Lawrence E. Joseph wrote this letter to The New York Times in response to their article on 2012 entitled, "The Final Days ," which in its opening paragraph cited and quoted him." The Times chose not to publish the letter, so we have decided to post it here.


To the Editors,

I was delighted yesterday morning to find a statement I made on a radio program quoted, quite accurately, in the opening paragraphs of Benjamin Anistas’s article, “The Final Days.” Had the writer chosen to contact me directly, I would have gladly spoken to him, and also would have sent along a copy of my book, Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End (Morgan Road/Random House, 2007.)  In my book, Anistas would have found fifteen or twenty words regarding Mary, Mother of Jesus (the subject of the quote he used) but fifteen or twenty thousand words regarding the connection between storms on the Sun and storms on the Earth.  

For all the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and then Rita and Wilma, one of the stormiest periods ever recorded on Earth, did you ever hear mention that that period was also one of the stormiest periods ever recorded on the Sun? The week of September 5-12, 2005, after Katrina and just before Rita, was extraordinarily turbulent, all the more shocking because this great upheaval occurred during what supposed to be a solar minimum, meaning little or no sunspot activity. It was the proverbial blizzard in July.

The next day, September 13, saw the Boina, Ethiopia earthquake, which, researchers reported to the American Geophysical Union’s 2005 annual plenary conference in San Francisco, signaled the formation of a new ocean basin and the cracking apart of the African continent. The crack opened up on the east coast of Africa, directly across from the spot on west coast of Africa where all of those killer hurricanes had been launched. On September 26, the sunstorms seemingly spent, a mammoth solar prominence shot out, a fiery spear larger than all the planets combined. Five days later, a volcano in Llamatepec, El Salvador erupted without warning, killing two and causing thousands to flee. The next solar climax will occur, according to a broad consensus of scientific opinion, in 2012, the same year that, perhaps coincidentally, ancient Mayan astronomers predicted will be pivotal and, quite possibly, catastrophic.

My interest in the dynamics of the Sun-Earth connection dates back, in fact, to my first New York Times Magazine article (11/23/86), on James Lovelock, the British atmospheric scientist who advanced the Gaia Hypothesis, which, in a nutshell, states that the global ecosystem functions more like a body than a rock or a machine, and which explores the many organismic ways in which our planet adjusts and regulates itself in response to our sustaining star. Sometimes our atmosphere fails to screen out the most harmful solar inputs, and other times it is rather too effective, as I explored in an Op-Ed piece (1/19/95). There I argued that the Moon will become the Persian Gulf of the twenty first century because of its superabundance of an ideal nuclear fusion fuel, known as Helium 3, which streams from the Sun and embeds itself in the lunar regolith. Inconveniently for us, this isotope is too light to penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere, and simply bounces back into space.

My interest in 2012 stems from my association with the Albuquerque, New Mexico firm, Aerospace Consulting Corporation (AC2), of which I am now chairman. AC2 is developing the Vulcan Plasma Disintegrator (U.S. patent #7,026,570 B2), a portable, ultra-high temperature plasma furnace designed to completely dissociate highly toxic wastes. Plasma, essentially energy in gaseous form, is pretty much what the Sun is made of. So when Roger Remy, our principal scientist, pointed out in late 2004 that “the Sun is making mayonnaise”, his way of saying that our sustaining star is experiencing turmoil, I decided to write my book, given the possibility that the next solar climax in 2012 might prove to be particularly problematic.

As for Mary, in whatever archetypal, corporeal or divine state she may exist, I can only say that the more of her, the better, especially over the next five years.

With kind regards,
Lawrence E. Joseph

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