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Research Finds Carbon Dating Flawed
eldavojohn writes "New research funded by the National Science Foundation at the University of Miami is showing that carbon dating (the 13C/12C ratio used to infer age) in the ocean can only be trusted up to 150 million years ago. From the primary researcher, 'This study is a major step in terms of rethinking how geologists interpret variations in the 13C/12C ratio throughout Earth's history. If the approach does not work over the past 10 million years, then why would it work during older time periods? As a consequence of our findings, changes in 13C/12C records need to be reevaluated, conclusions regarding changes in the reservoirs of carbon will have to be reassessed, and some of the widely-held ideas regarding the elevation of CO2 during specific periods of the Earth's geological history will have to be adjusted.' While this research doesn't necessarily throw carbon dating out the window, it should cause people to rethink so many theories about early life that revolved around ages of sediment in the oceans."
Is frustrating, oh no its only accurate for 150million years. JUST WAIT for the ID people to jump all over this and start with the whole dinosaurs didnt exist, invisible man made everything 5000years ago. *sighs* these people live in my neighborhood and are going to harass me with their ignorance again.
carbon dating can only be trusted up to 150 million years ago
Does that mean we'll never know for sure how old John McCain is?
"See! We were right!"
Creationists will be all over this... At least it shows that unlike them, scientists have the capacity to admit it when they're proven wrong.
Dig a little further and you'll find the maximum age of anything on the earth is 20000 years. Satan has manipulated scientific results throughout the ages in order to steer the flock from the only knowledge that truly matters- that Jesus is your savior and no one cares about some dirty rocks under the ocean.
Will there be a patch?
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
Anyone who uses any form of radiometric dating knows that there are limits to the accuracy. The fact that a new limit was discovered doesn't make the technique "flawed", though I will grant that it may call for re-evaluation of some results. Anyone who thinks that the fact that these limits exist is news, though, is terribly misguided.
..for those young earth freaks to come out with some formula that shows that the 6000 is actually 150000000 due to mistranslations in the bible. *sticks thumb up butt*
It's like always close to an order of magnitude off.
Even back in the middle of the last century it was know that "Because the decay rate is logarithmic, radiocarbon dating has significant upper and lower limits. It is not very accurate for fairly recent deposits. In recent deposits so little decay has occurred that the error factor (the standard deviation) may be larger than the date obtained. The practical upper limit is about 50,000 years, because so little C-14 remains after almost 9 half-lives that it may be hard to detect and obtain an accurate reading, regardless of the size of the sample" Correct me if I'm wrong, but this isn't bad news, it's just extending the upper range....good news if anything!
I was going to switch to one of those plastic blow up dolls until I found out that they're loaded with carbon too!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Is frustrating, oh no its only accurate for 150million years. JUST WAIT for the ID people to jump all over this and start with the whole dinosaurs didn't exist"
It doesn't say they didn't exist. The time line however may be a problem.
"invisible man made everything 5000years ago."
The only people saying "invisible man" are atheists trying to think they're clever.
"*sighs* these people live in my neighborhood and are going to harass me with their ignorance again."
Much like you're "harassing" people by posting here.
For next-generationcarbon dating, try eCarbony.com
The radiocarbon dating you're talking about, and most of the posters are thinking of, is with the radioactive isotope Carbon-14 against the stable Carbon-12. This is what's used to date more recent carbon-based life.
This is not what this article is talking about. The method in question is using two stable isotopes and apparently wrongly assuming a correlation between the 13/12 ratio in the plants and the atmosphere.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Why are there so many people in this thread worried about what other people are going to think about this? So many reactions were so similar it seems to be a Pavlovian response.
It is really sad that people who consider themselves to be smarter than others would immediately resort to the grade-school tactic of making fun of others because they are different than you in an attempt to make yourself feel accepted by the group.
I must be new here.
P.S. I'm no creationist or ID advocate.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
A classic example of science journalists who don't have any idea what they're writing about! Ratios of 13C/12C in ocean sediments are used as a proxy of paleoproductivity and a weak proxy of past temperatures. Generally 18O/16O is a better temperature proxy, and is just as easy to obtain. No one really relies on carbon isotopes for anything, except sometimes methane hydrate release. Carbon dating, like figuring out how old something is, is done with 14C/12C, and it is a well known fact that carbon dating is only useful back to 50,000 years ago. Bad science journalism makes me sad inside.
I had assumed from the article title that it was about C-14 dating, but TFS wasn't misleading for a change. One of the problems in using C13/C12 ratios is that there are many processes that will enrich or deplete the amount of C13.
When you date up to 4 other atoms at a time, there's something seriously flawed with that.
it just means that we will never find out exactly what he's made of.
Back when I did my Palaeontology degree (admittedly this was back in the 80s) radiocarbon dating was only supposed to be accurate to about 80,000 years anyway. If you wanted to measure longer times you needed to use other methods or simply go with stratigraphical dating where you worked on the basis of relative ages based on fast evolving fossil species such as ammonites.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Don't let science or facts stand in the way of business.
Unfortunately this serves as "science" for the unwashed masses where public opinion and being fashionable count more than the quest for "truth".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Does this mean that the earth was created in 4004 BC, after all?
