" I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism—a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell’s, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability. "

― Amitav Ghosh , The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable