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Where the populace is warned of pending disasters, this should be taken in the context of false warnings to cause the populace to prepare for the real thing, which the government will probably never actually announce. Meteors and trash falling from the sky. Tidal waves that would engulf coastal cities. Pathogens from outer space causing total crop failure. These false stories set many in the populace to thinking about what-if, and the mind moves to solutions. This in conjunction with deniable sites such as Troubled Times, which has the necessary element of doubt in that it can be dismissed as merely the warnings of some hypothetical aliens from Zeta Reticula, creates a tendency to prepare, to have an escape or alternative lifestyle handy. All to the good, in the thinking of some.
Alarms about solar flares are exaggerations. Solar flares will increase as the time of the passage approaches, but are in and of themselves not devastating. They, like the earthquakes that are on the increase, will increase in number, and plague electronic communications, but have little effect on the tides, growing seasons, or the weather. Those who would shield the populace from the truth of the 12th Planet's approach will say otherwise, declaring that this is the cause of the increase in deep earthquakes, the chronic El Nino, and magnetic diffusion. It is not. It is just yet another symptom of the approach of the rogue planet that causes the Earth such devastation during its periodic passage.