WTF? Doesn't everyone know that the earth is only seven thousand years old? (At least that is what fundies say.)
"Why are there so many people in this thread worried about what other people are going to think about this?"
I find it much more insightful "who" is feeling threatened than anything else. I'll refrain from naming the parties but a moment's inspection will clear that up.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
..he must be 6,000 years old. After all he can't be any older.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Ya, that's right, eHarmony is a dating site cover for Chritians only. Try, just try to get a match on their site if you are an atheist. Google it. The guy who started, the Dr. dude, is a Christian conservative. Only Christians need apply. Bah
You need to learn the bible for insight into much of western thought, but you should also learn it for the fun that can be had with it's biblically ignorant followers.
First, ask them what the ten commandments are. This will trip 95% of them up and they'll walk away without bothering you. If they say that the commandments are not important, tell them you think the same about the rest of the Bible.
Claim you don't believe in Yahweh because you don't believe in infanticide. They'll give you a strange look, and then ask them to read Psalm 137:9, which is in context, Jews daydreaming about smashing their enemies' infants to pieces.
Ask them if they eat lobster, or if there's a girl in the group, if they wear pants. If they say yes, ask them why they support the homosexual agenda, since all three are abominations according to the bible.
They will go to great lengths to explain away why what they do or don't is covered by some painful translation-based loopholes, and what everyone else does is what's really wrong. This is the basic definition of a hypocrite, which concerns my favorite scripture:
'As he taught, Jesus said, "Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.'
Don't get me wrong, the world would be a great place of everyone followed the advice of Jesus, but most of them have never read more than ten pages of their Holy Book.
If someone tries to point to this, telling you that it's evidence that all dating techniques are invalid, and that this discovery supports creationism, you can tell them that C14 dating was thought to be effective to 50,000 years, and now it's clearly stated in the article that carbon dating is effective to 150 million years!
Of course, don't point out that these are actually two separate techniques - they won't care anyway.
Carbon dating is based on the decay rate of Carbon 14, and has a pretty short limit geologically speaking - 70,000 years with enrichment methods, but closer to 50,000 years using traditional counting. It's possible accelerator 14C dating has pushed this slightly - I haven't worked in this field for about a decade.
The tie-in to "dating" in this context is that sediments are deposited over time, and if they're undisturbed you can drill a core that'll give you (theoretically) a record of the 13C/12C ratio over time - but that ratio is not being used for dating AT ALL. The only way you could use the ratio for ersatz dating is if the sediment shows an annual 13C/12C cycle due to annual temperature variations - then you can count the cycles the same way you can count tree rings (BTW 13C/12C in tree rings varies in this same sort of summer/winter - or spring/fall - pattern). In any case, the actual dating of the sediments is usually done using a different, longer-lived, radiometric isotope ration such as you find with rubidium-strontium (That particular isotope pair may not be the best fit for sea sediments; like I said, I've been out of this for a while. We mainly did 13C/12C in trees and 18O/16O in ice cores).
#DeleteChrome
They are still human.
Newton believed in alchemical transmutation.
Boyle wrote a paper claiming to have generated heat using gold and a special form of mercury.
Scientists get it wrong all the time. The process of science helps us get a better understanding than we had with time and effort, it doesn't make scientists perfect.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I've read at least four posts that "ID supporters are going to go crazy about this". And I've read zero posts from ID supporters going crazy. The fact is that ID could mean anything from you believe in Vishnu to you believe in the Intergalactic space council that seeds terraformed planets and has planted here, long ago, alien DNA by visiting spacecraft now trapped in a small storage locker somewhere in the Alpha Centauri system. ID is SO vague it can't possibly be argued against, or taught outside of saying "Someone or something may have made all this".
It's sort of like saying my Science is better than your imaginary friend. If some lunatic fringe of the radical evangelical right wing Christians want to disbelieve obvious science fact does not mean that everyone who believes in ID is so naive. Even Christians believe in science, and a lot of them believe that god made physics! But it's not something you can, or should argue about, you end up looking like a bigger fool than the guy who believes in a geocentric universe or some such nonsense.
You shouldn't pigeonhole anyone who believes in something you can't possibly prove or disprove as someone who is inherently stupid and who rejects science. There are far too many scientists who believe in ID for that argument to be valid.
We have never seen a species jump barriers, and fossil records are often not as accurate as they would have you believe.
We just need to stick around for a couple hundred thousand more years then if we see evidence of a species evolving through direct observation then we can basically say beyond a shadow of a doubt that evolution is a fact.
I met a carbon atom, and she was C 1 3,
Won her over with a diamond,
Then showed her my two buckyballs.
She said, "spread that graphite on me baby!"
We were bumping valence shells all the time,
And all was well till I met her twin, a C 1 2,
That ratio made them 140 million years older than me.
I don't know about angles, but it's fear that gives men wings. -Max Payne
Swart, P.K. Global Synchronous Changes in the Carbon Isotopic Composition of Carbonate Sediments Unrelated to Changes in the Global Carbon Cycle, Proc Nat. Acad. Sci. 37, 13741-13745.
