The end of the world scenarios is as fascinating as much as it is feared. The end of the Mayan 5,125 year cycle is now upon us and a new epoch in human and planetary time will soon arrive – or so goes the theory!
Humanities impact on Spain
Three major factors which may alter or devastate our modern civilisation, leaving out events such as asteroids, solar flares or pandemics, are already in play, and we must ignore these at our peril.
Here are my predictions for the beginning of our end.
Global crop failures
We have all been aware of recent changes in the seasons. Earlier springs, later autumns and less annual rainfall can sound like a blessing to us in the United Kingdom, but I am afraid that this is a ‘fool’s gold’ scenario.
In 2012 the global- wide, weird weather patterns will cause devastating crop failures around the world.
Global food prices have already been rising sharply because of poor wheat yields for the last two years, but this will be the year that a huge percentage of the world’s food requirements will be devastated because of a combination of low rainfall, related water shortages, plant diseases and the devastating decline of the honey bee caused by global heating.
5,000 years of altering the mechanics of the bio-sphere will trip tipping points this year.
Economic downturn to economic slide
This one I call the ‘shower curtain’ effect.
Walking around a large out- of- town shopping centre (you know the type), I realised that the whole global economy now depends on unabated shopping habits.
The world’s leading and most influential countries must depend on their people, both rich and poor, to keep spending, or smaller economies (curtain supports) will go snap, snap, snap on by one until the whole curtain (whole global economy) cannot be supported anymore and falls down.
Within localised economies, the two largest social groups (middle and working classes) keep their economies running successfully. But these two groups are also affected the most by any cuts to government spending and thus will not be spending but saving and foregoing non essential goods. The wealthy classes are too small a percentage to support whole economies. One by one, individual countries could fail, giving China a massive wake up call.
In 2012 we could see the Chinese economy, built on global overspending and currently overspending itself, slide quickly into a Dubai style crash.
An energy crunch caused by peak oil
The bloodstream of our society, our civilisation and our modern lives is oil. Both the economy and the ability to feed 7 billion people are dependent on an uninterrupted flow.
The rush for new sources is on, with most of the world’s countries now dependent on unreliable sources and existing sources strained by the emergence of the new Tiger economies in the East: the flow of the remaining reserves could be prioritised to flow eastward.
In 2012 we could see back room deals between the Eastern economies and the Middle East for the remaining stocks of oil to flow to the East and not the West, leaving the Western economies with no option but to declare hostilities.
Eager to protect their long term interests, the Eastern powers will undoubtedly protect their new allies and new oil supply. Welcome to a possible World War III scenario.
Throughout history, war has always been used to revive ailing economies.
Conclusion
Here are 3 plausible scenarios for the beginning of the end, with not an asteroid in sight. The Mayans may not have predicted the end of times this year, but you have got to admit their timing is uncanny.
A perfect storm of problems, occurring at exactly the same time in history may, at worst, be enough to kill our modern civilisations, at best make us change our destructive ways.
Unlike the Mayans who could not have envisaged the Spanish coming from across the water, we can see our fate looming on the horizon.
The fight for civilisation is won; the challenge of keeping it has just begun.
Forewarned is forearmed.
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An interesting speculation!! The real problem however is our exploding population growth and there is virtually nothing being done to curb that. If we do not reduce our numbers very quickly there is no hope for the future. For every advance in science which stops people from dying from some illness we see that there is another leap in population, hence we save some lives for the moment only to see the probability of many more perish at a later date because of over population!
Yep, It does not say it directly about over-population, but the problems raised here are definitely symptoms of over-population.
Economic growth is a massive problem too, but a school child can tell you that we can’t continue to grow on a finite space. Don’t viruses continue to grow until it kills its host?