#082 THE CONTROVERSY Between "Gradualism & Catastrophism" / The Younger Dryas Series S1E5

Previously on The Younger Drives.

Because the Cavalakes we learned were produced by blocks, big blocks of glacial ice,

dead ice that was strewn over the landscape after the destruction and the recession of the ice sheets.

Okay, so then we went on to this graph where we're learning some additional nomenclature

and getting a kind of a broad perspective through this graphic.

In all cases, drumblings are found under the glaciers to have formed beneath the glaciers,

not outside the glaciers.

Now this to me is, it is very significant.

So they find this foot-thick bed, a brownish, lacustrine, getcha.

What is getcha, Mike?

You got me.

I was setting you up for that.

Okay, getcha is a dark mud that is rich in organic nutrients and oxygen

and has accumulated that the bottom of a marsh or lake.

Getcha is a sediment composed of partially decomposed plant and animal remains

along with fine, non-organic sediment deposited in standing water.

He was describing the stratigraphy, the strata, above the getcha,

which meant warm environment, the cold, glacial depositant clay and the deposit below.

So you picture the sandwich, right?

Cold, warm, cold.

And then of course that cold, that's the younger Gryus, it was followed by the warmth that we now enjoy worldwide.

And why civilization has been able to prosper and the human population has grown to 8 billion people?

Welcome to Randall Carlson's definitive work on the Younger Gryus, your comprehensive overview of climate change.

Alright, so we left off last episode by quoting Jan Mangarud.

And let's see, what do we know about Jan?

Jan was a Norwegian geologist born in 1937 in Oslo, Norway.

We covered this, but just to remind people, he was a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters,

and a member of the Quaternary Research Association.

I'm going to pause for a minute right there because we need to define a term.

Quaternary.

A lot of people have trouble pronouncing that they say quaternary.

I think I even remember you, Mike, mispronouncing the word.

Oh, me?

Quaternary.

So what is the term?

Quaternary.

Quaternary.

Well, it's the two epochs, the Holocene and the Pleistocene.

That's all it is.

Got it.

It gets its name because once upon a time, it was believed that there were four distinct glacial interglacial cycles that defined that period that we now call the Pleistocene and the Holocene.

And it turned out, obviously, to be much more complex than that.

But so the term still sticks, even though it's only two epochs, the Pleistocene and the Holocene.

Now, what's important and interesting there is that the Pleistocene is now dated.

It's gotten older and older the more we study it.

And it's generally defined what distinguishes the Pleistocene from the previous relatively warm, the relative warmth of the Pleiocene is the onset of this oscillating climate between glacial interglacial.

Glacial interglacial.

How many times is that oscillated during the Pleistocene?

I don't know.

I don't know if anybody knows, but it's quite a few times actually, maybe 10 or 12 times.

Wow.

Anyways, the most recent oscillation which brought the Earth out of the ice age and spawned the Holocene that we're in now, the question arises.

And it's a question that has no final answer to it.

Is the Holocene truly a distinct epoch from the Pleistocene or is it just another interglacial period within the Pleistocene?

Hmm.

I've never heard you ask that question before.

Well, I'm not the one who originated that question, but it is certainly a question that doesn't have a definitive answer to it.

Okay, because I thought we were firmly in the Holocene.

Well, we are firmly in the Holocene, yes.

By definition, the Holocene is this period now dated to have begun 11,600 years ago.

Older estimates say the Holocene began about 10,000 years ago.

But now we've got definitive stratigraphic correlations that allow us to say Holocene began 11,600 years ago.

Because they've basically bumped it right up against the end of the younger dryus.

The end of the younger dryus marks the beginning of the Holocene.

That's my understanding.

But you just said that that subject is the whole 11,000 plus years of the Holocene.

Really a completely independent separate epoch.

Or is it just an interglacial phase within the larger Pleistocene that is going to come to an end at the next oscillation and the next onset of the ice.

It correct me if I'm wrong.

But if that second option is the case, then we're technically not in the Holocene.

Well, we're technically not out of the glacial age.

What would then probably happen is the Holocene would just become a substage within the Pleistocene.

We'd probably still call it the Holocene.