Note that the paper is only about carbon dating of shelf sediments, *not* fossils.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Slashdot should have ran the more interesting story pertaining to nuclear decay rates that came up this week, which my nuclear physicist associate (Oliver Manuel) forwarded to me ...
Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance
Seach the Firehose for "decay rate" and you'll find my submission, which was rejected (not complaining actually, just a bit confused).
And it's not even that this result is the first time it's been noticed. Russian researcher Simon Schnoll has performed *thousands* of simple geiger counter isotope decay rate experiments and noticed the same exact thing -- that there is an astrophysical influence to decay rates ...
Russian Discovery Challenges Existence of 'Absolute Time'
The idea that nuclear decay rates might not be random is pretty paradigm-changing. We can doubt the results, but shouldn't we at least be talking about it? It seems to me like a very important finding.
Isn't this even more pertinent to the concept of anthropogenic warming than the absolute dating article Slashdot went with???
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Undoubtedly they will use this to suggest that Carbon-14 is wrong even though this is an oddity of Carbon-13.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Have you ever watched The Bible is Repulsive? It's a great 15 minutes. Spare it. You won't regret it.
I used this video one time while talking to a fundamentalist. We were downtown, there was a gay rights parade (I'm a left-coaster) and the usual fundamentalist Christians on the other side of the street. Several blocks away, I struck up a conversation with a guy who was hanging around.
I guess it was because I'm obviously hetero, and fairly well-dressed, short hair, etc. because he assumed that I was on the Christian Fundamentalist side. I joshed with him for a while, talked about the wife, the kids, working, paying bills, blah blah blah. I mentioned something about strictly following the good book, and tisked about the guys down the street. He was very adamant that we should "follow the good book".
Having planted that seed, I got the kids into the conversation again a little while later. I started in with how I have lots of kids (I do) and how they sometimes misbehave. He agreed, and then I talked about what do you do about it? How do you keep your kids in line!?!? You have important values you want to teach! and he was with me all the way.
And then I said:
"It's a good thing that the good book thought of this, two. When my oldest son snuck out and smoked a joint with his buddies, I grabbed some bricks and killed him, right there on the spot". I played it perfectly, too! He was speechless. "Yeah, I believe that the good book should be taken literally, and it's pretty clear, right there in the Deuteronomy, when your children misbehave, you stone them to death".
As he cursed and walked away, I hollered out: "And the cops haven't even investigated! It's been 2 years now!"
I don't think I've ever laughed so hard in all my life...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
A cursory look at the wikipedia entry on Carbon dating clearly indicates that the method is accurate to mere 30-60k years back from present time.
No one in their own mind would even try to use Carbon dating for 150M years; for dating such large intervals scientists use isotopes with considerably longer half-life.
The article is pure drivel.
The OP never bothered to read the article, or has some strange ideas about carbon dating. The article title is just wrong. The 13C/12C ratio doesn't offer a date of any kind. What it has been used for, as the article says, is to infer when life begins to be an important player in the planetary environment. The article explains that a researcher has identified flaws in how the ratio is estimated. Nothing what-so-ever to do with "carbon dating." Instead it has to do with estimated dates of the ratio changes. The dates are probably Uranium based dates (you can't date anything more than about 50,000 years old using radiocarbon). The C13/C12 ratio estimated from proxies FOR that date are apparently in error.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
IF a theory can be disproved by an observation, then it is a theory.
I used to agree, but consider the theory "some sheep are black." Spotting a black sheep could prove the theory and until you find a black sheep, parsimony says you should presume the theory false, but there is no observation you could(*) make that would affirmatively disprove the theory.
Same goes for "there was once life on mars", "silicon based life is possible", "there is life on other planets", "kangaroos sometimes kill their young", and "the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct".
(*) You might be able to get some play from the idea that a theory only has to be disprovable in theory rather than practice (i.e. in theory you could check all the sheep in the world even if you couldn't in practice). However, I'm doubtful if that could work since in theory just about any theory is disprovable given a sufficiently advanced technology and sufficiently strange physical laws.
Supposing this story is true, that carbon dating can only be trusted 150 million years ago, this still is sufficient to ridicule those fundamentalist creationists and superstitious who believe that the earth was created 4004 years ago. That's right, folks: even if science makes a mistake, there is always sufficient margin to not give the slightest hope to the superstitious that they might be correct.
FYI: In 1650 the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, published the Ussher chronology based on Bible history giving a date for Creation of 4004 BC.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
The same researches have also found the Speed Dating is flawed.
This is not about Carbon dating at all (that's about looking at the decay of Carbon 14, produced by cosmic ray radiation high in the atmosphere), this is about the Carbon 12/13 isotope ratio used as an indicator of biological activity in the distant past. Basically, what they say they found was that this is only trustworthy in deep ocean sediments, not on land or in island sediments, and you can only find deep ocean sediments for the last 150 million years or so, due to plate tectonics recycling the sea floor.
This will not affect geological dating at all. It may affect the interpretation of some work regarding, e.g., extinction events. It's hard to say without looking in detail at the other work (they may have several lines of evidence, etc.).
