mother nature is VERY UNHAPPY; probably has to do with pole shift, mass coronal ejections, etc. "2012" etc. seems far-fetched, but as most in this community know, there really are greater forces out there than any individual one of us. and it's not going away--i think that mass earth changes are only getting off to the races, so fasten your seatbelts! i remember on a transatlantic flight looking out & thinking "what is that shit?" (i'm in LA, so used to dirty air) it was a brown band really high; we were adjacent to/a little above it. it was the indonesian volcano that affected the earth's climate for a very long time. which is a very long way to say that there have always been great earth changes; we're just one of the first (assuming ancients did'nt have communications technology) to see it in real time . . .