There's no reason we wouldn't necessarily change the name of it.

If the ice, the glacial ice doesn't return for another thousand years, well, I think we could say, yeah, this is its own epoch.

It's beyond what would just be a stage within the Pleistocene.

If the ice comes back in a hundred years, well, now me might go, oh, well, this is actually just a stage within the Pleistocene.

Because if we go back to what has long been considered within the Pleistocene,

the analog for the Holocene is a period called the Emean, double E-M-I-A-N, the Emean,

and it is now dated to have lasted from 116,000 years ago to 129,000 years.

13,000 years.

Within that Emean, the climate actually was far more variable than was understood 30, 40, 50 years ago,

particularly with the advent of much more precise dating methodology, within that Emean,

which had phases that were actually considerably warmer than the Holocene.

That warmth caused all the glaciers worldwide to shrink to the point where sea levels may have been as much as 20 feet higher than now.

Now, is the Emean a true analog for the Holocene? Well, for a long time, it was considered to be.

It looked like it was about the same length of time, and it was definitely a period of warmth.

The thing is, though, within the Emean, there were some major shifts and changes within the climate on a scale we haven't seen in the Holocene.

Now, we go back from the Emean, and there are other periods much earlier than that that looked like they could be sort of quasi analogs for the Holocene.

In some ways, though, the Holocene seems kind of unique.

And that's a discussion we definitely want to return to when we start looking at the impetus for the rise of civilization,

and the conditions that were conducive to the rise of civilization, as we now know it,

because ultimately, what we're trying to do with establishing this contextual framework of the younger Dryas,

and the transitions that it represents, is to understand the rise of human civilization, and possibly the fall of human civilization.

And ultimately, the academic studies of the younger Dryas, the ice ages, the climate changes that saw the termination of the great ice age, are of intellectual, very stimulating intellectually themselves.

Right. But they're not just of academic interest. I believe firmly that the younger Dryas has a great deal to teach us about our own time.

And what the future potentially holds, whether it's 10 years, 100 years, or a thousand years from now.

Okay. So anyways, that's where we introduced the term Quaternary, because Jan Mangarud was a member of the Quaternary Research Association.

So if you're researching the Quaternary, you're going back roughly two and a half million years to the beginning of the Pleistocene,

and looking at what characterizes the Pleistocene, which is the oscillating interglacial climate,

and what's also interesting is that the earliest, like, tool-making hominins seem to show up about the same time, a couple of two and a half million years ago.

And then when we go back to about a quarter million years ago, which essentially, when you go down the Greenland ice cores, when you go down the corridor bedrock, those ice cores are going back about a quarter million years.

So they're going back to roughly the time when the very earliest potential modern human remains appear to exist.

Now it's sketchy. When we get that far back, it's sketchy. But I'll make a prediction here. I'll go ahead and I'll make a prediction that as we continue to learn more and more,

we'll be constantly pushing back the time span during which modern Homo sapiens sapiens has been an inhabitant of the earth.

And we're up now pushing a couple of hundred thousand years.

And I will fully expect it before we're done. We'll probably have found evidence that it goes back earlier than that.

A little further, yep.

I'm going to interrupt this podcast for a brief moment while Randall receives a package from the Gods.

Yeah, a package today came today, Mike. And let's see. It says, it says right here, Mike, that it's from the Gods.

Mike, I got a package from the Gods.

You're in luck. There's a big sale going on at CBD from the Gods.com.

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So at this moment, Mike, I'm feeling really special.

So, but I think I better open it up and see what's in it. What do you think?

And let's see if I can just muscle it open from here. Yep. All right. Oh, look it.

There's a personal note from from the Gods.

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And I look forward to talking to you more in the future, continuing taking good care of yourself out there.

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That I've been using for what, three years, four years now.

CBD from the Gods.com.

So that's Jan Mangarud. And we were quoting from him. We ended that.

We talked about glacial features.

We learned about catalogues. We learned about askers. We learned about Maureen. We learned about drummers.

We learned about till all of that. We learned about Getcha.

So now what we're going to do is we're going to move on. And we're going to go back to 1952.

What happened in 1952? The significance. Well, I was one year old, but aside from that,

it was the first publication. There we go.

