joseph presents, he adds some strange autobiographical elements to the mix, and reveals his own personal meltdown that was happening during the research of this book. After presenting this research in a very entertaining way, he gives us a final chapter that had me wondering if he had not descended into batshit craziness. He has some pretty strange conclusions about what we should do in regards to these potential catastrophes, including funding fusion research, praying, preparing our minds against mass psychological collapse, heading for the hills (he pegs Berea, KY, as the safest spot), and destroying VW Phaetons. LOL!

This book was quite a ride. I enjoyed it.

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