The Giordano Bruno GlobalShift University is the first online university to make high-quality fully accredited university education accessible to young people in all parts of the world. It held its Founding Congress at the Budapest Historical Museum in the Royal Castle of Hungary on the 9^th of September 2011 and will open for enrollment on the five continents as of 2012.

The open letter to the young people and the Covenant adopted by the University indicate the University’s commitment to young people, and its resolution to offer a program of education that empowers them to be self-reliant and productive members of society, as well as effective architects of a world that is sustainable and peaceful, and free of the barriers and subordination that often constrain the lives and the opportunities of young people today.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE WORLD

You, the young people of the world, are the movers and shakers, the music makers—the most privileged people who ever walked the Earth. For the first time in history, one generation—your generation—holds the key to the greatest challenge our species has faced since it proudly named itself homo sapiens. This is the challenge of change—of profound, timely, and conscious change.

Privilege entails responsibility. You have the privilege to meet the challenge of timely and conscious change, but you also have the responsibility that goes with the privilege: the responsibility of taking an active part in promoting this change.

To live up to this responsibility you need to understand the nature of the problem and its possible solution. Why do we, the human family, face the challenge of change? And what can you, your generation, do about meeting the challenge? There is a straightforward answer to both these questions.

We face the challenge of profound and timely change because the world your fathers and forefathers have created is not sustainable. “Unsustainable” means that if the world doesn’t change, it will break down. It cannot keep going as it is.

Take a look around you. Summers are getting hotter, winters milder, storms more violent, the extremes more pronounced, the variations more unpredictable. A little less cold could be a good thing in many climes, except that global warming also means that less rain is falling on productive lands; that forests are dying; that water-tables are dropping, and that, because ice is constantly melting into the Arctic and Antarctic oceans, sea levels are rising the world over.

How long before thousands of millions will be pressed below the level of bare subsistence? Before hundreds of millions will be driven from their homelands by hurricanes and floods? Before whole cities and entire islands will be submerged?

Global warming and the resulting climate change are just one of several “unsustainabilities” in today’s world. Urban overcrowding, the breakdown of the health of vast populations, violence born of intolerance, and war waged to secure short-term economic interests are among the many threats to life and wellbeing on this planet. We of the older generations have impaired the vital balances of nature; balances that are needed to sustain your life, and the life of myriad other species. Now you, the younger generation, must correct our errors and repair the damage.

We are now seven billion humans on the planet. How many of us will survive the next ten years? The next five years, or the next three? And if some of us go under, how will the rest manage, given our interdependence and our proneness to resort to violence to assure our short-term interests? If the world continues its downhill slide, and if the mindset of the rich and powerful doesn’t change while there is time, there will be a holocaust from which no one will emerge unscathed.

The answer to the question of why we must have timely and profound change in the world should be clear. We either change, or we go under.

But what can you, today’s young generation, do to create the required change?

The answer to this question is straightforward as well. You need to take to heart two wise sayings, by two of the wisest people who ever lived on this planet. Albert Einstein said, you can’t solve a problem with the kind of consciousness that gave rise to the problem. And Mahatma Gandhi said, be the change you want to see in the world.

Take Einstein’s insight first. You need to develop a new consciousness, adopt new thinking. This means not just acquiring more data, more information, mere additions to the current kinds of knowledge. It means new knowledge, a new way of thinking. Some call it a new paradigm.

The new paradigm is in active development. It is variously called the holistic paradigm, the integral mode of thinking, or the systemic view of the world. Its main and decisive feature is that it doesn’t fragment the world in order to understand it. It doesn’t reduce the diversity we experience to one or two factors for the convenience of analyzing it. The “analytic approach” can provide sound technical knowledge, but not true understanding. It’s the knowledge of the specialist, who knows more and more about less and less. Specialized knowledge, the knowledge of the technician, while good for specific applications, fails when it comes to coping with the whole in which that application occurs. It cures the illness, but loses the patient.