SO old that she can't even get carbon dated
Is it your contention that they only measure CO2 levels at that one location, and that all Climate Change work is based on measurements from that one location? If so, then you are mentally ill. Such a belief can't be based on stupidity; you would have to be too stupid to read or write (or breathe). Please seek professional help.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
How long before Sarah Palin is on the tube saying -
"See, we should teach creationism, because Science can't tell us how old stuff is. And if science can't tell us how old stuff is, then why couldn't the world be only 6000 years old? Put God back into our school science classes where he belongs..."
All I can say is Good Grief! Makes me with the LCH had blown up the world yesterday.
Let's say for the sake of argument that some advanced alien space travelling race created life on earth and guided its advancement over time through genetic engineering. There's no reason in principle why this fact, if it was a fact, could not be subjected to scientific investigation.
OK. Define the experiment that will test that. I'm interested to see how you pull it off.
Firstly, the above should not be marked troll. Because someone poses a valid argument that you don't agree with doesn't mean they are trolling for hate.
,(unless someone chooses answer to #2 to be "everywhere, and in everything" to which respond "so I am God also?"), to asking some body if Aliens existed, where would they live, and where would that be located and so on and and so on.
Secondly the GP of this particular post should be modded informative, not insightful. He is stating, in an informative manner, two components of a theory
To leave the poor modding subject, to understand why the alien substitution for God does essentially work is this. Ask a creationist or some hardcore religious person this series of questions:
1.Who/what is God
2.Where does God exist (demand a physical location or residence)
3. Ask where that location is located
The end of result of this will be almost identical
The point is you are asking a series of questions that lead to the unanswerable question of "what exists outside of the universe?Where is the universe located?"
It is impossible to test or disprove that an invisible man is living in the sky...
No, it's not... It's easily tested. The hard part is reporting the results to anybody else.
Seach the Firehose for "decay rate" and you'll find my submission, which was rejected (not complaining actually, just a bit confused).
You mean this article?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/29/1227239
Take Potassium-Argon dating for example. "Potassium-argon dating is accurate from 4.3 billion years (the age of the Earth) to about 100,000 years before the present."
Nice attack on the parent there...
Is it me, or is there an awful lot of extrapolation going on here? Also, how do people get the half-life of stabilized nickel to be some odd Billion years? I read once in an article that they used the geologic record of the earth to determine it, but I figured that can't be right, because you use that to determine the age of a mineral sample, and that makes it circular reasoning.
Furthermore, the Japanese are always hauling the most unusual carcasses out of the Pacific, whether they are giant squid befitting captain Nemo, or ancient plesiosaurs. There are accounts in the Lower Kingdom of Egypt of poisonous spitting lizards that walk on two legs, and nearly every culture with written tradition that existed during the Dark Ages had Wurm/Dragon mythos.
C-14 dating is decent to 10,000 years and approximate to 50,000 years with special equipment. This essentially covers modern humanity hostory. The C-13 method in the article mentioned hundred million years.
Read the whole thing. Has some good advice, but it's pretty obvious to anyone that the codified New Testament is a derivative work of other Pagan religions, strong-armed into place by an empire desperate to unite and control their territory via a new, all-inclusive religion. I think that safely explains why Paul (Roman Citizen and a Jew?) was so adamant about rules and the inclusion of gentiles.
If you're a student of history, and you believe that many books are more reliable than one book, you can even trace the evolution of the Jewish and Christian faith based on what cultures they were exposed to historically, and then find new subsequent "revelations" in the OT and NT. One of the most obvious changes is in Genesis, where all references to multiple Gods have been removed for "clarity." You also have the official doctrine of "diabolical mimicry," where the ripoff of Dionysus, Osiris, Mithras, etc., is explained by believing that the devil foresaw the coming of Christ and invented other religions to prematurely discredit it. Just like the dinosaurs which receive no mention have a huge fossilized record which was placed here to "test" our faith. The four gospels don't even agree on what kind of man Judas was.
The Old Testament is simply more fun because it's the rantings of an angry desert tribe, trying to prove their God was tougher than the others. Blatant liberalization of old world ideas is definitely a message you should take away from the NT. Just as shellfish and pork are no longer abominations, most ideas from 2000 years ago are no longer relevant to society. Sorry.
The Bible is so inconsistent and obviously self-defeating that it has to be read in small bits, cherry picked over years for it to be passed off as believable. When I finally walked away from it in disgust, the church leaders begged me to just believe it was true before I read it, and then it would make more sense. If you read it from beginning to end, it's too obvious, and one reason Christians are the least literate of their own book among other religious followers.
I'm just going to ignore the stupidity about ONE of the locations that CO2 levels are measured from.
Anyway, global climate change is a currently proven theory. There should be no debate on this. People, stop saying global warming is not happening, its childish to do so. However, human-caused global warming is still up for further testing.
The real issue, is that there is at least a chance that we are influencing global warming with pollution. It would be irresponsible to ignore this risk.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
"Miscalculation" is the wrong word. Geologists are nuanced (unlike this headline) in how they interpret C-13 vs. C-12, especially for early Earth history. The PNAS paper is not about the ratio being flawed, it's about another way to interpret the activity of the shallow ocean versus the deep, open ocean. The paper is simply another line of scientific discussion, itself part of the scientific method.
