Author Description

Americans are not being told by the news media about the biggest story of their lifetimes. Every night every television news channel is desperately worried about the global economic crisis, looming recession, protracted unemployment, Wall Street and the housing market, government spending and taxation, and "going over the "fiscal cliff." But there is a much bigger untold story about a threat to the global economy--and to the very existence of global civilization--yet so rarely mentioned anywhere that, as described by the title of this book, it is an "Apocalypse Unknown." The biggest story is this. December 2012 commenced the solar maximum, and significantly increased the possibility of a geomagnetic super-storm, something like a space hurricane, that could collapse electric grids and all the critical infrastructures that support modern civilization, and the lives of billions worldwide.The Sun is a gigantic ongoing thermonuclear explosion, equivalent to billions of nuclear warheads detonating every second, contained by gravity. During the solar maximum the Sun hurls into space more solar flares and coronal mass ejections--basically enormous chunks of itself, many times larger than the Earth. If one of these solar torpedoes hits the Earth, it could generate a powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would collapse electric power grids everywhere, plunging every modern nation into a protracted blackout. Perhaps permanently.Worldwide, billions could die.The Earth is overdue for a solar super-storm that could inflict a global catastrophe. The last such super-storm, called the Carrington Event, happened in 1859. It caused fires in telegraph stations and destroyed the newly laid trans-Atlantic cable. But in those horse and buggy days civilization did not depend upon electricity. The Congressional EMP Commission estimated that a Carrington class geomagnetic super-storm probably occurs every century. Arithmetic suggests that, as of this writing in December 2012, as we enter