This paper was published through the University of Chicago Committee on Publications in the Physical Sciences.

So it was the University of Chicago Press, 1952, by Willard F. Libby.

And this was his, where he's describing this process that he figured out called radio carbon dating.

Radio carbon dating allows you to estimate spans of times that have elapsed because the known rate of radioactive carbon

and the formation of carbon 14, right, from, from, say regular carbon, is at a known rate.

And we'll get into that. We'll talk about the process of radio carbon dating.

I don't really want to try to break that down right now how it works. It's very interesting how it works.

But I just want to show that, you know, in the early 50s, this man right here, Willard Libby,

published his paper on radio carbon dating. And radio carbon dating turned out to be a very much a game changer.

Yeah. Yeah. But it has to be, you have to have organic material because of the fact that carbon is a constituent element within, within organic material.

So carbon 14 radioactive isotope of carbon, right, carbon 14.

And you can date, right now, they've refined and made the capabilities of the method much better.

Say, since obviously since Willard Libby's in it now can date material organic material back to about 60,000 years.

Then beyond that, it doesn't really work anymore.

So anyways, we'll talk about that more and how it works. But for now, what radio carbon dating did was, for the first time,

allowed scientist geologists, paleoclimatologists to really start getting a chronological handle on these events.

Now, since then, radio carbon dating has been calibrated. And what we've found is that when we go back a few centuries or millennium or two,

the actual calendar dates and the radio carbon dates are pretty consistent. But the further back you go, they begin to diverge.

So some people are dismissing radio carbon dating because of this divergence. However, scientists have done their diligence,

done due diligence, and they've calibrated it by using primarily dendrochronology.

Because here a tree is an organic, so you can use radio carbon dating to date it, and it has annual layers in it.

Each year that that tree exists has a layer. And you can count layers. Now, well, how do you, you know, while a tree, you know, what if it's, you know, 20,000 years old?

Well, here's the thing, dendrochronologists have very exhaustively collected thousands of samples of trees from around the world.

And what you can do, let's say you've got a tree here and it's layered, I should actually do a diagram. Let's see, it's got this layer here, right?

And it existed for 200 years, three, let's say 300 years. And then when it was 200 years old, another tree grew near it. And that other tree was only now, was 200 years younger than this tree.

However, here's the thing, you can now correlate the layers in the older tree with the younger tree, right?

So now the older tree dies away, the younger tree is still there for another 200 years, right? But because of this overlap, let's say 100 year overlap, you can go in and you can make a correlation, a cross correlation between the rings in the older tree and the rings in the younger tree.

And if they're in the same environment, let's say you've got a warm rainy growing season, now you have a nice big fat ring, then let's say it's a drought.

Well, now there's, there's not much growth. You have a very skinny ring. And you can look in very much, you can see, yeah, here's the pattern in the older tree. And here it is duplicated in the younger tree.

Well, now even the old, the old tree is only 300 years old. The younger tree is 200 years older. So now you have a chronology that's 500 years, right?

Right. Now, by doing this exhaustive correlation back and forth, they've been able to go back and, you know, correlate now radio carbon dating because at the same time, now you've got that organic layer in the tree, so you can date it.

Right. So now, ultimately, what you're trying to do is you're trying to calibrate the number of years from the counting of rings and, and this applies also to a, an ice core, because when you take an ice core out, you've got layers, right?

And those layers can be defined. And now you can also, you can also date that by a uranium thorium dating, you can date now. And then, of course, if there's anything organic in an ice layer, you can date that.

But so you now have several different methods of dating, and you can actually do layer counting in the ice or tree ring counting into trees. And so over, you know, decades, the, the, the glaciologist, the dendrocanologists, and the, the geochemists who are experts in radio carbon dating, they have been systematically

collaborating the two dates. So what happens is, and where some people get confused is that if you're reading the older literature, it might give a date, and that date will be uncalibrated.

It will be generally younger than the calibrated date, right? So you, you'll see a discrepancy, you know, where, oh, the lower younger dry is, or the end of the younger dry is, let's say, placed at 10,000 years ago.

