Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, a handful of deniers manage to keep arguing about the existence, causes, and likely outcomes of global warming. Not to be outdone by this conventional irrationality, we have a few oddballs on the ‘believing’ side of the fence too.

Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, a new-age religious cult based out of Yelm, Washington, makes exaggerated, doomsday predictions about global warming to instill fear in its followers and convince them to build underground shelters to protect from the “Days to Come.“[social_buttons]

According to the prophesies made by the spiritual school, the human population at the end of 2012 will be two-thirds what it is now, and those who survive in the long term will do so by stocking up on food, water, and medical supplies and by having an underground shelter to protect them from the dangers of a rapidly changing earth.

Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, or RSE, was founded in 1987, and its teachings date back a decade further. The lessons are based around the concepts of tapping into the forgotten God within oneself, being able to create one’s own reality, and using one’s mind to perform superhuman abilities. Supposedly the teacher is a 35,000-year-old warrior from Lemuria who is being channeled by a 62-year-old woman named JZ Knight.

Ramtha students were behind the pseudo-science documentary What the Bleep Do We Know!? , which purports to inform us about quantum physics and the subjective nature of reality, yet could not even accurately tell us what percentage of the human body is composed of water.

While so-called prophets have been making doomsday prophecies for centuries, Ramtha’s predictions take on a unique form of sophistication. Their claims are masked as science, which has attracted followers who are not only wealthy and credulous, but surprisingly intelligent, creating an aura of credibility.

They can not seem to keep the prophecies consistent even from one lecture to another, but the scare tactics are generally rooted in a combination of climate change exaggerations and economic collapse straight out of New World Order. In Last Waltz of the Tyrants, their book of predictions for the ’90s, Ramtha told of the financial collapse we would see in the ’90s and explained how using cars has created a hole in the ozone layer, which is simply not true.

When none of the catastrophes came to fruition in the ’90s, they turned their scares toward 2012 and are using reports that recent hurricanes and floods have likely intensified due to climate change as evidence that the world as we know it has only a few more years.

Listen to some incoherent babbling here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/DfGs-cA3E_M&hl=en&fs=1]

One might ask, “So what? They have some controversial new age views, but at least they are concerned with the planet! They’re an ally!” That could have been the case. But these money-grubbers, who charge thousands per year for their students to retain their invitation to the doomsday party, have instead decided that convincing their followers to move to Yelm and build underground shelters is a far bigger priority than actually trying to stop climate change from occurring (so much for them being able to “create their own realities”).

McKenna, the town neighboring Yelm, conveniently has a business run by Ramtha students called the Survival Center, which sells Ramtha books, emergency supplies, and will build you a fully stocked 5-room underground shelter for the low price of $1.5 million! The survival center claims to be independent of RSE, but it’s anyone’s guess where the profit from the store goes.

So the next time someone tells you that climate change is just a paranoid doomsday embellishment, you can show them the IPCC’s accurate and frightening most recent findings and then tell them that if they’re looking for crazy and exaggerated, you’ve got just the group for them.

Oh, and if money is still burning in your pocket after purchasing that bargain of a bunker, you can always pay $30,000 to speak one-on-one for an hour with Ramtha him/herself.

Photo Credit: lonesome:cycler on Flickr under Creative Commons license.