The knowledge of mainstream society is fragmented, and it’s not only fundamentally incomplete, it’s fundamentally misleading. Things in the world are not separate, independent of one another. As cutting edge scientists now realize, all things in nature are connected; and in the final count all things are what they are because of and through their connections.

Sound knowledge takes into account the connections. It perceives the forest and not only the trees. Trees are an organic part of the forest, and you cannot truly know a single tree in the absence of having an idea of the forest in which that tree is growing.

We live in an organic world, and our knowledge must be organic: whole and integral. Such knowledge is available. It’s the knowledge you need to live up to the challenge of changing the world, of consciously changing today’s unsustainable, moribund world into a sustainable and viable world. The Giordano Bruno GlobalShift University is committed to gathering such knowledge, to bringing together the people who develop it and who can effectively deliver it.

Consider now Gandhi’s advice. Why is it important to “be” the change you want to see in the world? Is changing yourself the way to consciously change the world around you?

The answer is that it is indeed. In a critically unstable system even small “fluctuations” can provoke major transformations. You have heard of the “butterfly effect.” The popular story is that when a monarch butterfly flaps its wings in Southern California a storm develops in Outer Mongolia. The tiny air current created by the butterfly grows and grows, until it changes the pattern of weather on the other side of the globe. This is entirely possible, although the actual origin of the term is different. It refers to the shape of the “chaotic attractor” that meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered in the 1960s when he tried to model the world’s weather. This attractor, a mathematically generated modeling device, has two “wings” where each wing models one path in the evolution of the world’s weather. Lorenz found that even tiny alterations in the factors that influence the weather can make for a sudden, and initially unpredictable, shift from one of the wings of the “butterfly” to the other—from one global weather-pattern to another.

The fact is that a chaotic system—and the world’s weather is such a system—is supersensitive and inherently unpredictable. But not only the world’s weather is chaotic: so is the world’s economy, the world’s financial system, and the world’s natural environment. All these systems have now been pushed to the edge of chaos, and as a result they have all become supersensitive. Butterfly effects are coming about in them.

You, the young generation of our chaotic times, are precisely positioned to be the butterfly that creates the crucial effect. You were born at exactly the right time: at the time when the world around you is becoming open to change.

It’s hardly possible to create real change in a stable society: it has powerful defenses against it. There is a simple reason for this: those who hold the reins of power fear change—it may divest them of their privileges. Whether they are politicians, business leaders, or ecclesiastical, educational, or social authorities, the powerful, unless they are exceptionally open and wise, do everything in their power to maintain the status quo. They try to “excommunicate” those who want change— not literally, as the Church did in the Middle Ages, but by modern means: by ignoring the agents of change, and if ignoring them is not feasible, then by discrediting, ridiculing, and isolating them.

This is not an insurmountable problem for you, today’s young generation. The dominant forces in the world still resist change, but they no longer have the power to resist it effectively. Contemporary societies are no longer stable; they suffer from multiple crises—economic, financial, and ecological, even social and cultural crises. They are approaching a condition of chaos, and in a condition of chaos new thinking can spawn new behavior and lead to effective innovation. Even small groups and seemingly minor initiatives can catalyze major change.

There was chaos in the human world in the past as well, but it was local, and the opportunity to change was likewise local. Today’s chaos is global, and the opportunity it brings is also global. Failing to seize it would be not just the height of stupidity: it would be a crime against humanity.

The bottom line is this. The world needs timely and effective change: a global shift. Your generation is uniquely positioned to bring about that shift. The Giordano Bruno GlobalShift University is committed to make available to you the new-paradigm thinking you need to evolve your consciousness, develop new thinking—and change yourself so you can change the world.

