"The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been

"The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right." I was going to say that this is obviously rubbish and if the professor is spouting it then it reflects very badly on his hypothesis. But then I thought about what I would say if some journalist asked an insightful question like 'this is all rubbish and can't possibly be true, right?' The most charitable way of looking at it is: maybe he was trying to remind people how wide the bounds of possibility are and that ruling out the prediction without examining his methods would be premature.