Yes, they measure carbon dioxide levels at the largest volcano on the planet. Do you see any problems with that?
Yeah, I bet the scientists who spend their whole lives measuring carbon dioxide never thought of that.
Mauna Loa doesn't really outgas a lot of steady CO2. It comes in bursts, which you can see in the data, and you can independently check whether you may be getting contamination by looking at the wind direction. They have to throw out some data points now and then, but the final record is quite independent of volcanic activity.
And if you don't believe Mauna Loa, you can look at all the other places where CO2 is also measured, as others have pointed out. Plus direct CO2 flux measurements on land and for the ocean. And the cumulative ocean uptake of carbon. And the decrease in atmospheric oxygen levels as O2 is added to C during combustion to make CO2. And direct economic numbers on how much fossil fuel has been extracted and added to the atmosphere. And you can look at trapped gas in ice cores for CO2 levels earlier than 50 years. And so on and so forth.
This is an example of someone with such knee-jerk skepticism that they don't do any basic fact checking. CO2 levels are not what the debate is about; nobody seriously argues against those.
Radio carbon dating for recent artifacts has been calibrated using dendrochronology, using old redwood trees, comparing the samples to counted rings. AFAIK, radio carbon dating gives a range--not an exact date. Science as a process, and scientific information becomes more exact over time. The process of fine-tuning radio carbon dating will continue.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
"is showing that carbon dating (the 13C/12C ratio used to infer age)"
13C/12C is a STABLE carbon isotope ratio, which wavers around over geological time. It gives some indication of changes in biomass, erosion, and other processes affecting the carbon cycle. Simplistically, it is about changes in biological versus non-biological carbon-storing processes occurring on land and the oceans.
Sometimes that variability through time is a signature that can be used to correlate rock successions of the same age (e.g., if it does a particular rate and magnitude of wiggle, that might correspond to the wiggles in 13C/12C found at another site), but this method distinctly DOES NOT yield a numerical age, and it is therefore not a radiometric dating technique. It is useful for correlation -- i.e. matching ages from site to site -- which is valuable, but a different sort of age information (the order of geological events, not their numerical age). This article calls that correlation ability into question, but there are many other techniques used.
The threshold at about 150 million years has to do with the fact that there isn't any ocean crust older than that which hasn't been subducted into the mantle or pushed up onto the continents in rather deformed pieces -- i.e. it gets harder to get an unaltered and continuous sample of carbonate rock in order to measure its 13C/12C ratio.
C-14 dating relies on a radioactive isotope (i.e. C-14) and it only works back to about 100000 years or so. It goes that far only if you use specialized techniques. Most C-14 dates are in the range age of those carbon cycle fluctuations? No. There's no mention of that in the cited article because the numerical ages of the variations come from entirely unrelated techniques.
What could changes in our understanding of 13C/12C ratios through geological time possibly have to do with U/Pb or K/Ar isotopic ratios, for example?
Anybody who thinks this calls the age of the Earth or "carbon dating" into question is seeing the word "carbon" and "isotope" in the same sentence and thinking that equates with C-14 dating, which isn't even relevant to the age of the Earth in the first place. In other words, they're confused.
And sometimes we can look at things right here on Earth, too!
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
See my sig - we can make it class action!
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
to do radiometric dating~
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nice straw man comeback.
Oh yeah -- the ad hominem clincher. Excellent job.
sig: sauer
It's not a straw man. The poster was correctly pointing out that CO2 measurements are not based on a single measurement site on a volcano. So even if you think the volcanic site is being contaminated, that has nothing to do with the measurements of CO2 made everywhere else which show the same trend, and therefore the original poster's premise (that global warming research conclusions rest on volcanically contaminated measurements) is wrong.
Yes, it was a straw man. When the word "only" was used, it became a straw man argument. The original post did not say that CO2 levels are only measured next to volcanoes. But, the reply attempted to reduce his argument by saying he did. Look again.
sig: sauer
For example, did you know that they've only been measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1959? Less than 50 years. And did you know that they measure the carbon dioxide levels on an active volcano? ... Obviously people aren't going to believe that they are measuring CO2 from an active volcano, because it's just too stupid to be true.
If the OP was not trying to at least insinuate that the CO2 readings used to support Climate Change are being taken from that active volcano, then s/he has no point, whatsoever. Is it "too stupid to be true" to measure the CO2 output of a volcano? No. Is it "too stupid to be true" that scientists would use only those measurements and discover Climate Change? Yes, that would be too stupid to be true, and that was obviously the OP's intent.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
The original poster was explicitly attempting to use the volcanic measurement of CO2 to cast doubt upon global warming. The other poster was correct in noting that this is a logical fallacy, since the conclusions of that theory do not depend upon volcanic measurement of CO2.
Obviously people aren't going to believe that they are measuring CO2 from an active volcano, because it's just too stupid to be true. But it is true, take a look: CO2 measured at Mauna Loa. Yes, they measure carbon dioxide levels at the largest volcano on the planet. Do you see any problems with that?
