Lawrence E. Joseph

...author of several bestsellers; expert on 2012 Mayan prophecies and solar system physics

Over the past twenty five years, Lawrence E. Joseph has written on international science, nature, politics, business and culture for publications including The New York Times, Salon.com, and, currently, the Huffington Post.

Mr. Joseph is a futurist who has authored a number of books, most recently, APOCALYPSE 2012: An Investigation into Civilization’s End, (Broadway/Random House, 2007, plus twenty one foreign languages).  APOCALYPSE 2012 is a personal exploration of the strange coincidence that both ancient Mayan prophecy and contemporary solar physics indicate that the year 2012 will be uniquely pivotal, perhaps catastrophic.  His interest in 2012 began while serving as chairman of a New Mexico research firm that holds the global patent for an ultra-high temperature plasma furnace designed to disintegrate deadly chemical and nuclear wastes.  His research led him to work with scientists, shamans, and philosophers on five continents.  The book has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide.

Lawrence Joseph has since given more than 400 interviews, including CBS, ABC, NPR, Discovery, History, New York Times, Times of London, plus more than 100 foreign language media. Joseph’s websites, apocalypse2012.com and lawrenceejoseph.com, have garnered more than one million unique visitors and 25 million hits. His viral videos have amassed more than 4 million Internet plays.

Mr. Joseph’s latest book, AFTERMATH: A Guide to Preparing for and Surviving Apocalypse 2012, (Broadway/Random House, June, 2010), explores the scenarios that global civilization might face following the cataclysm and/or enlightenment predicted for 2012 or thereabouts.

His previous books include GAIA: The Growth of an Idea (St. Martin’s Press, 1990), which explores the Gaia Hypothesis, advanced by British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock and American microbiologist, Lynn Margulis.  The Gaia Hypothesis maintains that the global ecosystem adjusts and regulates itself more like a living organism than a geological machine, as traditional Earth science holds, with ramifications for fields ranging from biogeochemistry to spirituality.  He presented his findings at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and subsequently to several heads of state.

In COMMON SENSE: Why It’s No Longer Common (Addison-Wesley, 1994), Mr. Joseph examined the psychology, philosophy and folk wisdom of common sense, with lots of satire on the lack thereof.  He has since served as common sense consultant for organizations ranging from the American Society for Industrial Security to the United Nations Development Programme.

Lawrence Joseph also co-wrote two New York Times bestsellers: STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER: John Lennon Remembered (Ballantine, 1981) and AMERIKA: The Triumph of the American Spirit, (Simon & Schuster, 1987), a novelization of the ABC TV miniseries, on which he also served as creative editor.

For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists.  But that’s exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.

Good-bye, civilization.

Worse yet, the next period of intense solar activity is expected in 2012, and coincides with the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth’s geomagnetic shield.  But the report received relatively little attention, perhaps because of 2012's supernatural connotations.  Mayan astronomers supposedly predicted that 2012 would mark the calamitous birth of a new era."

Whether the Mayans were on to something, or this is all just a chilling coincidence, won’t be known for several years. But according to Lawrence Joseph, author of Apocalypse 2012: A  Scientific Investigation into Civilization, “I’ve been following this topic for almost five years, and it wasn’t until the report came out that this really began to freak me out."

Wired.com: Do you think it’s a coincidence that the Mayans predicted apocalypse on the exact date when astronomers say the sun will next reach a period of maximum turbulence?

Lawrence Joseph: I have enormous respect for Mayan astronomers.  It disinclines me to dismiss this as a coincidence.  But I  recommend people verify that the Mayans prophesied what people say they did. I went to Guatemala and spent a week with two Mayan shamans who spent 20 years talking to other shamans about the prophecies. They confirmed that the Maya do see 2012 as a great turning point. Not the end of the world, not the great off-switch in the sky, but the birth of the fifth age.

Wired.com: Isn’t a great off-switch in the sky exactly what’s described in the report?

Joseph: The chair of the NASA workshop was Dan Baker at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Some of his comments, and the comments he approved in the report, are very strong about the potential connection between coronal mass ejections and power grids here on Earth.  There’s a direct relationship between how technologically sophisticated a society is and how badly it could be hurt.  That’s the meta-message of the report.

I had the good fortune last week to meet with John Kappenman at MetaTech. He took me through a meticulous two-hour presentation about just how vulnerable the power grid is, and how it becomes more vulnerable as higher voltages are sent across it.  He sees it as a big antenna for space weather outbursts.

