[Denethor]

*nods in agreement*

I would definitely say that it's nothing more then a political hoax from start to finish. Wouldn't even be the first time a "End of the World" cult of this sort cropped up within the environmentalist movement either. I remember going through the 1974 to 2002 issues of a magazine called "The Futurist" on an unrelated project and coming across various articles that predicted the collapse of Western Civilization in 1980 due to lack of resources and the extinction of the human race in the year 2000 due to overpopulation and thinking "Hmmm! Inconsiderate of us to make hash of their predictions by still being around and uncollapsed, aren't we?". @_@