Ed Dames was part of the remote viewing project inside the lettered agencies. He and his colleagues provided lots of intel that proved to be valid. When the program was made public, it appeared to be too "tin foil" to be worthy of taxpayer support. The government remote viewing project was shutdown and Ed Dames recruited some of his former colleagues and students into a private enterprise.
Instead of providing military and political intel via remote viewing, Ed makes his living teaching the technique. He does charity work to find missing children who have been killed and hidden. His track record is pretty good on the topic.
Ed has been concerned since around 1997 that future events appear to go very wrong. His curiousity on the topic became a personal passion to get an answer. The current best estimate is that the problem is caused by increasing solar activity. We get coronal mass ejections that are earth directed and smack into the magnetosphere. That causes geomagnetic storms and auroras. Our satellite communications are frequently disturbed. Our terrestrial radio is sometimes disturbed. Very large events can induce electromagnetic pulses that damage power lines and ordinary electrically powered devices. The phenomena are real and observed a on regular basis.
Ed's concern is for a series of coronal mass ejection events that arrive in quick succession. Under that scenario, the earth's magnetosphere gets repeatedly slammed down without an opportunity to recover. At some point, we are left unprotected and a CME event scorches the surface of the earth.
The sun facing side of the earth will be screwed in a big way if this happens. The side facing away from the sun will likely observe a big flash in the sky similar to a bright aurora. A well supplied underground cave would be a place of temporary refuge. After the event passes, you still have to figure out how to survive in a scorched world.
Apocalyptic? Yes. Time frame? Best guess is late 2005. Ed summarized his findings on a DVD that he is selling at a dedicated website "http://www.thekillshot.com".
That summary saved you 3 hours of listening to the live presentation. My take is that I'm as prepared as I can be for a disaster.