Thanks for proving that volcanos don't influence CO2 levels much: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html
Note the spikes in 1975 and 1984, when there where huge eruptions at Mauna Loa - No? Because there are none. Figure that.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
If you read nothing but apologetics, everything can be rationalized away. Thus apologetics only prove that you will continue to believe whatever you want to believe in. It's why you haven't read ten books defending the Qur'an or the Book of Mormon or Scientology. But the real leap of faith for any religion is making the obvious mistake of claiming infallibility. I could see room for saying, "This is the truth, in the best way it could be interpreted by people, and it's somewhat flawed." But dogmatic religion requires belief in perfection, and nothing in our universe is perfect or even wholly predictable.
The internal failure of the concept of any Judeo-Christian God was illustrated thousands of years ago by Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
If God cares, why not beat the devil and prevent further suffering today, or a hundred or a thousand years ago? It's like raising animals in an environment that guarantees their suffering, in order to "save" them. It makes no sense at all to any rational person.
He did not say that. Straw man again.
This is Slashdot man. We can read what he posted and what you posted. You can get away with this, stop trying.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Yes it did. If it did not, no measurements would be taken there in the first place.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Boy, you'll go to any length to try to nitpick your way into being right, won't you?
If you say, "When it comes to global warming, they'll believe anything", then explicitly say "for example", and proceed to give an example of CO2 measured next to volcanoes, the obvious implication is that the CO2 measured next to volcanoes has something to do with global warming. Otherwise you're attempting to claim that the poster gave an example that had nothing to do with what said poster was explicitly giving an example of.
Give up man, it's pathetic. Admit that the AC didn't know what he/she was talking about and move on.
No. The conclusions remain unchanged even if you take Mauna Loa out of the data set. And the Mauna Loa data set is itself independent of volcanic activity.
I was under the impression Argon dating was also used for time scales greater than 50k years, which is about as far back as Carbon-13 dating works.
If they measure CO2 next to volcanos it obviously has something to do with global warming, or else they simply would take measurements elsewhere. Poster was attacking something the OP did not say.
'AC did not say what the poster refuted' == Straw man. It's not that hard. Try rubbing ice on forehead.
Give up man, it's pathetic. Admit that the AC didn't know what he/she was talking about and move on.
Actually pleading me to stop arguing instead of giving me an actual counter argument is pathetic.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
If somebody farts it will smell even after the 1 or 2 seconds of the fart itself. Now move that to a giant Earthly asshole scale and wonder why the following statement is not exactly Nobel prize winning material.
And the Mauna Loa data set is itself independent of volcanic activity.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
If they measure CO2 next to volcanos it obviously has something to do with global warming, or else they simply would take measurements elsewhere.
That's wrong, for two reasons I pointed out elsewhere.
'AC did not say what the poster refuted' == Straw man.
Sorry, the AC clearly gave an example of something upon which the theory of global warming was supposed to depend. It is not a straw man to point out that the theory does not actually depend on volcanic activity or even the results of measurements made on volcanoes.
Well there's a devastating scientific rebuttal if I've ever seen one. You should write it up as a comment to Nature Geosciences.
Ok, we agree to disagree then. :)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Dang.
Maybe I will! :)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
More seriously, as I noted elsewhere in this thread, the reason why volcanic CO2 emissions are not present in the Mauna Loa data set is because such emissions are detected by the instrument, but are flagged as such and removed before being entered into the data set.
Charles Keeling became famous 50 years ago for his careful efforts at calibration and bias removal in these kinds of measurements. The first thing you do is site the instrument at a location on Mauna Loa where the prevailing winds do not come from the volcano. Since you can't rely on that — at night with light winds the gas can be trapped in a thermal inversion and carried downslope to the instrument — you also set up an anemometer to detect whether there is wind coming from the volcano. And even without the wind data, CO2 from the volcano is easily distinguishable from background CO2 because it's (a) bursty in time, (b) much more variable in magnitude, and (c) shows a higher mixing ratio with the ambient air. There's actually more to it than that, but that's the "first line of defense" against contaminated data.
Indeed, it's only within the last 10-15 years that people have started to use this discarded "nuisance" data to go back and determine what the volcanic emissions were. Before that, people just used the clean background data for global CO2 levels and ignored the removed volcanic contribution. Some relevant papers are Ryan, Chem. Geol. 177, 201 (2001), Keeling et al., Tellus 28, 6 (1976), and Thoning, Tans, and Komhyr, JGR 94, D6 (1989).
Carbon dating c13/c12 is ***not****
carbon 14 radioactive dating.
C13 and c12 are stable forms of Carbon. I'm not sure what kind of dating these scientists think they can do with that. The Earth's makeup of C13 to C12 is 1:99.
Radioactive C14 dating is only good for about 40000 years. C14 has a half-life of ~5600 yr, after 6 half-lives you'd be hardpressed to find a single C14 atom in any sample you do.
You have to use other radioactive isotopes after that. Plus there is the problem that C14 dating assumes a particular rate of the natural creation of C14.
C14 occurs naturally in the atmosphere when N takes on an extra proton. Once a living being dies they stop breathing. While a living being breathes it accumulates C14. Once it is dead it no longer accumulates C14 and the C14 begins to decay to Nitrogen. C14 dating only works with remains of living beings.