The Giordano Bruno GlobalShift University’s COVENANT WITH THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE WORLD

Whereas

The world we and our fathers and forefathers before us have created is no longer sustainable; it either breaks down in chaos and anarchy or breaks through to a more sustainable, equitable and peaceful world;

Whereas

The choice between breakdown and breakthrough is yet to be decided, and it is likely to be decided ultimately by the young people who are now reaching maturity and will soon be entering positions of responsibility in society;

Whereas

It is the task of higher education to bring relevant information and knowledge to young people, and relevant information and knowledge embraces today the information and the knowledge on the basis of which young people—and people who are young in spirit, whether young or old—can evolve the wisdom and the determination to become conscious and responsible architects of a new world;

and Whereas

The Giordano Bruno GlobalShift University, being a global online university aspiring to reach young people and people young in spirit the world over, is in a unique position to provide the information and the knowledge on the basis of which people can develop the wisdom and the determination to become conscious architects of a more sustainable, equitable, and peaceful world.

The Giordano Bruno GlobalShift University now resolves to enter into this covenant with the young people of the world

To do its utmost to provide the scientific and humanistic concepts and insights that can empower young people and people young in spirit to evolve the new thinking and the new consciousness Einstein said is needed to solve the significant problems of our time, so that they may become conscious and dedicated architects of a sustainable, equitable and peaceful world, as well as responsible and productive members of their family, their community, and the community of all life on Earth.

In the fulfillment of this Covenant, The Giordano Bruno Globalshift University resolves to

challenge and put on trial the doctrines, the structures and the institutions that create artificial barriers between peoples, nations and cultures, and subordinate the great majority of the people to the economic, political and doctrinaire interests of a political, economic, or cultural minority, just as the ecclesiastical authorities and institutions of the late 16^th Century had put on trial Giordano Bruno for refusing to subordinate his insights and his convictions to their authority.

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The University pledges to implement this Covenant with the Young People of the World in all its educational offerings, including its degree and continuing education programs, and the seminars and symposia associated with them.

Einstein said that we can’t solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that gave rise to the problem. His insight applies also to the domain of consciousness: we can’t solve the problems of our time with the same kind of consciousness that created them. We live in global times, yet most of us have a tribal kind of consciousness – it’s me or you, my group or yours, and whoever isn’t with us is against us. The continuation of tribal consciousness is nothing less than a recipe for disaster in a world of nuclear weapons, environmental devastation, increasing population and dwindling resources.

There can be no doubt: if we’re going to live sustainably and in peace with each other, we must all shift from a tribal to a planetary consciousness.

But just what is planetary consciousness? Here is how we defined it in the Manifesto on Planetary Consciousness that I drafted with the Dalai Lama and other luminaries of the Club of Budapest in 1996:

“Planetary consciousness is knowing as well as feeling the vital interdependence and essential oneness of humankind, and the conscious adoption of the ethic and the ethos that this entails.”

It was our conclusion at that time that the evolution of planetary consciousness was the foundational imperative for the survival of the human species. I remain more convinced than ever that this is the case.

But what do you think? Assuming you agree that we must evolve beyond tribalism if we are to survive, would you consider yourself to have planetary consciousness? Here are ten questions that I believe, if answered honestly, will tell you whether you do.

Do you –

1. Satisfy your basic needs without diminishing other people’s chances of satisfying theirs?

2. Pursue your own happiness with due regard for the similar pursuit of others?

3. Respect the right to economic development for all people, wherever they live and whatever their ethnic origin or belief system?

4. Live in a way that respects the integrity of nature around you?

5. Work with like-minded people to safeguard and restore your local environment?

6. Require your government to relate to other nations peacefully and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing the legitimate aspirations of all the members of the international community?

7. Buy from companies that accept responsibility for stakeholders at all levels of the supply chain?

8. Consume media that provides unbiased information relevant to you and your community?

9. Do something to help at least one other person escape the hopeless struggles and abject humiliations of extreme poverty?

10. Believe all young people are entitled to the education they need to be productive members of their community?

Answering these ten questions with an honest yes doesn’t call for money or power. It calls for dedication and solidarity, for the spirit that creates true community, both locally and globally.