Well, now with the calibrated date, it's 11,600, and that 1600 years or whatever it may be represents that divergence between radio carbon date and calibrated date.

We can also think of the caliber when you see, you know, X number of years, Cal, C-A-L-Y-R-B-P. We'll see that multiple times. You'll get it, Mike, it's calibrated years before present.

And that's going to be different than radio carbon years, because of this divergence factor, and the divergence factor is a function of the fact that the, that the radioactive isotopes of carbon are not constant in concentration to the atmosphere.

Okay. Okay, so basically what I do is I also suggest that the C-A-L, which stands for calibrated, can also be thought of as standing for calendar years, because it's those calibrated years that are the actual calendar years counting backwards from now.

And then the radio carbon years could diverge as much as 1,000 years or 1,500 years, actually looking younger, right? Okay, so with that in mind, this was an important milestone here, the discovery by Willard Libby of radio carbon dating.

Okay, and this paper, first paper was 1952. Now, at 1952, what kind of database did you have to look at to make statistical inferences? Well, you didn't have any.

So you now had to, you know, go fast forward a few years before you could start getting dates to see when things may or may not have happened.

Okay, so we're going to jump forward to 1956, four years now, and we have Maurice Ewing and William Eldon, who published a paper called The Theory of Ice Ages. It occurred in science, summer of 1956.

And here's Ewing. Now, you may have heard of Ewing. Anybody who has seen my work on Atlantis is going to know the name Maurice Ewing, because he was the marine geologist that was on that first cruise aboard the ship that did the traverse of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge back in the late 1940s.

And I have quoted extensively from a 48 expedition, a 49 expedition that Maurice Ewing was the head of that appeared in National Geographic magazine.

So if you're interested in that, then I would definitely say go procure my lectures on Atlantis.

In those lectures, I try to steer away from the fringe, the woo-woo stuff, and just get down to the hard geology and ask the question, does the hard geology, is it consistent with what Plato describes?

That's what we get into.

Well, we'll provide that link to that lecture.

Yeah, good. So here, this is Maurice Ewing. Here's one, I guess he was pretty much younger here.

Yeah, so he was like one of the founding fathers of marine geology. Okay, so Maurice Ewing, William Eldon, a theory of the ice ages.

The data show that this fairly abrupt increase in temperature in the surface layers of the Atlantic Ocean about 11,000 years ago was the most significant temperature change of the past 60 to 80,000 years.

Okay, so what now is he's accessed some of the preliminary radio carbon dates, and he sees that there is an increase, and he calls it a fairly abrupt.

Oh, it's a fairly abrupt increase in temperature because he's being conservative, I assume.

Absolutely, because in 1956, uniformitarianism or strict gradualism dominated all discussion virtually or thinking about earth change, global change, climate change, environmental change, et cetera, et cetera.

And anything postulating catastrophe was considered to be definitely fringe or pseudo or whatever. So what he's saying here is that there was a fairly abrupt increase in temperature in the surface layers of the Atlantic Ocean about 11,000 years ago,

but they were able to determine that it was the most significant temperature change of the past 60 to 80,000 years, although similar changes occurred earlier in the Pleistocene.

We suggest that the alternating warm and cold stages of Pleistocene climate are the effects of fairly abrupt alternations between warm and cold conditions of the upper layer of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

And we're going to get into that because the ocean stratification that presumably resulted from a large influx of fresh water from the melting glaciers is potentially being repeated today by the melting glaciers.

In the melting glaciers, it is claimed would cause an interruption in the thermohalene circulation.

The warm water is being carried up nearly to Scandinavia, dumping their warmth and intensifying because cold water is heavier than warm water,

and then sinking down to becoming deep water, and then that deep water circulating back to the equatorial regions where it picks up more heat in this never ending cycle.

Well, I'll say this, the amount of melting that's going on now is minuscule compared to the rates of melting that ended the last ice age.

And ultimately saw the elimination of something like 6 million cubic miles of glacial ice piled up on the continents that are no longer there.

Okay, so then, but they conclude they have to say this. In spite of the fact of the evidence that they're looking at, they say this, and this is Maurice as a younger man here, he says the theories of the origin of the Pleistocene glacial climate.

