Fashionable Catastrophe

I love reading this type of science article.....but then I have to stop and reflect that there's not all that much science in it. Right now, it's quite the fashion to blither on about catastrophe and Armageddons of all sorts and stripes, but this article -in a putatively respectable "journal of record," is typical of much of what one reads and/or views. A theory built upon linked hypotheses, all resting on very limited and even tenuous physical evidence. The problem is that once the "fashion effect" takes hold, and the theory begins to appear on multiple web sites, then The Hysteria Channel takes over, or The Discovery of a New Disaster Channel, The Learning about Lahars and Tsunamis Channel, or The All Weather is a Disaster Channel....and suddenly a fringe theory has become a sort of "fact" in the common wisdom, a mountain of speculation with only the most tenuous base of support in fact. But facts are such dreary things......