The evolution of planetary consciousness is without question an imperative for human survival on our planet. In its absence it’s difficult to see how all seven billion of us will be able to live in peace—or even just survive. To paraphrase Gandhi, “Live consciously, so that all of us may live.”

In the first post of this series I promised to explore the wider implications of our having a quantum computer in our head. What does this revolutionary understanding of the capacities of the human brain mean for our life and our future?

Here I call “quantum consciousness” the consciousness we access when we use the potentials of our quantum-computer brain. Our brain is a macroscopic quantum system, yet we use it as if it were exclusively a classical biochemical system. With its quantum-system functions, our brain can receive information not only from our eyes and ears, but directly from the wider world with which we are “entangled”—nonlocally connected. Insightful people throughout history, whether shamans or scientists, poets or prophets, have extensively used this capacity, innate to all human beings. Today it is widely neglected. This impoverishes our world picture, and causes a nagging sense that we are separate from the world around us.

I believe that quantum consciousness could be the next stage in the evolution of our consciousness—and that this evolution could be our salvation. Let me explain.

The first thing I ask you to note is that human consciousness is not static, fixed once and for all. It’s the product of a long evolutionary development, and is capable of further development. In the thirty- or fifty-thousand-year history of the species we proudly call homo sapiens the human body didn’t change significantly, but human consciousness did. And it can change again.

In a variety of “alternative cultures” a new consciousness is already emerging. The members of these cultures—the green movement, the peace movement, the sustainable living movement, the movement of cultural creatives, and others—share similar social values and are open and interactive with the larger society; they don’t seek isolation or indulge in promiscuous sex. They aim to rethink accepted beliefs and values, and adopt a more responsible style of living. They shift from matter- and energy-wasteful ostentation toward voluntary simplicity and the search for sustainability and harmony with nature.

A new consciousness is now struggling to be born. Does this mean that the consciousness of humanity itself is evolving? Some famous thinkers have said so. The Indian sage Sri Aurobindo spoke of the emergence of superconsciousness in ever more people, and this, he said, is the harbinger of the next evolution of human consciousness. In a similar vein the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser spoke of the coming of four-dimensional integral consciousness, rising from the prior stages of archaic, magical, and mythical consciousness. The American mystic Richard Bucke called the new consciousness “cosmic,” and in the colorful spiral dynamics developed by Chris Cowan and Don Beck it’s the turquoise stage of collective individualism, cosmic spirituality, and Earth changes. For philosopher Ken Wilber these developments signify an evolutionary transition from the mental consciousness characteristic of both animals and humans, to subtle consciousness, which is archetypal, transindividual, and intuitive, to causal consciousness, and then ultimately to “consciousness as such.” Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof summed up the characteristics of the emerging consciousness as “transpersonal.”

There is remarkable agreement among these visionary concepts.  Superconsciousness, integral consciousness, cosmic consciousness, turquoise-stage consciousness, and consciousness as such are all forms of consciousness that transcend the divide between you and me, the individual and the world, the human being and nature. If these thinkers are right, this kind of consciousness will be the next stage in the evolution of the consciousness of our species.

Quantum consciousness—QC—could perhaps be the next stage in the evolution of the mind of humanity, but why would it be our salvation?

The answer is simple commonsense: because QC is a consciousness of directly intuited, felt connection to the world. It inspires empathy with people and with nature; it brings an experience of oneness and belonging. Quantum consciousness makes us realize that, being one with others and with nature, what we do to them we do to ourselves.

Not only will QC make us behave more responsibly toward other people and the planet, it will also encourage us to join together to cope with the problems we face.

Most of us cooperate with members of our own family and community. But cooperation has now become vitally necessary on the global level: it’s in all our best interest to cooperate with our fellows in the global community. Without such cooperation we’ll be hard put to overcome the global threats and problems that face us. Without cooperation we risk joining the countless species that became extinct because they couldn’t adjust to changed circumstances.

