What is the word for a shocking statement that lacks facts to back it up. E. g. someone talking about climate change and saying “we are at the beginning of a mass extinction” without providing any further facts.

The word used for such statements as described here is sensationalist.

Explanation:

Sensationalist statements are those that are designed to gauge reactions out of people and not necessarily raise the level of, or contribute onto any meaningful discussion in any way.

The statement has no semblance of facts to back it up and is often very exaggerated form of a truth that has been convoluted beyond its sense so it serves only to rile people up and not to make them discuss things.

It is often used in rhetoric to drive the points away from discussion and make speeches out of debates.

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serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.

comfort   in their suffering