Exactly.
Are there any thoughts or refutations to that?
Um, yeah. A few.
First of all, he's not the first person to claim that the Earth is getting bigger, so it's not an original idea or obsession with him. It's called the Expanding Earth Theory--
typical website.
The trouble with them is that they claim that plate tectonics/continental drift cannot suggest a realistic, testable physical mechanism whereby the plates collide and drift (they pooh-pooh the whole "floating around on magma" thing)--yet neither are they able to suggest a physical mechanism that would cause an entire planet to swell up over the course of eons like an expanding loaf of bread.
What they're doing, of course, is that they're looking at the undisputable evidence of massive geological building (mountain chains, rift valleys, the Mid-Atlantic ridge, the way it looks like South America and Africa fit together, etc.), and jumping from that observation to the conclusion that the only thing that could have caused those was some sort of swelling-up of the Earth, skipping along the way those steps that we know as "evidence".
They're not reasoning from scientific data--they're looking at maps and diagrams the way that basically a child does, and exclaiming, "But, how could something like that happen?"
Perfect example, from Neal Adam's page:
Thing is, South America and Africa don’t fit together. If you try to put them together and match the north of South America and the overhang of Africa then as you go down on the two triangular bottoms there is a 25 degree angle missing. A pie wedge of material. You can’t account for it, no matter how you try. Unless you say; the pieces were verrry flexible.
Well they weren’t! Flexible! At all! They’re granite and basalt. They’d break!
There is one way they could fit together, but you geologists would have to seek out your answers in geometry, not geology.
If the Earth were 30 percent smaller all the geometry would change. The continents would wrap tighter around a smaller ball and the tails of South America and Africa would fit perfectly
This is exactly how a kid looks at a map and says, "Hey, where's the missing piece"? He doesn't understand that a map of continents, always in a state of flux whether it's the Plate Tectonics theory or the Expanding Earth theory, isn't the same thing as a cardboard jigsaw puzzle.
A kid also thinks that when scientists say, "The granite and basalt of a continental shelf are flexible, so they subduct", that means "flexible" as in rubber or elastic. He thinks the scientists are stupid for saying that stone can be flexible like rubber. Ha ha! He knows better.
Another specific refutation:
From the geocities page:
There is growing evidence that surface gravity must have been less in the recent past or the dinosaur's could not have supported their own weight, let alone been able to move about quickly without smashing their bones to pieces if they attempted it. Paradoxically, the available evidence indicates that these were agile active animals, as shown in dinosaur stampede tracks, etc. When they wanted to sprint to get away from a predator they clearly could, but if you calculate their body weight and analyse their skeletal structure, they would have shattered their leg bones if they did so. The only explanation that seems to work is that Earth's gravity must have been less in the past but is increasing as mass is added to the mantle.
Ask your friend, "Where is this mass coming from?" That's the central question that the Expanding Earth theory is never able to answer. Mass cannot be created from scratch. A rock cannot increase its mass by itself, from within. Planet Earth is basically a big rock. It cannot create mass for itself. Even if magma adds itself to the mantle and makes the mantle bigger, that mass of magma would have had to come from somewhere.
The usual explanation that the Expanding Earthers offer for this is to invoke "unknown physical processes deep within the Earth's core" that, when they are fully understood, will turn today's physics topsy-turvy and incidentally give the lie to all those Scientists who told us the Earth couldn't expand...Ha ha! We know better.
Another, not as common, explanation is to invoke an ongoing Big Bang-like "matter creation" event deep within Earth's core. This argument leaves most physicists stupefied in amazement, and I've never run across any kind of adequate refutation for it, other than, "What, are you nuts...?"
********************
The "dinosaurs would have smashed their bones if they tried to run in current Earth gravity!" argument is just silly, and betrays a lack of paying attention.
The dinosaurs that are now presumed to have been able to run fast are NOT the lumbering dinosaurs with the big heavy bones. Give
this page to your friend to read. The big heavy-boned dinosaurs have never been presumed to be able to do anything other than lumber along. It's the theropods like T.Rex that have now been--tentatively--promoted to "fast runners". And hind-leg runners like T.Rex are so obviously built physically different from four-leg plodders like Triceratops that only someone who wasn't paying attention--someone who only heard, "Dinosaurs could run fast after all" on the news and who doesn't understand that there are different
kinds of dinosaurs--would jump from that to, "Earth's gravity must have been different to allow Triceratops to run fast". Yes, if Triceratops had been able to run fast, that would indeed mean that Earth's gravity must have been different--
but nobody's saying that Triceratops could run fast.
Earth's gravity
couldn't have been different because, again, mass cannot be added to a planet (unless you're talking about planetary collisions). Gravity is directly tied to the mass of the body. The smaller the body, the lower its gravity. If Earth's gravity had been smaller, and it's more now--then where did the mass come from, that would have increased the gravity? Mass cannot be generated from nothing.
I know it's probably frustrating to spend any time on this kind of crackpot stuff, but I really appreciate your help with this.