With dedicated and purposeful cooperation we can meet the challenges of human survival: we can have seven billion or more people living peacefully and sustainably on the planet. We have the technologies, the skills, and the necessary financial and human resources. Abject forms of poverty can be eliminated, energy- and resource-efficient technologies can be made widely available, water can be recycled and seawater desalinized, and sustainable forms of agriculture adopted. We can be more efficient and effective in harvesting the vast stream of energy that flows from the sun to our planet. And to finance these projects we would only need a small part of the enormous sums of money that we now commit to speculative, self-serving, or downright destructive ends.

Cooperation on the global level is a new requirement in the history of our civilization, and we are not prepared for it. Our institutions and organizations were designed to protect their own interests in competition with others; the need for them to join together in the shared interest has been limited to territorial aspirations and defense, and to economic gain in selected domains. The will to cooperate in globally cooperative projects that subordinate immediate self-interest to the vital interests of a wider community is still lacking in the political as well as in the economic domains.

When all is said and done, the fundamental need of our time, the precondition of creating a peaceful and sustainable world, is the spread of a new and more evolutionarily adaptive consciousness—the quantum consciousness of oneness and belonging.

Forms and intimations of the new consciousness are already emerging in the world, but they haven’t yet reached the mainstream. When QC becomes mainstream, humanity will have reached a higher stage of maturity. It will have become a species that has not only the technologies and the skills, but also the wisdom and the will, to survive in the world it has itself created.

Published at Huffington Post

Physical changes in the intensity of solar radiation conspire with human impacts to stress the world system. Astronomers have noted that since the 1940s, and particularly since 2003, the Sun has become remarkably turbulent, with the exception of the last year or so. Solar activity is predicted to peak around 2012, creating storms of intensity unprecedented since the 1859 “Carrington event,” when a large solar flare accompanied by a coronal mass ejection flung billions of tons of solar plasma into the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Solar storms, capable of traveling at speeds up to 5 million miles per hour, could knock-out virtually every major technological infrastructure on the planet: transportation, security and emergency response systems, electricity grids, finance, telecommunications, including satellite and other wireless networks, and even household electronic equipment.

The solar storm of 1859 was the most powerful event of its kind in recorded history. On the 1^st of September of that year the Sun expelled huge quantities of high-energy protons in a large flare that traveled directly toward the Earth, taking eighteen hours instead of the usual three or four days to reach our planet. It disrupted telegraph systems all over Europe and North America. Fires erupted in telegraph stations due to power surges in the wires; and the northern lights (aurorae borealis) were seen as far south as Florida.

The next solar storm on record, in March of 1989, melted the transformers of the HydroQuebec Power Grid, causing a nine-hour blackout that affected six million people in Canada. And the solar storms that reached the Earth between October 19^th and November 7^th 2003 disrupted satellites and global communications, air travel, navigation systems, and power grids all over the world. It also affected systems on the International Space Station.

The solar maximum forecast for 2012 could do greater harm than any before, since human life has become much more dependent on the global energy grid. According to “Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Economic and Societal Impacts,” a National Research Council report issued in the spring of 2009 by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, another Carrington event would induce ground currents that knock out 300 key transformers within 90 seconds and cut off power for more than 130 million people in the U.S. alone.  Its cost could be as high as 2 trillion dollars, and recovery time would be four to ten years.  An even worse impact would be felt in China, where the electrical grid is more vulnerable than in the West.

A major solar storm would cause the failure of electric power in most parts of the world. The above cited report of the National Academy of Science claims that this would have catastrophic consequences. People in high-rise apartments, where water has to be pumped up, would be cut off immediately. For most others drinking water would come through the taps for about half a day, but the flow would then cease without electricity to pump it from reservoirs. Transportation systems directly or indirectly dependent on electric power (which means practically all systems) would come to a standstill. Back-up generators would operate at some sites until their fuel ran out. For hospitals that would mean about 72 hours of essential care only services. Without power for heating, cooling and refrigeration, and with a breakdown in the distribution of medicines and pharmaceuticals, urban population would begin to die back within days.

