Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun One who believes in catastrophism; a cataclysmist.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Geol.) One who holds the theory or catastrophism.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Of, having, or being a theory that explains a situation by positing one or more
catastrophic events, as opposed to gradual changes. - noun A catastrophist person: a person who subscribes to a catastrophist theory.
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Jean Burgess, who I think totally correctly debunked the "catastrophist" narrative, as I later dubbed it, about the death of the newspaper.
Larvatus Prodeo 2008
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Even when the media was not “picking a winner” in the science, it supported the catastrophist message in its editorial decisions, choosing to cover (for example) ad nauseum a 30-year low in Arctic sea ice but failing to even mention a 30-year high in Antarctic sea ice which occurred on nearly the same day (more here).
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This removes the keystone of the catastrophist arguement, which is the only one which justifies emergency action.
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Even when the media was not “picking a winner” in the science, it supported the catastrophist message in its editorial decisions, choosing to cover (for example) ad nauseum a 30-year low in Arctic sea ice but failing to even mention a 30-year high in Antarctic sea ice which occurred on nearly the same day (more here).
Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Dangers of a Monoculture — Reactions to the CRU Emails 2009
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I'm not a catastrophist about these, but it's certainly not that I trust us to make the right decisions; I just think we're going to see some radical upheavals that make the transhuman cybertopia look unlikely at more than a temporary subcultural level among a group limited by class and location.
More Aesthetics Hal Duncan 2007
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I'm not a catastrophist about these, but it's certainly not that I trust us to make the right decisions; I just think we're going to see some radical upheavals that make the transhuman cybertopia look unlikely at more than a temporary subcultural level among a group limited by class and location.
More Aesthetics Hal Duncan 2007
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If you're a catastrophist, you want to take steps that would have a huge impact on peoples lives before anything happened.
On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with... 2009
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In this debate, Agassiz was a catastrophist, believing that God created species, then wiped them all out and started with new species.
Agassiz, Louis 2009
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Mainly I feel that the bat-winged model is a legacy of the flawed "orthodox" view of ornithodires as maladaptive failures, that was so common in the pre-Bakker era, i.e. a very negative and catastrophist view of these creatures.
Life's Time Capsule: Questions about Pterosaurs #1 Peter Bond 2009
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I should warn you that my chatter on this matter is ... well, catastrophist.
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