This is the fifth in a series of posts showing the crazy-ass 2012 books I read last year.  I recommend starting at the beginning.  Part 1.  Part 2.  Part 3. Part 4.

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It’s Time To Panic

The book by Patrick Geryl, How to Survive 2012: Tactics and Survival Places for the Coming Pole Shift, doesn’t hesitate to get to the point.  Some folks prefer their 2012 mythology to be kinder and gentler, with the world awakening through a sudden shift in the way people think.  Everyone’s mood will improve, we’ll stop polluting, and we’ll practice yoga instead of watching TV.

Not this time.  I would not call Patrick Geryl an optimist.  Before we even get to the first chapter – in the Foreward – we’re told that the aftermath of 2012 will be “nothing but horror, pure unimaginable horror.”  It’s all because of a pole shift.  Yes, I know.  We just got done talking about shifting the poles in Part 1.  Gregg Braden was all over that, giving us his insight into how the magnetic field fiddles around inside your body and head.

This time, the magnetic field of the sun gets in on the action.  Specifically, Geryl asserts that the Sun goes through polar shifts with regularity.  In response, Earth’s poles shift with it.  The iron core of the Earth actually flips over and spins the other direction.  As a consequence, the Earth’s crust follows suit.  The Earth begins to spin in the opposite direction.  Sun rises in the West and sets in the East.  That kind of thing.  If you think that would cause problems for those of us living on the surface of the Earth, you’d be right.  The crust will rend and tear.  Continents will slam into each other.  Tidal waves and volcanoes will blanket the Earth.  Because of the change in the magnetic field, there will be massive lightning storms that bake the surface of the Earth.  Previous civilizations have been utterly wiped from memory because this very thing has happened in the past.  All of their knowledge has been lost.

All of this will happen again in 2012.  Patrick Geryl is absolutely certain of it.  Let’s follow his line of evidence.  Let’s together weep for our short time left on this planet as his proof overwhelms us.

That Crazy Magnetic Field that Nobody has Figured Out except Patrick Geryl and Ancient Mayans and Egyptians

What makes our magnetic field flip?  We must first ask what it is that powers our planet’s magnetic field.  It’s the spinning iron core in the center of the planet.  Geryl asserts that the Old Egyptians encoded the knowledge of the magnetic field within their Holy Numbers and architecture.  The codes they formed were impossible to crack for non-insiders.  Some codes were extremely complicated, but not incomprehensible.  After peeling away layer after layer, you can see the naked scientific figures regarding the previous catastrophes.  Other questions still need answering, and Geryl claims that the answers lie hidden beneath the sands of Hawara (a limestone and mud-brick pyramid) in the legendary Labyrinth.  He says that the revelations from the Labyrinth will astonish him, though he hasn’t yet gotten permission to dig there.  That’s probably because the Labyrinth isn’t there anymore. Herodotus traveled there back in the day, while it still existed, noting that it was pretty darn big.

I should take this moment to note that, like many of the other examples in this series of posts, the authors list few to zero citations for where they get their knowledge.  Even original research has some kind of basis to be built upon.  When there is no place for me to double-check your statements, I am going to assume you just made it all up.  Also, I would like to point out that if he hasn’t yet dug in the Labyrinth of Hawara (assuming anything still exists of it), how does he know that it has revelations that will astonish him?  How did the Ancient Egyptians know about the spinning iron core in the center of our planet?  I’m not going to guess how he knows this.  This is much too early for speculation about that, and I just know that there are more fascinating insights to how he got his evidence.

Oh Fuck, Numbers

Also introduced are new code numbers which connect to each other in new interesting ways.  In fact, there’s an entire chapter in his book dedicated to fiddling around with numbers and claiming that two similar results counts as proof of something or another.  It’s quite difficult to explain without an example.  Beware – you might not have any idea what is going on here.  I am omitting nothing.  Starting on page 206:

An Absolutely Certain Coding

Multiply the number of seconds in one day with the different orbit periods of the earth around the sun:

86,400 x 360 = 31,104,000

86,400 x 365 = 31,536,000

86,400 x 365.25 = 31,557,600

Also multiply by the exact value [of the number of days in one Earth year]:

86,400 x 365.2422 = 31,556,926.08

Difference with the value of 365.25:

31,557,600 – 31,556,926.08 = 673.92

Leave out the decimal point:

67,392 = code number Egyptian Zodiac

In my previous book I had found the following:

67,392 + 936 = 68,328 = value Mayan sunspot cycle

Also multiply by the value of a Mayan year:

86,400 x 365.242 = 31,556,908.8

Difference with the value of 365.25:

31,557,600 – 31,557,600 = 691.2 = code number

Enlarge the number into the units used above:

=69,120

Subtract the Mayan sunspot cycle:

69,120 – 68,328 = 792 = code number Dresden Codex

Add up the outcomes:

936 + 792 = 1,728 = Mayan code number for the time difference of a solar year!