1. Many great scientists, such as Louis Pasteur, were Religious. Religion also helped greatly in bringing us out of the dark ages. Religion and Science are not "enemies." The enemies are those on both sides who thrive off this kind of stuff, and have created the illusion that Religion and Science are both out to get each other. THESE are the people we should be out to get. I think that, in general, religious people are happy as long as scientists don't start saying "Because of this, that, and these, God doesn't exist." and the scientists are happy as long as religious people don't start saying "HOW DARE YOU CHALLENGE GOD BY ...."
2. I see nothing wrong with evolution, save for the fact that we don't have a lot of the links. I do not see why God could have made the inhabitants of the earth, through evolution. It is a very nice theory. I do not think that we can prove or disprove evolution or creationism. It is a matter of personal belief.
3. There were dinosaurs. We have fossil records. And there are dinosaurs in the Bible (at least, creatures that sound an awful lot like dinosaurs). There were dinosaurs. I do not think that any well-informed Creationist, arguing for their cause, would deny that there were dinosaurs, as this would call into question their understanding of the world around them and a major point that they would bring up would be "How come there are dinosaurs in the Bible when you say that no one was around during that time?"
4. Once again, scientists should not think that religious people are trying to disprove them, and religious people should not think that scientists are trying to disprove them.
There are some people out there, on both sides, who will profit over such thinking as this. Of course, when you think that the other people are out to get you, you start fighting the other people. Thus proving that you are out to get the other side, which will provoke the other side. And the people who are profiting from all of this? They are now right.
This constant fighting will only stop progress.
I can't help notice that one of the most common replies is something along the lines of "wait until those *@#&$ Creationists get ahold of this". To point out that only a small, vocal, somewhat silly fraction of Christians truly believes the Earth is only 4000 (or was it 6000?) years old is probably pointless, but I would like to point out that 150 million years is still several orders of magnitude too large to fit that particular belief, so it doesn't really change anything for them.
Look at it this way: It's another opportunity to prove that scientific inquiry is not just another belief system, being self-correcting when new data comes to light. Whereas clinging to old theories in the face of contradicting evidence *would* suggest a belief system.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
OMG! this is proof the dinosaurs were wiped out with the mammoths in Noah's flood! Which is the creationists interpretation of what this actually is: another dating method getting it's accuracy window re-adjusted. That is, one of the 35-40 dating methods I can think of that are in common use today. Given the research the article has pointed out, this kind of revelation actually makes dating more accurate. It's the nature of science that people don't understand, getting it wrong is a good thing.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
That was a pretty darn good response. Ok then, I withdraw the fart theory, since it has been disproven. :-)
I don't think global warming is a lie. What I'm trying to fight here is the politics guised in 'science' that would have us freeze the developing world in time while carbon taxing the entire world to fill their environment-friendly pocket. That is dirty, dishonest and opportunistic crap.
There's no denying that the environmental movement has been hijacked by special interests. I think that's really bad. For science AND the environmental movement.
The best thing for the environment is technological progress. I mean, a car pollutes less than four horses, a locomotive pollutes less than, oh, a bunch of cars or trucks and taking a plane to Paris will certainly cost much less than a cab.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance
This very paper was discussed a week prior to your firehose submission:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/29/1227239
I'll address your submission/commentary here, since your present post reiterates only a portion of your position.
[there is an] interesting story pertaining to nuclear decay rates that came up this week, which my nuclear physicist associate (Oliver Manuel) forwarded to me ...
Yup, this reader has a "nuclear physicist associate", and feels the need to stoop to name-dropping; better accord him some reverence!
The Oliver Manuel in question is not a nuclear physicist; he's a retired nuclear chemist:
http://www.omatumr.com/
He's just another dilettante, dabbling in astrophysical theory despite lacking almost all knowledge of the established field.
And he is a crank "independent researcher" running among the iron sun folks:
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/07/23/sun.iron/
He (along with others in the iron sun crowd) have been converging with the Electric Universe club for some time (see the first link above, and read the usual EU literature).
Einstein liked to say of it that "God does not play dice" and made the rather eloquent point that, as stated in the second link, "Just because physicists in Bohr's time could not penetrate beyond the apparent randomness of radioactive decay and other microscopic processes, to find a deeper lawfulness and regularity underlying such processes, does not mean that science is doomed to remain in that state of ignorance forever".
Just to clarify, you're talking about two separate things:
1) Einstein's assertion that "God does not play dice" was a statement that he didn't think there was any nonlocality; that nature only appeared to exhibit nonlocality.
2) The second assertion is merely a restatement of the scientific process: there could always be some new discovery showing that prior knowledge was only a special case of a greater reality.
Jonathan Tennenbaum, the article's author, is blurring the precise physical meaning of (1) and implies in the article that it means Einstein was merely exercizing skepticism. Actually, Einstein's position on nonlocality was no more or less dogmatic than Bohr's. His doubt was based on the observation that the universe never exhibits nonlocality at large scale, while Bohr's was based on the observation that it always exhibits nonlocality at small scale. The situation would be resolved if a "hidden variable" could be found. As it turns out, there is no such hidden variable, even in principle, because reality isn't that way. Bell's extension to the EPR paradox demonstrates that no hidden variable theory is compatible with what's actually observed in nature. Nonlocality is a fact of physical reality, even though it is counterintuitive, is philosophically grating, and causes difficulties for theories bridging small and large scale effects.