Kappenman also points out that when the transformers blow, they can’t be fixed in the field. They often can’t be fixed at all.  Right now there is a one to three-year lag time between placing an order and getting a new one.

According to Kappenman, there’s an as-yet-untested plan for inserting ground resistors into the power grid.  It makes the handling a little more complicated, but apparently isn’t anything the operators can’t handle.  I’m not sure he’d say these could be in place by 2012, as it is difficult to establish standards, and utilities are generally regulated on a state-by-state basis. You’d have quite a legal thicket.  But it still might be possible to get some measure of protection in by the next solar climax.

Wired.com: Why can’t we just shut down the grid when we see a storm coming, and start it up again afterwards?

Joseph: Power grid operators now rely on one satellite called ACE , which sits about a million miles out from Earth in what’s called the gravity well, the balancing point between sun and earth. It was designed to run for five years.  It’s 20 years old, is losing steam, and there are no plans to replace it.

ACE provides about 15 to 45 minutes of heads-up to power plant operators if  something is coming in.  They can shunt loads, or shut different parts of the grid.  But to just shut the grid off and restart it is a $10 billion proposition, and there is lots of resistance to doing so.  Many times these storms hit at the North Pole, and don’t move south far enough to hit us.  It’s a difficult call to make, and false alarms really piss people off.  Lots of money is lost and damage incurred.  But in Kappenman’s view, and in lots of others, this time burnt could really mean burnt.

Wired.com: Do you live your life differently now?

Joseph: I’ve been following this topic for almost five years.  It wasn’t until the report came out that it began to freak me out.

Up until this point, I firmly believed that the possibility of 2012 being catastrophic in some way was worth investigating.  The report made it a little too real. That document can’t be ignored. And it was even written before the THEMIS satellite discovered a gigantic hole in Earth’s magnetic shield.  Ten or twenty times more particles are coming through this crack than expected.  And astronomers predict that the way the sun’s polarity will flip in 2012 will make it point exactly the way we don’t want it to in terms of evading Earth’s magnetic field.  It’s an astonishingly bad set of coincidences.

Wired.com: If Barack Obama said, "Let’s prepare," and there weren’t any bureaucratic hurdles, could we still be ready in time?

Joseph: I believe so.  I’d ask the President to slipstream behind stimulus package funds already appropriated for smart grids, which are supposed to improve grid efficiency and help transfer high energies at peak times.  There’s a framework there. Working within that, you could carve out some money for the ground resistors program, if those tests work, and have the initial momentum for cutting through the red tape.  It’d be a place to start.

Wired.com: What’s the problem?

John Kappenman: We’ve got a big, interconnected grid that spans  across the country.  Over the years, higher and higher operating voltages have been added to it.  This has escalated our vulnerability to geomagnetic storms.  These are not a new thing.  They’ve probably been  occurring for as long as the sun has been around.  It’s just that we’ve been unknowingly building an infrastructure that’s acting more and more like an antenna for geomagnetic storms.

Wired.com: What do you mean by antenna?

Kappenman: Large currents circulate in the network, coming up from the earth through ground connections at large transformers.  We need these for safety reasons, but ground connections provide entry paths for charges that could disrupt the grid.

Wired.com:  What’s your solution?

Kappenman: What we’re proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive resistors in the transformers ground connections.  The addition of that little bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid.

Wired.com: What does it look like?

Kappenman: In its simplest form, it’s something that might be made out of cast iron or stainless steel, about the size of a washing machine.

Wired.com: How much would it cost?

Kappenman: We’re still at the conceptual design phase, but we think it’s do-able for $40,000 or less per resistor.  That’s less than what you pay for insurance for a transformer.

Wired.com: And less than what you willingly pay for insurance on civilization.

Kappenman: If you’re talking about the United States, there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for.  The Electromagnetic Pulse Commission  recommended it in a report they sent to Congress last year.  We’re talking about $150 million or so.  It’s pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

Big power lines and substations can withstand all the other known environmental challenges. The problem with geomagnetic storms is that we never really understood them as a vulnerability, and had a design code that took them into account.

Wired.com: Can it be done in time?

Kappenman: I’m not in the camp that’s certain a big storm will occur in 2012.  But given time, a big storm is certain to occur in the future.  They have in the past, and they will again.  They’re about one-in-400-year events. That doesn’t mean it will be 2012.  It’s just as likely that it could occur next week.