Scientists forecast yet another disruptive event for the end of 2012: breaches in the Earth’s magnetic field. In the past this field protected living systems from the effects of solar storms and coronal mass ejections. Lately the magnetic field has diminished in intensity and holes and gaps have appeared. Scientists in South Africa measured cracks in the magnetic field the size of California, and in December of 2008 NASA announced that its Themis Project had found a massive breach that would allow a devastating amounts of solar plasma to enter the Earth’s magnetosphere.

The fluctuation of the magnetic field could also lead to the reversal of the planet’s magnetic poles. During the course of reversal the magnetic field would become still weaker, and the danger to life from solar and stellar radiation would greatly increase.

Another scientific report of relevance concerns the entry of our solar system into a highly energized region of space. This turbulent region is making the Sun hotter and stormier and has already caused climate change on other planets. According to Russian scientists the effects on Earth will include an acceleration of the magnetic pole shift, the vertical and horizontal distribution of ozone, and an increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme climate events.

There is solid scientific evidence backing up the prophecy that the end of 2012 will be a turbulent epoch. Will we be ready for the abrupt shifts and disruptions it will bring, and ready to seize the opportunities that will open in their wake? We must now face this question. The answer to it is not yet in, but one thing is certain: we must wake up to both to the dangers and to the opportunities of the “WorldShift 2012” awaiting us.

Tremendous global stress is created by the growth of the world’s population. At the end of the 20^th century population was expanding by about 900 million per decade, equivalent to a new London every month. It passed 6 billion before the turn of the century, and demographic calculations indicate that it would reach 9.1 billion by the middle of the 21^st century. Urban dwellers number more than half of the world’s population, and U.N. forecasts speak of 60 percent of the global population living in cities by 2030.

Modern cities are the largest conglomerations of humans ever seen on this planet. There are mega-conglomerations such as the Greater Tokyo Area with 35 million inhabitants, and Sao Paolo with 23 or 25 million. Other cities are rapidly catching up: Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Dhaka, Jakarta and Lagos, among others. By 2015 there may be 23 mega-cities in the world, 19 of them in the developing world, and 37 other cities with populations between 5 and 10 million.

Rapid urbanization in developing countries exposes vast numbers of poor people to shortages of drinking water and sanitation, as well as to rising air pollution and air-born toxins. Large cities produce enormous social inequalities; over one billion people now squat in squalor in slums, favelas and bidonvilles.

Urban overcrowding and sub-minimal conditions of life in urban conglomerations are major factors that stress people in many parts of the world. They produce frustration and conflict, resulting in higher levels of violence and unusual forms of crime: mass murders where seemingly ordinary people run amok, renewed suicide bombings in populated city centers, and suicidal terrorism on land and in the air.

The rapid growth of the world’s population, especially the growth of cities, creates growing problems of resource availability, first of all of clean water and energy.  Already one third of the global population lacks access to adequate supplies of clean water, and the share of water-deprived populations is expected to rise to half of humankind within decades. UNESCO and other global organs speak of the danger of “water wars” as desperate populations become violent in the fight for clean-water supplies.

Urban centers consume three-quarters of the world’s energy and are responsible for at least three-quarters of its pollution. The supply of abundant cheap energy has entered a critical end-phase. As the world continues to run on fossil fuels, demand for oil rises and supply diminishes. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21^st Century most of the world’s oil-producers had passed their peak. The largest oilfields were discovered over half a century ago: the peak of discovery was in 1965. New fields have not been found at the same rate, and as a result global oil production will peak, or has already peaked. As the peak is passed, oil becomes more difficult and expensive to extract. The supply of cheap oil drops, and extraction becomes less profitable. Yet demand for oil is still rising: the International Energy Agency found that in the last few years global demand has been increasing by 2 million barrels a day. If no significant changes in the patterns of energy production and consumption come about, global demand for oil would rise in the next two decades, from the present 80 million barrels a day to 125 million barrels.

