So-called experts and advocates, who often have a vested stake in creative doomsaying, seem particularly gifted at ginning up hypothetical links to misfortunes that may or may not occur. Some days it feels like if you subtracted hypothetical outcomes from the day's haul of news, there might be precious little left to report.

Take the recent intergalactic scare story linking alcohol consumption to cancer. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy paralyzed a generation of tipplers by calling for cancer warning labels on alcoholic beverages. "For certain cancers, like breast, mouth, and throat cancers, evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day," Murthy's report noted.

"Note the operative word, may," Allysia Finley wrote in The Wall Street Journal, alert to the tyranny of the conditional.

Finley further rained on Murthy's parade by noting that a recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine "found insufficient evidence to support a link" -- that word again -- "between moderate drinking and oral, pharyngeal, esophageal, laryngeal, and other cancers. It did find a slightly higher risk of breast cancer with moderate drinking but also a lower risk of death generally and from cardiovascular disease specifically compared with never drinking."

One of my all-time favorite maybe-yes-maybe-no news bombs was Kathryn Schulz's 2015 New Yorker article "The Really Big One." Eliding various theories floating around seismological circles, Schulz posited that an earthquake along something called the "Cascadia subduction zone" might cause most of the Pacific Northwest to be destroyed. "Across the region, something on the order of a million buildings -- more than three thousand of them schools -- will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges," Schulz wrote.

The most famous quote from this article was "Everything west of Interstate 5 [the highway that runs from Portland to Seattle] will be toast."

As a former Los Angeles resident, I am precisely the wrong audience for this type of scaremongering. All I ever heard from my East Coast friends was: "Come home soon, that whole state will slide into the Pacific." Tragically we now see that LA is doomed but for a different reason.

I visited the Pacific Northwest in September, and, curiously, I heard more talk of Sasquatch than of the storied subduction zone. Perhaps that is because, as Schulz wrote, "the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten."

So there's a 90 percent chance the really big one won't occur in 50 years. Seems a bit less threatening to me.

President-elect Donald Trump plays on the media's obsession with hypothetical scenarios like a Vienna concertmaster. He may create a blindingly ridiculous "EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE." (His caps.) Perhaps he will invade Greenland and annex Canada, other nonsense possibilities that made for "news" of a sort in recent days.

Will [insert dubious eventuality here] happen or not? Signs point to maybe -- but please consult this space for regular updates.

Alex Beam's column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him @imalexbeamyrnot.