And of the glacial and interglacial stages proposed here are in complete harmony with the doctrine of uniformitarianism.

No external influences or catastrophic events are required to initiate or maintain these conditions.

Oh, there was a fairly abrupt changes. However, we are not willing to go. Yeah, we're not willing to backtrack to catastrophism.

That seemed to be the perspective of virtually every geologist or founding father of geology back into 1800s.

So do you think he believed otherwise?

Well, at this point, he may have been having questions, but he's making it clear that what he's proposing here is not going to be in contradiction to the well entrenched gradualism of gradualism. Right.

But I'm asking you, do you do you think he might have personally?

I think it's well pressured into making this public statement as opposed, and personally, I do because look, he says a fairly abrupt. Right.

So he's acknowledging that, well, but he's not willing to go full circle back to catastrophism. Right.

He's saying, well, it's fairly abrupt, but really no external influences or catastrophic events are required. All right. This is 1956.

Then we get to 57, and we're going to go into this. This is where we're going to pick up on the next episode. Very interesting paper by Carl O'Sour or Saur.

The end of the Ice Age and its witnesses, but I'm going to go through this quick for a second, just to 1960.

And the work of Maurice Ewing and Bruce Heason. So here's Maurice again. Right.

He's now collaborating with Bruce Heason and Wallace Brecker, who we're going to meet because they were key players.

Look at the title of this article in 1960. Evidence for an abrupt change in climate close to 11,000 years ago.

Notice the absence of the qualifier fairly abrupt. Yeah, exactly. They're saying no. Unambiguously, there was evidence for an abrupt change in climate close to 11,000 years ago.

Because now we've got, this is 1960. So four years after Ewing's previous paper has accumulated a lot more radio carbon data has been has has made it possible to refine the changes that occurred.

And so this is the shift that has taken place by 1960. Right. So this is where we're going to pick it up in the next episode.

I hope everybody comes back and joins me because as we move forward to this, we're getting we are getting to what to me is just the most exciting developments.

And looking at this, in effect, what kind of seeps through some of these papers about the psychology of these men and women who are making these studies and realizing that wait a second, this is telling a much more dramatic story than we had visualized a generation ago.

I just, you know what, a lot of people will know the difference between or the controversy between gradualism and catastrophism.

But a lot of people won't and I realize so far in the series, we haven't really explained like, you know, what that is. Do you have a before we end this episode, could you explain to those who are not aware of the controversy between those two camps, just exactly what that is and why.

I mean, which is totally irrelevant to why what you're talking about right now is so important.

Well, you know, there's uniformitarianism is a powerful tool for understanding the past. It's basically the tagline of it is the present is the key to the past.

And what you do is when you're trying to decipher archaic landscapes and you're looking prehistoric landscapes of which there is no record.

The first thing you do is go, okay, is there a modern analog to that like speaking of the glacial age, it was the modern analog of the little ice age that helped facilitate the evolution of the eyes and the conceptual framework to understand the big ice age.

Why? Well, we just, we learned about moring, right? We learned about terminal moring. Well, the big, the huge glaciers of the great ice age created big prominent moring that were had been seen and studied, you know, from, from really from the 1700s on, right?

Now, what's happening is that the little ice age, the glaciers worldwide begin growing at around 13, between 13, 1400 years ago, several interruptions and even reversals, but they, they reach their maximum extent like in the early 1800s larger than glaciers worldwide had been for 10, 11,000 years, right?

They begin to melt back. So as they begin to melt back, well, now diligent observers, the founders of geology and glaciology and so on who are like really looking and paying attention could see, oh, the ice age glaciers have recessed backwards and there's boring, right?

Like on the northwest of the, on the flanks of the, of the Alps, the Swiss Alps and the Italian Alps, there is more in little ice age moring, right? Now you go out beyond that another 20 miles or so. There's another moring, which is bigger.

That's basically the same thing, just a large version of it. So look, we've seen the little ice age glaciers creating this moring, receding backwards and now out here on the, on the plane, you know, 20, 30 miles from the Alpine front, where the little ice age moring is, you've got this big deposits of moring.