If it turns out there's a heretofore unknown mechanism affecting the decay rates, that would refine the understanding of physical laws and arrangement of matter in space, but it couldn't alter nonlocality even in principle. In the postscript excerpted at your second linked article, D.S. Chernavskii's second point is glaringly wrong. From Bell's extension, we know that if quantum mechanics is incomplete, it cannot give correct predictions. But quantum mechanics does give correct predictions, so there are no hidden aspects, and the universe is decisively nonlocal at small scales.
21st Century Science & Technology is a conspiracy theory hawking vanity press, and it shows.
Vladimir Voeikov, a colleague of Shnoll, comments in the Spring 2000 issue
I don't really want to get into the environmental movement and what its motivations may be. I think the more interesting question is what should be done about global warming. Regardless of what you think about the politics, a carbon tax remains an economically effective policy instrument. Counting on technological progress is not enough: if you believe in the free market, you should want the economic incentives to align with the right technologies. The problem is right now they don't.
If one accepts that CO2 emissions have environmental costs, the market is not yet aware of these extra costs. It is a negative externality leading to inefficiency. To correct the market distortion, it is necessary to internalize the externality by putting a price on it. That way, technologies which reduce carbon emissions become more economically competitive, as they should if carbon-intensive technologies have hidden environmental costs. And not just technological progress; as long as there is a price on carbon which reflects its true costs, the economic incentive is there to minimize carbon emissions by whatever means are more efficient. That might be simple conservation measures, or greater deployment of existing but underutilized technologies. It can be some mix of technologies, like low emission vehicles, carbon capture and sequestration, alternative energy, improved building codes, etc. As long as there's some uniformly imposed price, the market will ideally find the optimal mix of solutions, since everyone wants to pay less and make more.
Taxation may be a dirty word among the general public, but it's long been accepted by mainstream economists as one of the most effective mechanisms by which to correct externalities: look up Pigovian tax. The main alternative is a permit trading scheme. See Weitzman's famous paper on price vs. quantity controls, and Pizer's climate-specific followup. The taxes don't have to be pocketed by the government; usually they are part of a revenue neutral tax shift (add one tax, cut another), or a tax-and-dividend plan (return the proceeds as rebates to the public).
Now, the developing world is a big problem. But I don't think it's necessary to "freeze them in time" and arrest their development. Rather, the developed world can view it as an opportunity to foster low-carbon technologies for sale in the developing world. That's not going to solve the problem entirely, but it will help a lot if we ever decide to get serious about it.
Probably the world's leading economist on climate economic policy is Bill Nordhaus. He's recently published a new book intended for the public, A Question of Balance. It's a really good place to start regarding what an effective policy to insure against climate change may be.
In context, the great majority of the bible has no relevance to any modern person. We treat illness with medicine instead of sacrificing birds. We treat women as equals. We no longer support slavery, or view people as property. Instead of believing that prayer can help the blind see, we perform medical procedures that are successful in reality instead of mythic history.
The philosophy of Jesus, which is similar to and no better than the positive philosophies of many of history's great thinkers, does not merit attachment to such a dogmatic prison of mediocre morality.
And that's how the world works today: Rather than astrophysical observations acting as a test for our gravity-centric theories, the observations are just made to fit with mathematical contortions. And rather than the stories of ancient humans acting as a test for our astrophysical theories, they are just abandoned and ignored -- as if the information is just unrecoverable. It's not that it's not recoverable; it's that you just don't know anything about it.
OK, thinking about this a bit more ...
From about 4000 years ago (between ~5000 and 3000 anyway) on, there are surviving written records, relatively large in number and reasonably well understood/translated, from at least two well-separated regions.
Astronomers, among others, have gone over these records very carefully, and have found various events such as eclipses (esp solar), supernovae, and comets.
Analysis - mathematical, by necessity - of these records leads to various conclusions, of considerable robustness; among them:
* the relative sizes (in the sky) of the Sun and Moon have not changed, over this period
* the motions of the Sun and Moon, through the sky, are completely consistent with Ptolemaic models of (what we today call) the solar system, Kepler's models, and today's ones (which incorporate General Relativity)
* ditto, but to a lesser degree of accuracy, the naked eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn)
* ditto, also to a somewhat lesser degree of accuracy, and only relative to rather more modern estimates of orbits, a number of comets, esp Halley's.
So, at least in the sense that written records can be read, and information about the dates and times and appearances of some solar system phenomena (as we call them today) compiled, "the stories of ancient humans" very much "act[ed] as a test for our astrophysical theories"!
Of course, various groups of humans, who left no written records, and without contact with others, no doubt have (had) many stories (myths, etc). The fact that "first contact" with some of these groups occurred well after ~500 BCE (say) should provide a very good test of the quality of the astronomical events and phenomena in their stories. For example, do they record the solar eclipses, supernovae, and comets which are found in Chinese records (say)?