Predicted and scheduled events

January
January 13 – January 22 – The first Winter Youth Olympics will be held in Innsbruck, Austria.
January 31 – 433 Eros, the second-largest Near Earth Object on record (size 13 km × 13 km × 33 km) will pass Earth at 0.1790 astronomical units (26,780,000 km; 16,640,000 mi). NASA studied Eros with the NEAR Shoemaker probe launched on February 17, 1996.

February
February 6 – Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, marking the 60th anniversary of her accession to the thrones of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia & New Zealand, and the 60th anniversary of her becoming Head of the Commonwealth.

April
April 17 – The United States will cede wartime control of the military of South Korea after 50 years and dissolve the Combined Forces Command. Two distinct military commands (South Korea and the United States) will operate in Korea during wartime, rather than one unified command under the Combined Forces Command.

May
May 12 – August 12 – The 2012 World Expo is to be held in Yeosu, South Korea.
May 20 – Annular solar eclipse. Path of annularity runs through the Pacific Ocean from northern China to California.

June
June 6 – The second and last solar transit of Venus of the century. The next pair is predicted to occur in 2117 and 2125.
June 18 – June 23 – Turing Centenary Conference at the University of Cambridge, in honor of the mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptographer Alan Turing, the last day of the conference being the hundredth anniversary of his birth.

July
July 27 – Opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics begins in London at 19:30 UTC, 20:30 BST. London will become the first city in history to host the Olympic Games three times.

August
August 6 – August 20 – Mars Science Laboratory also known as the Curiosity rover is scheduled to land on Mars.
August 12 – Closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

November
November 13 – Total solar eclipse (visible in Northern Australia and the South Pacific).

December
December 21 – The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, notably used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization among others, completes a "great cycle" of thirteen b'ak'tuns (periods of 144,000 days each) since the mythical creation date of the calendar's current era.
December 31 – The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol ends.

Date unknown
China will launch the Kuafu spacecraft.
18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China will be the next major Congress of the Communist Party of China.
Pleiades, a proposed supercomputer built by Intel and SGI for NASA's Ames Research Center, will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10 quadrillion floating point operations per second).
Sequoia, a proposed super computer built by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 20 Petaflops.
On the Sun, the solar maximum of Solar Cycle 24 in the 11-year sunspot cycle is forecast to occur. Solar Cycle 24 is regarded to have commenced January 2008, and on average will reach its peak of maximal sunspot activity around 2012. The period between successive solar maxima averages 11 years (the Schwabe cycle), and the previous solar maximum of Solar Cycle 23 occurred in 2000–2002. During the solar maximum the Sun's magnetic poles will reverse.
The Kars–Tbilisi–Baku railway across the Caucasus is scheduled to be completed sometime in 2012.
The first quad-core smartphones will be available.