Ah, they're not just a moring, but all the other evidence of the presence of masses of glacial ice, they put it all together and realized, well, gosh, at one point the glaciers were even way bigger than they were during the little little ice age. So just as the little ice age helped to evolve the ice site and the conceptual framework to see and understand the big ice age.

Now, catastrophism was basically when you had the founders of geology going out, and this is William Buckland, Kuvier, Sedgwick, Rodney Merchison, Humboldt, the list goes on. They were virtually all catastrophists. They looked at the landscape unencumbered by dogma and doctrine.

And what they saw, what time frame was that?

Oh, we're talking early 1800s to, you know, a few decades post civil war, because what happened between the end of the state of American civil war and the turn of the 20th century is that geology became established institutional study, right?

So when geological science was being incorporated into academic curricula, what they were looking for was this framework that they could use, and the framework was drawn from the work of Charles Lyle, who was the one who basically codified and popularized the uniformitarian concept, which, however, eventually became dogma.

In that, here's why it became dogma. And Lyle was building upon the work of James William play fair, James today fair.

Think it was William play fair, who was building on the work of James Hutton. James Hutton was in a position where he was able to see the evidence now that the world was much, much older, right?

When you're looking at the belief that the world is 7 or 10,000 years old, whatever those landscape features are out there, they all have to be formed within that ridiculously constricted framework.

Well, with the advent of the Huttonian chronological model of the earth, it's now many, many times older. What that did is allowed geologists, incipient geologists to go, well, now we don't have to cram everything into 10,000 years.

We've got hundreds of thousands, or now even millions of years to accomplish this. So we don't need catastrophes anymore, that we can throw that out with the Bible and know as flood.

Because now we've got, we've got a concept that everything is happening incrementally, one grain of sand, one drop of water at a time, over these huge vast spans of time, and given enough time, yeah, one drop of water, one grain of sand.

Water one grain of sand is going to be able to accumulate a whole lot of geomorphic work, right? And they pretty much throughout the baby with the bath water.

So I cut you off before you were just about that early group of catastrophists, you were just about to say what they saw, and then I kind of interjected a question.

What they saw was in their minds, evidence of processes unlike those occurring today.

And we're going to, we'll be showing examples of that. You know, actually, if you recall in the, in the, when the new website gets launched, I've got that series already written about the early, the history of early catastrophist geologists, and what they believed in, and what they saw, and how they interpreted it.

Now they didn't all see it eye to eye, of course, of course, but post civil war, what happened was Lallian gradualism came to dominate the, the discipline of geology and how it was taught in universities.

And it became unscientific to invoke processes to explain things that happened in the past that we don't see happening today.

That's where it became dogmatic. Well, why? Why? Why did they introduce this dogma and this unscientific approach to something so important?

Well, it was half scientific because the reference to today's process is very key to understanding half of the, of the, of the concepts of change, right?

But what I'm maintaining is it was only half. The other half was is that, yeah, you have to look at what's going on today. When you look at a, at a meandering river, when you look at an earthquake, when you look at a volcanic eruption, you know, whatever it might be, you look at a forest fire, and then you see that the forest fire burns all the trees off of a slope.

And now there's nothing to retain the surface runoff. And so now you have erosion that occurs that wouldn't occur if the forest was still there. And that erosion creates gullies, it creates outwash, et cetera.

So we can observe things happening today. Absolutely. And we can extrapolate from that. And it's a tremendously powerful tool.

Where they went wrong, I think, is that by putting this straight jacket under thinking and saying that anything that that is explained, not by reference to modern processes or rates is unscientific.

Now, why did they do that? Well, I think it was part of the outcome of this, the controversies between science on the one hand and religion on the other.

Because with the birth of modern science coming out of the scientific enlightenment, those gentlemen had their feet in two worlds, one world where intellectual inquiry is, is, is, you know, believed in and promoted on another hand where if you disagree with church doctrine, you're a heretic.

And there were consequences, you know, I was still going on into 16 early 1700s, right? It was still going on in the time of Kepler Newton and Galileo and Tico Brahi and all those guys, right?

So I think that's part of it is that we want to get, oh, science has got to get away from religion. And the dog must imposed by theological belief systems. And I think that was part of it.

