Re:Fairy tales (Score 1)

The return of catastrophism to geology was marked by the widespread acceptance of the bolide impact at the K-T boundary. An excellent book on this subject is "Mass extinction debates: How science works in a crisis" William Glen (ed.). Most geologists accept that there are events in the geological past that have no present analog. As to your rather narrow vision of "the scientific method", this falsificationalist view is that of the earlier works of Karl Popper. Historical science is inferential, and tries to assign probabilities to what happened, just as human histories do. As for what experiments can tell you, the Miller-Urey experiment told us something about how the possibility of complex organic molecules emerging. That is an experiment that tells us something about what might have been going on 4 B.a. As to the rates of eruption quoted in the article, there is abundant radiometric dating evidence from the Siberian Trappes. The rate of eruption is then simply the change in rock area or volume over the calculated time. The links to the mass extinction may be more tenuous, but there is no question that a major change in the marine organisms occurred aroudn the Permo-Triassic boundary.