2012??? is it true???

Listen up! Only three years from now, on Dec. 21, a violent flameout on the sun will blaze and the world will come to an end - almost.
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The science gurus of Hollywood are at it again, this time in the apocalyptic movie "2012" now playing at theaters near you.
Science it isn't.
There's this Indian astrophysicist who calls the sun's major burps an eruption, and warns his American geologist pal at the White House, who has apparently never heard of what the sun can do. Solar physicists know that even the sun's biggest burps are exotic but harmless (except to satellites and power grids) coronal mass ejections - CMEs for short.
But this movie CME sends billions and trillions and gazillions of subnuclear particles called neutrinos down to Earth, where scientists in white coats (essential for all Ph.D.s) work in a spooky laboratory 11,000 feet deep and have already dug 6,000 feet deeper to measure the nasty neutrinos and learn what doom they carry.
Real CMEs don't know from neutrinos - electrons and protons, yes - but that's the cinema business. Underground labs like this one do exist, and Stanford scientists have worked in one in Minnesota trying to catch real neutrinos from cosmic rays, plus curious little objects known as WIMPs - weakly interacting massive particles - that just might be the mysterious dark matter that fills the universe. But what will these neutrinos from the sun do in 2012? Only a little, it seems: All they'll do is hit the crust of the Earth and warm it up until it really erupts.
"The Earth's crust is destabilizing," pronounces the movie's White House geologist, and he knows he must tell the world..
But what's a little destabilizing, even though there's no such thing? It just sets off a magnitude 10.9 earthquake somewhere, which sends bigger and bigger cracks ripping through the ground, first in Los Angeles, then all over the world. It topples skyscrapers onto cars and screaming multitudes, it triggers the world's most violent volcano in Yellowstone National Park (not Yosemite, thanks be!) and causes the North and South Poles to switch places immediately.
A sudden reversal
Polar reversal, that's called, and real geophysicists know the poles can't possibly switch; it's only the magnetic poles that occasionally reverse, and specialists in paleomagnetism use those benign reversals to date ancient land masses and the history of Africa's Rift Valley, where ancient hominid fossils lie.
But in this 2 1/2 hours of humans screaming and groaning, freeways crashing and airplanes roaring, we are finally asked to believe that the mother of all tsunamis - generated by worldwide giant earthquakes - buries continents, drowns mountains and, of course, kills off most of the world's population.
Something called "galactic alignment" has caused all this movie trouble. It's presumably when the Earth and sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Well, we're 28,000 or so light-years away from the center of the galaxy, and always will be, so the entire idea is impossible, says astronomer David Morrison, senior scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View.
"It's just an Internet hoax," he says.
The Mayans knew?
The movie also warns us that the "long count" calendar of the ancient Maya predicted our doom in December 2012, but the calendar does no such thing. It does indeed denote a date that in our terms would be Dec. 21, 2012, but without any doom or disaster.
The same Mayan calendar also sets the creation of the world at 3114 B.C., which would surely make astronomers, geologists and all 40,000 members of the American Geophysical Union scream, because the Earth by all reckoning formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and methanogens, the first earthly organisms, emerged a billion years later.
This movie has been hyped all over the Internet for more than a year now, and thousands of people have been really frightened. Its publicists have even created a fake but very real looking "Institute for Human Continuity" (links.sfgate.com/ZIRN), with a fake "Dr. Pilar Peralta-Pineda" as its "awareness" director. This "scientist" warns us all:
"It is my duty to inform you, in as clear a way as possible, of the series of catastrophes that the IHC believes will devastate our planet in 2012."
If you look closely at the Web site, you'll see Sony Pictures' "All Rights Reserved" at the bottom of the "Institute's" home page in very small type. It's a bitter hoax.Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/19/MVHS1AHMS4.DTL#ixzz0XN1XxsKj

2012? Maybe the world ends earlier
"Societe Generale has advised clients to be ready for a possible "global economic collapse" over the next two years, mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction."
More from the Daily Telegraph:
In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario," the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.
Overall debt is still far too high in almost all rich economies as a share of GDP (350% in the US), whether public or private. It must be reduced by the hard slog of "deleveraging" for years.
"As yet, nobody can say with any certainty whether we have in fact escaped the prospect of a global economic collapse," said the 68-page report. It is an exploration of the dangers, not a forecast.
Phew! It's only a movie, after all.Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/bottomline/detail?entry_id=52024#ixzz0XN1H2eLb