Reprinted with permission.

Several films (2012, Terminator Salvation, Zombieland) are predicting global catastrophe.  Why is cinema obsessed with the end?

The most remarkable thing about the doomsday disaster movie 2012 is not the eye-gouging special effects. Nor is it the casual depiction of the death of nearly six billion people. It’s not even the scene devoted to the cancelling of the London Olympics due to unforeseen Armageddon.  No, the truly unique thing about Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is that it is not unique at all. In fact, it positively struggles to find it’s own space in a movie marketplace that is crammed to bursting with apocalyptic product.

After witnessing the end of civilisation in movies such as Zombieland and Terminator Salvation, we will soon face the big screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic Pulitzer prizewinner, The Road, complete with deserted highways, cannibals and heart-breaking reflections on fatherhood. This will be followed closely by Denzel Washington playing a mysterious wanderer among a tiny band of, yes, post-apocalyptic survivors in The Book of Eli, and Dennis Quaid playing an honest man in the American Midwest during the onslaught of the biblical Armageddon in Legion.

Global warming documentaries too, such as The Age of Stupid, repeatedly show us a future in which the Earth is already ruined. Even children’s films such as the recent 9 and Wall-E, are not averse to the death of humanity as we know it. And it’s not just movies either. On television the forthcoming Day One, a high-profile American series in the Lost mould, will follow a group of American apartment dwellers who somehow survive a global cataclysm. Iconic touchstone video games such as the recently released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 play with apocalyptic imagery, such as the destruction of the White House in a burnt-out bullet-ridden Washington DC. In books, popular nonfiction prognostications such as The World Without Us, Our Final Century and The Coming Plague continue to ride into the bestseller list based on cogent scientific arguments about the end of life on Earth. In other words, when Danny Glover’s Obama-style President announces, midway through 2012, that the world as we know it will soon come to an end, he is essentially preaching to the converted.

There is definitely a lot in the collective consciousness right now about the end of the world, 2012 star Chiwetel Ejiofor says.  The fragility of the planet, the nature of global warming, the free access to nuclear weapons, financial and scientific responsibility--these are all part of our consciousness. So a movie like 2012, though entertaining and extraordinary in scope, allows us to discuss these things.

Admittedly, the level of discussion in 2012 is brief. In the film the Earth’s core overheats, resulting in a spectacularly cracking and melting crust and giant super-tsunamis. But, as Ejiofor suggests, it is the context that is all important and the idea that the movie is not being released to an unsuspecting public, but to a world already suffering from apocalyptic jitters.

For Joseph, the catastrophe that we all face in 2012 (or early 2013) is a giant solar blast that will fry electrical grids around the planet and plunge us into a world without electricity for up to three years. This, he warns, is not fanciful conjecture and is in fact all thoroughly documented by America’s National Academy of Sciences, which in December 2008 released a 152-page report highlighting the grave vulnerability of power grids in America and elsewhere to solar blasts, the largest modern example of which is due to strike near the end of 2012. No electricity doesn’t just mean no telecoms, he warns. It means no water, no fuel, no refrigeration, no basic law enforcement or functioning military.

So, will it be like being knocked back into the pre-electrical age?   “No. It will be much worse. Those people at least knew how to live without electricity. We certainly do not”.  He adds too that other scientifically validated threats to our stability include a giant NASA-observed tear in the Earth’s magnetic field (which usually protects us from solar blasts), and the possibility of an oceanic asteroid strike that would result in catastrophic floods around the globe. Poppycock, says the former Cambridge scholar Ole Peter Grell, the co-author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a book that examines the rise of apocalyptic obsessions in Reformation-era Europe. Grell claims that interest in Armageddon flourishes whenever the matrices that hold societies together begin to shift. “Apocalyptic obsessions are generally found in times of great break-ups”, Grell says.  At the moment you’ve got all sorts of reactions to global warming and the current financial breakdown. But when you look back, from medieval times through to the Reformation, when the general way of the world is no longer a given, the idea of the apocalypse becomes a tool to interpret a dramatically shifting world.

