From Catastrophism to Neo-Catastrophist Rhetoric: The Problem of Scale

William Whewell coined "catastrophism" in 1832 to describe geological discontinuities, but the framework was abandoned when geology learned that local disruptions don't automatically signal global revolutions. From Cuvier's fossil gaps to Bretz's vindicated Scablands floods and the Alvarez asteroid hypothesis, science accepted catastrophes only when backed by globally synchronized evidence. Today's climate debate risks repeating the old error: extrapolating local signals into universal crisis narratives without sufficient inductive discipline across temporal and spatial scales.