And so there was a sphere that like when breaths came along and early like 1920s and said, hey, there was these really gigantic floods in the Pacific Northwest, the geological establishment said, get out of here.

You're trying to bring back Noah's flood. And we've dispensed with that. We've moved beyond that. We're scientific now. Well, you know, there's a lot to say about that.

Eventually, of course, breaths was vindicated. There were really giant floods. And since then we've discovered that all over the ancient world.

There were really giant floods. Most of them seem to be centered around the glacial interglacial transition. The period we're exactly talking about here.

So that's kind of where we're at now. And we've still got this. We saw first when the catastrophe was invoked to explain the demise of the dinosaurs, the disappearance extinction of the dinosaurs, it was resisted for 10 to 15 years.

And the critics all said the same thing. Well, until you can shoot, you know, you talk about an asteroid impacting the earth and all the feedbacks and secondary consequences of that asteroid impact, right?

Ultimately, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. Well, where's the crater? You know, if this thing happens, shouldn't there be a big crater somewhere? Well, until you show us that crater, we're not believing you.

We're going to go back to all these some of the older, much more longer that the extinction didn't happen overnight. It happened over millions of years, right?

Well, eventually in the early 90s, the crater was found throughout the 90s. It was dated, redated, and it turned out that it was exactly precisely at the Great Cretaceous Church Reboundary.

Right? So eventually now virtually all scientists have accepted that the asteroid impact was real, with the implication that the extinction of the dinosaurs was very quick.

It was not something that took place over millions of years. Fast forward to 2007, which is where we're headed for. What happened in 2007? Well, the events of the Younger Dryas, it was proposed, were triggered by the impact of something from space.

That's still controversial now. And there was, I believe, a very knee-jerk reaction to it, and I'll show why. I think when we get, as we move forward through the timeline and we get there, I'll show why I think that it was a knee-jerk reaction.

And basically you had the gradualists. At that point, controlled the narrative, because here's a difference between the dinosaur impact and an impact happening 11 or 12 or 13,000 years ago, is 66 million years ago. Well, no humans around. It was much more of academic interest rather than pragmatic interest or own times.

It's a totally different matter when you come up to the time in relatively recent human history when we modern humans lived on the earth, and we're only going back twice the distance of the beginning of civilization.

We go back to the beginning of civilization between five and 6,000 years ago, the first appearances of civilization on earth, and we go that far back again. Well, now we're right back there at the end of the Younger Dryas, basically.

And all of those events that happen. Well, those events have implications for discussions of climate change that's going on right now, because all of what we're talking about now, the rapid recession of the ice that we're talking about here.

There's no agreement. There's no consensus on that. What actually happened? There's a lot of different ideas. Some of them have more merit than others. But there's no consensus. And yet we're being told, and we now know from precise dating, multiple cross checking of multiple dating methodologies that there were climate changes that happened extremely fast.

And they were much greater than anything we've seen in the last couple of centuries. And they have been just, you know, at the end of the last ice age. Now, and there've also been pretty extreme changes that have occurred. Now we've discovered in the holocene itself.

Yeah, we're constantly being told, and I see this over and over again. Oh, it's never happened this fast. Well, somebody says, oh, it's never happened this fast. They have no idea what they're talking about. And there's lots of people saying that.

Well, what's the difference here now from climate change? What's different here between man made climate change and natural climate change? Well, it's never happened this fast. Well, I'm sorry, but you have no idea what that's not true. That's not true.

No, that's not true. No, that's not true. And we're going to be exploring that in depth right here. And that's part of why we're doing this. So on that note, I think we better adjourn.

Okay, trying to keep these, trying to keep these episodes concise.

That was a good, that was a good discussion. Just to get, get the context of the, you know, the different camps, and to make sure that people understand the difference between gradualism, catastrophism, why it's important, what the difference is.

And where we are right now, gradualism still has a hold on our education system and on society. Yes, yes, because only within the context of gradualism, can you claim that there is now an anthropogenically driven climate crisis? Right.

Which is a problem, which is a problem. All right, we'll leave it right there. We'll leave it right there. And we're going to pick this up in our next episode. So stick with us. And I hope you're having as much fun as we are.

I know I am me too.