A frustrated writer struggles to keep his family alive when a series of global catastrophes threatens to annihilate mankind.

Several years before, geologist Adrian Helmsley comes across information that shows the world will come to an end in 2012. No announcement is made but the G8 countries begin to prepare for the event. Jack Curtis is a divorced and a less than successful writer. While on a camping trip with his children in Yosemite, he meets Charlie Frost, who is preaching that the end of the world is at hand. A series of events leads Curtis to believe what Frost has told him and with his family, heads for China where the industrialized countries have been working on a response to the impending disaster.