Growing demand and decreasing supply drives prices up. Surges in oil prices impact almost instantly on people, enterprises and economies in every part of the world. Higher prices also trigger conflict related to discovery and extraction. The Arctic Ocean seabed, which may hold billions of gallons of both oil and natural gas, is becoming a globally contested region. In March 2007 Russia made public that it plans to set up a military force to protect its interests in the Arctic, and in August of that year the Russian flag had been planted on the ocean bed 4 km beneath the North Pole to indicate Russia’s claim to the undersea oil-formation known as the Lomonosov Ridge. The U.K. in turn is claiming sovereign rights over more than 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) of the seabed off Antarctica. The opening up of the Northwest passage due to the melting of Arctic ice is already provoking international contestation and conflict.

Population expansion drives all unsustainable human activity, and is perhaps the most difficult problem to solve. I’ll address possible solutions in a future post.

What independent evidence do we have that the 2012 prophecies are true? Are there scientifically established grounds to believe not only that an interesting conjunction will occur in the position of our planet at the end of 2012, but that this conjunction will signify an abrupt tipping point for humanity?

There is independent evidence of various kinds that the systems of life on this planet are approaching a critical stage. Most evidently, we see that weather patterns are turning extreme over the whole world. There are unprecedented droughts in China and Australia, floods in North America, and cyclones and devastating hurricanes impacting many tropical coastlines.  There are threats to health appearing on a scale never before experienced: avian flu and “novel swine flu,” and malaria and other tropical diseases, some of which had been believed to be vanquished. Global warming creates a widespread and frequent incidence of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, as well as of water-borne diseases such as cholera.

The record shows temperatures fluctuating strongly. The average is rising: in the summer of 2003 temperature fluctuations averaged 2.3 degrees higher than in previous years. Globally, temperatures have risen over the past century by at least 0.74˚C, and the principal causes are still debated. More than likely, both human and natural processes conspire to produce the warming. It is known that greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere trap the sun’s rays and heat up the atmosphere. This is bound to be a factor in global warming, whether or not changes in the physical processes of the Sun contribute to the warming.

Global warming is also produced by natural causes. As well as the emission of CO₂ and other greenhouses gases, also variations in the sun’s radiation and in sunspot activity, variations in the Earth’s orbit and spin, and volcanic geo-thermal activity affect and warm the planet’s troposphere and stratosphere.

In its 2007 Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared that the warming of the world’s climate is now “unequivocal.” This is a matter of observed fact. It comes to the fore in the increase of temperatures in the arctic, in the reduced size of icebergs and the melting of icecaps and glaciers, in the reduction of areas under permafrost, in changes in rainfall patterns, and in new wind formations, droughts, heat waves, tropical cyclones and other extreme weather patterns.

The consequences of global warming include widespread flooding due to tropical storms and the rise of sea levels. The melting of the Greenland icecap could alter the flow of the Gulf Stream and may deflect it before it reaches the European continent, dropping temperatures in England and the Nordic countries to levels typical of Labrador. If the West Antarctic ice sheet disintegrates during this century the level of the sea will rise by meters, not centimeters,  and human settlements close to sea level will be inundated.

According to the Stern Review, commissioned by the British government in 2007, there is a 50 percent risk of global temperatures rising by more than a 5˚C by the year 2100. In a conservative formulation, this would create a “5 to 20 percent reduction in consumption levels” worldwide. But even a global temperature increase of 3°C would radically transform the flows and balances of the ecology on which animal, plant and human life is now vitally dependent.

We have no choice but to address the climate crisis as aggressively as possible, in every way possible. I urge you to support this effort in every way you can.