Conclusion

This deciphering is absolute proof that all of my previous findings are correct.

This is what is meant by code numbers and deciphering different theories.  It’s utterly indecipherable, and his concept of “proof” is like throwing paint at a canvas – a la Jackson Pollack – and seeing which ones look like smiley faces.  There’s a whole chapter of this.  To be honest, I didn’t even try to pretend that I could follow the train of thought.  This is not “A Beautiful Mind.”  This is “A Malnourished Mind.”

Back to Geryl’s thoughts.  Ultimately, according to him, the main culprit in how the Earth’s poles flip is the sunspot cycle.  You saw him mention sunspots in his mathematical “proof,” and he says massive solar activity corresponds to when the poles flip.  Geryl offers up another piece of evidence relating to previous pole reversals and how they happen.  Everybody knows that we are currently exiting the Age of Pisces and entering the Age of Aquarius, and sometimes hiccups occur when transitioning between different astrological signs.  For example, the civilization of Atlantis ended in the sign of Leo.  The Earth started spinning in the other direction, continents flew thousands of kilometers, and the Atlantean folks couldn’t handle it.  Not that I could blame them.  If the Earth started spinning the other way at the end of 2012, I don’t think we’d fare any better.  That’s an enormous amount of energy to be able to stop our planet and spin it in the other direction.

After a brief consultation with Superman (since he did it once before) I calculated that it would take 2.14 x 10^29 Joules to slow the Earth to a complete stop, and then the same amount to make it spin the other direction.  5.28 x 10^29 Joules total (give or take a few hundred billion Joules).  The amount of energy from the Sun that strikes the earth is 5.5 x 10^24 Joules per year.  So we would only need the total amount of energy that strikes the earth over the course of the year, increase it by five orders of magnitude, and make sure every quantum of that energy is used to somehow make the Earth spin the other direction.  Please tell me if I’m out of line or if this isn’t making sense.  The Sun simply doesn’t have enough energy output to do what Patrick Geryl claims it will do.  He makes it seem as if it will all happen in an instant.  I’ll even be very conservative and say that it will happen over the course of one day.  That would be ten thousand years worth of energy from the Sun condensed into one day.  The output of the sun would have to be 3,650,000 times more powerful than normal and aimed directly at the Earth, and all of the photonic energy would have to be converted into mechanical kinetic energy.  Perhaps a solar flare or coronal mass ejection (CME) could do such a thing.  But every time that happens, it tends to make pretty Aurorae, knock out electrical grids, or fry satellites.  The length of the Earth’s day hasn’t changed by any appreciable length, even those solar flares and CMEs are happening all the time.  Well, maybe not all the time.  Let’s just say it’s very often.  If you are old enough to read this, you have lived through a CME or solar flare.

I’m confused as to why Patrick Geryl is so good at doing long convoluted calculations, but completely failed to do the one calculation that would answer the one question he should have asked from the very beginning: Am I wasting my time?

It’s happened before, multiple times, he says.  One would imagine our best geologists could find some kind of evidence of a massive cataclysmic event happening relatively recently, geologically speaking.  The time that Atlantis ended, according to Geryl, was about 30,000 years ago.  That’s practically yesterday to geologists.  I can’t find any mention whatsoever of any kind of crazy planet-wide catastrophe.  I shouldn’t be surprised, since Geryl says geologists don’t know anything.  And he says the same thing happened again in 21,312 BCE.  “At that time the earth shifted seventy-two degrees in less than half an hour.”

He has looked through the Geologic evidence, and mentions that geologists know that the magnetic particles in magma align with the magnetic field of the time, and they can use old rocks to see when the poles changed locations.

