Randall Carlson

And so what happened in the past, in order to understand it, we extrapolate from the scale, the magnitude, the rates of change that we see going on now.

And it was considered to be unscientific to invoke anything different than what is now prevailing in terms of global change.

And so...

Pretty much what happened was, by the time geology and earth science became institutionalized as part of academia, in the last couple of decades of the 20th century, you had two things that came together, what is called Lyellian gradualism, and then you had Darwinian evolution.

both of them were predicated upon the idea that these changes, whether it's in the biological realm or the geological realm, were so minute and incremental that you wouldn't even notice them on a day-to-day or year-to-year or even a century-to-century basis, right?

And those two ideas, which have, there's a great deal of power to those ideas,

to explain, I think, half the equation.

But what they did was they neglected the other half of the equation is that, yes, we can see that these kinds of changes accumulate over time.

I mean, just if I go back to where I grew up, you know, half a century ago, I can see changes.

I can see changes in the local creek channels near here where I live.

And I go quite frequently walking or walking my dog or whatever.

In 30 years, you know, things have changed quite dramatically.

However,

Even though you, if you watch carefully, you can see things changing incrementally, little bit year by year.

We had two great storms.

One was, um, Oh, what was it?

Hurricane Ivan came through.

did more work in two days, three days than I had seen in 20 years.

That's the other side of the equation.

Now, take Hurricane Ivan and multiply that by several orders of magnitude.