Will the coming of a tipping point in human societies coincide with the famous 2012 prophecies? Let’s first look at these prophecies, and then look at the evidence that does—or does not—support them.

The most famous of the prophecies that speak of the end of 2012 as a critical point in human life and civilization comes from the Mayans. The Mayans viewed civilization as a cyclic process, where shifts from one phase of the cycle to the next occur at specific intervals.

The cyclic concept of the world was not unique to the Mayans. Cycles exist everywhere in nature and have been recognized in almost all cultures.  Cycles occur in history as well. In traditional cultures they were seen as the advent and passing of “Great Ages.” There was the astrological Great Year which lasts just under 26 thousand years (based on the precession of the equinoxes), and the Yugas of Hindu philosophy, a cosmic epoch with a cycle of dark and golden ages. Many myths speak of celestial cycles, and many civilizations have attempted to map their principal transitions. Celestial calendars were a major reference for life in many parts of the world. One of the most famous of these calendars is the Tzolk’in calendar, a 260-day Mesoamerican system that was known to the Mayans.

The Mayan calendar itself was completed by priest-astronomers in the year 1479 and carved into the Aztec-Mayan sun stone. The Mayan calendar details long passages of time, and includes mathematical calculations so accurate that modern astronomers are at a loss to understand how a traditional people could arrive at them—for example, the calculation of the length of the Earth’s revolution within a thousandth of a decimal point.

The most famous calculation is encoded in the so-called long count. The “Age of Jaguar,” the thirteenth baktun of 144,000 days, will come to an end on the 21^st of December, 2012. That will mark the end of the Fourth Sun (also known as the Fourth World) and the end—and at the same time also the beginning—of the Mayan calendar. This transformative date is written as 13.0.0.0.0 in long count notation, which is the same as the notation for the first day in the calendar.

December 21, 2012 marks the end of the long count in the Mayan calendar (and thus also the end and re-birth of the calendar), but not the end of the world. Carlos Barrios, a Guatemalan historian and anthropologist who became a Mayan Ajq’ij, ceremonial priest and spiritual guide, is definite on the question regarding the end of the world. “Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya,” he declared in a series of interviews in Santa Fe. “They say that the world will end on December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.” Everything will change: December 21, 2012 will be a date of rebirth, the beginning of the World of the Fifth Sun. The nature of that world is not determined in advance, but the Mayan system suggests that it may be the beginning of a new cycle of Ages, starting with the Golden Age. It is likely to mark a fundamental shift in human culture and consciousness.

A world transformation at the end of 2012 is predicted by astrology as well. Astrologers have noted that at sunrise on December 21, 2012 the Sun will conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic, creating a cosmic cross. The center of our galaxy will complete a “cosmic year”: a 25,920-year journey around the wheel of the zodiac. According to most systems of astrology a new cosmic year will then begin, lasting for another 25,920 years. (The reality of this cycle, if not its astrological—or Mayan—interpretation, rests on independent scientific evidence: it concerns the rotation of the Earth on its axis. This rotation is about 23 degrees off vertical: our planet is like a spinning top that is slightly out of balance. In this condition it takes 25,800 years for the celestial pole to describe a full circle. The conjunction noted by Mayans and astrologers will occur in a 36-year window in time between 1980 and 2016. The Mayans have chosen the winter solstice 2012 as the decisive point, even though it’s not in the middle of this window, perhaps because at that point the Earth’s axis will point exactly toward the “galactic bulge”—the thick central part of the visual image of the Milky Way galaxy as seen from Earth.)

The cosmic conjunction noted by both astrologers and the Mayans was considered a fundamental re-alignment in a number of spiritual traditions, including the Hopi time-keeping system, Vedic and Islamic astrology, Mithraism, the Jewish kabala, European sacred geography, medieval Christian architecture, and a variety of hermetic metaphysics.

Does this re-alignment, and the prophecies based on it, mean that the “abrupt” change of our world will occur at the end of 2012?