Don't google the Mayan long calendar end-date on Google, you'll just get a bunch of matches to places with conflicting information and amateur "studies". I know quite a bit about the 2012 End date and have read 2 books devoted to it. John Jenkins (the #1 authority on the subject and author of the best book on it,
Maya Cosmogenesis) as well as other leading scientists in the field have all reported that there is no proof or sign that any natural
physical changes will occur on the planet Earth itself. They aren't saying there "wont" be either, but it seems like you're missing the whole point of the end date. The end date is a shift in human
consciousness as a whole, as we move into the 5th age of the human race's timescale. The 4th age is ending in 2012, and has been deemed the 'technological' age, which makes sense.
The change will be a psychological and social shift on a grand-scale. The "ends" of all of the previous Maya calendar long counts (which equals about 5125 years) have been fairly strongly theorized to have all ended in similar ways and global transitions throughout humanity have occurred more strongly during this phase.
It's not like on December 21'st of 2012 there is going to be a massive earthquake, solar flares, tsunamis, and everything else going crazy. That makes absolutely no scientific sense and the Maya would never, ever claim something to be along those lines, whether or not they are 'scientific' themselves. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen in a transitioning "shift", a sped up process that could be compared to evolution in mechanism, and it's going to happen on a global scale.
That's all. There's nothing to worry about here.
We should worry more about the San Andreas faultline *still* building up to undergo a violent reaction, than we should about the Mayan end date.