And certainly, a quick skim through movie history validates Grell’s thesis. For the previous high-water mark of doomsday movies was the 1950s, when films such as When Worlds Collide, War of the Worlds and On the Beach articulated the fears of a society gripped by an escalating Cold War. Similarly, late-1960s/early-1970s doomsday movies such as Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man reflect obvious social issues, the former, especially, is a blatant race relations analogy in which the white man gets a taste of his own medicine.  And yet, if we take this analysis to its logical conclusion, there is something worryingly different about the current crop of apocalyptic blockbusters. In recent years movies such as Terminator 2, Deep Impact and Independence Day were all about the possibility of staving off the end of days, whereas today’s movies take the death of humanity for granted.  Even 2012, the most buoyant movie in the pack, suggests that fewer than 400,000 people will survive the global cataclysm. 

In Terminator salvation, nuclear meltdown is simply a fated fact.  Life on Earth will end, and soon.  Joseph says that on the surface there seem to be numerous explanations for this new downbeat outlook, including the effects of globalisation, of environmental damage and the financial crisis. The latter, he says, has significantly scarred the American psyche. There was a failure with the financial crisis that was deeply unsettling for people. The fact that nobody not Harvard, not CNN, not the Government could see this coming really scared people and left them feeling exposed.

In other words, these apocalyptic movies, books and cultural artefacts represent a profound snapshot of who we are, right now, and a stinging critique of our fears and our flaws. But they are also, the film-maker John Hillcoat cautions, bloody annoying.  Hillcoat, who directed The Road, has meticulously avoided the busy CGI-laden of traditional doomsday movies precisely because it is distracting, unemotional and impossible to fathom.

Instead his film, taking its cue from McCarthy's source novel, never reveals the event that caused the global meltdown, and instead concentrates solely on the touching, binding relationship between a dying father (Viggo Mortensen) and his precious inquisitive son (Kodi Smit-Mcphee). “I have a problem with the whole apocalyptic genre”, Hillcoat says. “It is so much about the big event that there is rarely any real connection, emotionally, to the people in it. When you concentrate on the event, your personal response to the people is greatly diminished”.

And this is the point. Perhaps the Achilles heel of all apocalypse obsessions is that they force us outwards intellectually and emotionally, away from ourselves and human intimacy, and into the arms of abstract ideas and fears. And indeed there isn't a single moment of emotional honesty in 2012 to counterbalance the movie's 158 minutes of visually decorative wham-bam. Joseph argues, convincingly, that we should kit ourselves out with enough solar panels and wind-turbines to survive completely off the grid come the big solar flare of 2012. But in the meantime, clearly, we should do nothing less than ignore the frenzy, enjoy the Olympics, and take our movies, like our popcorn, with a pinch of salt.

Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.

On Christmas Eve, 2009, the startling hypothesis that our Solar System, the Sun and all its planets, is moving into a potentially dangerous and destabilizing interstellar energy cloud, was resoundingly sustained.  In their research paper, “A strong, highly-tilted interstellar magnetic field near the Solar System,” published the December 24, 2009 issue of Nature, a highly respected scientific journal, M. Opher et al report on data transmitted from Voyager, the twin spacecraft that have been exploring the outer reaches of the Solar System since 1977.

“We have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system. This magnetic field holds the interstellar energy cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all,” says Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University.  He explains that this energy cloud is at least twice as strong as had previously been predicted and that the Solar System has begun to pass into it, adding that this field “is turbulent or has a distortion in the solar vicinity.”

The Nature article does not examine the earthly ramifications of moving into the energy cloud beyond suggesting that we could face an increase in cosmic rays, which could affect everything from space travel to rainfall.  But the prescient Dmitriev, who has been publishing on the subject for the past fifteen years, observes that passage into this interstellar cloud has already begun to perturb the Sun, causing solar outbursts that are leading to hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes of unprecedented ferocity here on Earth.  He is on record as predicting that we will face global catastrophe in “not tens but ones of years.”  When pressed, Dmitriev guesstimates that the Solar System will remain within this turbulent energy cloud for something on the order of three millennia.

Apocalypse 2012 also reported extensively on evidence that the Earth’s protective magnetic shield is showing signs of realignment and deterioration, a hypothesis emphatically validated in December, 2008.  THEMIS, a squadron of five NASA research satellites, unexpectedly flew through a giant, pole-to-equator breach in our planet’s magnetic field.  The astrophysicists attached to the THEMIS project were utterly astonished by the e data, with David Sibeck, the project leader, going so far as to declare that “it was as though the Sun rose in the west.”  The shields are down, Scotty, and the Sun is going to begin pummeling us big time in late 2012 or early 2013.

Back to:
Authors
Outer Space
2012
Science