As mentioned before, magnetohydrodynamics is a difficult thing to study, because we are dealing with enormous amounts of hot, liquid iron flowing around a solid iron core.  We can’t see any of it.  We really do not know a whole lot about the core.  Computer simulations paint a picture of a system that sometimes borders on a chaotic magnetic mess, and then comes back into a mostly north-south alignment.  The magnetic north or south may switch locations sometimes, too.  Patrick Geryl seems to be displaying a complete misunderstanding of how this whole system works.

To further emphasize this misunderstanding, he digs into Myth and religious stories.  The Chinese say that there have been up to ten ‘lost worlds’ since the beginning.  The Hopi Indians say there were three other worlds that were destroyed before this one.  The one we’re in right now will end on a pre-determined date.  Which one is correct?  And how the hell do they know this?  If these worlds are lost, why would anyone know about them?  Did they leave a note?

Another story that Patrick Geryl presents as evidence for his theory involves a shepherd noticing that his animals were staring at the sun, and then one of his llamas told him that there was going to be a tidal wave.  Yeah.  Convincing.  He goes on even further with ancient priest mutterings and Hindu traditions and Angkor Wat carvings, but honestly they’re not as interesting as a talking llama.

To get to the point of his theory, the sun belches a mass of charged particles and it interacts with our magnetic field, and it causes it to flip somehow.  You know the rest of his story.  I guess he has no doubt that this solar flare will actually hit the Earth.  It will definitely be aimed at us.  They need to hit Earth, or else it won’t charge the spinning of the core.  That’s right, the geodynamo is externally powered.  It can’t possibly be because of angular momentum.  It has to be powered because “Its primary task is to protect us against cosmic and solar radiation.  Without this field, life is practically impossible.”

Another tangent coming on.  Why do people think that the Earth is made for us?  Geryl asserts that the magnetic field has an actual task, and it’s to protect us.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the magnetic field doesn’t give a flying fuck about us.  Do you know why?  Because it’s not actually alive, and it doesn’t have a brain, and it can’t be assigned a task.  It just is.  I’m glad it’s there, because Geryl’s right, we do need it to protect against cosmic rays and other space radiation.  We need it.  That doesn’t give it ‘agency’.

Feel free at this point to get up and take a shot of whiskey.  My brain hurts too.  This handwaving hysterical made-up number porn continues for multiple chapters.  Religious and astrological nonsense abounds.

But enough of his nonsensical proofs.  Let’s get to the down and dirty of his claims.  What will actually happen on the fateful day?  During the catastrophe, there will be massive solar flares that will fry all of our satellites and ground-based electrical equipment.  Earthquakes and volcanoes will be as common as sunrises and Walmarts.  A massive ice age will make life “barely possible” in North America and Europe.  All food crops will be destroyed by the volcanoes and climate change and tidal waves.  Oh, I didn’t mention tidal waves?  There will be tidal waves too, because the crust will be flung around since the Earth will spin the other direction.  Oil will be spewing out of the destroyed oil wells and be carried on the two kilometer-high tidal waves onto agricultural land and ruining it for growing crops.  The volcanoes and ice age seems like a bit of overkill after all that.  All knowledge, including medical lifesaving knowledge will be lost, as well as the hospital facilities.  Nuclear power plants will spew radiation all over the world, and chemical factories will spill their toxic wares into our precious bodily fluids.  Oh, and airplanes will crash, too.  Gotta make people afraid of the plummeting aircraft.  He even says, “The story of the Swiss Family Robinson shipwrecked on a tropical island would be an absolute utopia compared to this destroyed and polluted world.”

Go get another shot of whiskey.  There’s more.  Let’s see how we rebuild our civilization.  First, we must move to a land far away from industrial pollution and nuclear power plants.  That place is, of course, Antarctica.  “But Matt,” you say, “how can we possibly get to Antarctica during an ice age when everything in the world has just exploded?”  My answer to you would be, “I dunno.”  Still, Patrick Geryl says we need to do it, since that’s where Atlantis is buried, and since it’s an island, it “cannot be conquered by less cultured civilizations.”  Also, he’s into the idea of having an Antarctic civilization ruled by a Pharaoh.  Hope some trees and crops show up there, or else they’ll have to build their houses out of rocks and eat mud once the ice sheet melts.  It’ll be a short line to sign up to be Pharaoh of that.

He continues with a strict mostly-vegetarian dietary program, which seems unlikely considering food crops were destroyed by oil tsunamis and volcanoes and ice ages.  If I were in that situation, I would probably just eat anything that moved or morphed into a cartoon steak or something.