Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1

The reported plateaus and rises in the C 14 curves compared to a straight line relation seems to me to be good evidence that true results are being recorded. One YEC I have blogged with asserts that 95% of RM dates are discarded because they are "wrong". I hope this does not cause Coyote to explode! At $595 a test, the idea of some researcher doing 100s of tests to be able to report a few "right" ones strains credulity a mite much!

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And, a news piece in Nature on 16 Feb. tells of a recent paper in Physical Review Letters that describes a optical-spectroscopy way to measure carbon 14 at much lower levels than current methods can. This may well allow carbon dating further into the past, though folks will have to be even more vigilant about contamination than they are now. And the instrumentation is potentially far cheaper than accelerator mass spectrometers.

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According to the Phys Rev paper, the sensitivity of this technique is one to two orders of magnitude worse than AMS at present. So it is not yet applicable to old samples. But it's a very interesting development. It should be much cheaper than AMS, and may be applicable to biomedical research even at its current level of sensitivity. Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

I am familiar with YEC's and their claims regarding radiocarbon dating. They just make things up based on what they need the answers to be, no matter what the facts really are. That 95% figure is from some study some creationist did back in the 1960s. You know how much you can trust that!So far, I have done 611 radiocarbon dates; that is way more, I suspect, than all of these rabid creationists combined! I have written a monograph on radiocarbon dating and delivered lectures to professional societies. I was even on the advisory board for a university radiocarbon laboratory a couple of decades ago.When creationists want to tell me how things are in radiocarbon dating they better bring some evidence and leave the belief and myths behind.And there are a couple of other folks here who are probably even more experienced, particularly in the nuclear chemistry part of the technique.Creationists should tread with caution in this neck of the woods.

Hmmm. I would expect better science reporting out of Nature. That's disappointing - though they really left it unsaid just how the sensitivity compared.Edited by Coragyps, : No reason given.

From foreveryoung in Message 25 on the Whether to leave this forum or not thread: First off, I recognize that it is difficult to accept concepts that run counter to what you have been taught, this is called cognitive dissonance in psychology, and we are all susceptible to it, no matter your education or experience or opinions.What is important is to keep an open, if skeptical, mind, and not react to reject new information. That is what the evidence shows. We either accept that the objective evidence represents reality or that reality is an illusion.It is a fact that the correlations between different age measuring systems result in virtually identical results, not just for age but for climate and other aspects within the evidence. It is a fact that the levels of 14C measured in the tree rings and the Lake Suigetsu varves are the same levels for the same ages in 4 different sets of data measured by annual counted layers, and that these precisely measured levels correlate with the decay curve for 14C, thus showing that such radiometric hanky panky did not occur within the last 35,000 years, minimum. They don't need to be accurate proxies of the actual climate in the past, what is important is that the same proxies are measured in the arctic and antarctic ice cores, which are correlated with annual counted layers.As with 14C evidence used, the oxygen and carbon isotope ratios originated in the earths atmosphere at the time that they were trapped, and as the earths atmosphere is well mixed there cannot be major differences in concentrations for different parts of the globe: the level of 14C in one area will be very close to the level of 14C in an area on the other side of the earth, and the same applies to the oxygen and carbon isotope ratios measured.The objective measured evidence is the isotope quantities and their ratios, and these are facts. The changes in their levels from year to year are explained by climate changes, in the same way we see this change today, but climate per se is not the evidence.There is additional evidence of climate changes in pollen counts and types that also correlate, and these give us a better idea of what those paleoclimates were like.I can provide you with the link to the tables of data that show the correlations between the ice cores and the stalactite if you want to look at the actual numbers.Your problem is not to provide an alternate explanation for each system of age measurement by any single hypothetical system (such as your comment on radiometric dating), but to explain why they correlate with the annual counting systems and with the other measurements. Why do I get the same age from 14C as I do from tree rings?An open skeptical mind says yes, it is possible that the earth is young, but then how do I explain all these correlations.An open skeptical mind says yes, it is possible that all this evidence is correct, and the earth is very old, but how do I know that there isn't something that causes all these systems to be wrong in the same places and in the same ways.Science is about explaining the evidence, and it assumes that the evidence represents reality.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : r

The Scripps Institute has a discussion of the Milankovich cycles used in dating ice and sea cores at Miklankovitch Theory - Hits and MissesEdited by Pollux, : Correct typoEdited by Pollux, : typo

Hi Pollux Milutin Milankovi - WikipediaLeaving out the cause and effect issues of the cyclic patterns originally discussed by Milankovich in 1912 and formalized in 1920, we can certainly see markers of these cycles in each of the dating systems where we have indications of paleoclimates and their correlations with the dates in each of these systems.We can add correlations with these cycles to the long list of additional correlations between data from various different areas of science, and ask the question why a cyclic pattern would exist if the ages are all wrong.Enjoy

Even leaving out RM dating, those YEC who hold to the idea of one Ice Age after the Flood will have their work cut out to explain all the isotope and other variations noted in the cores.
When you start searching it is astounding to find the amount of work that is being done on the various cores. Lakes Ven, Meerfelder Maar, Soppensee, and Holzmaar for starters all provide support for C14 dating out to about 12,000 BP. Lago Grande di Monticchio in Italy has varves out to 76,000 BP - not continuous but inferred from interpolated sedimentation rates in the gaps, and Ar/Ar dates of included tephra.

I don't know whether this had been covered yet, especially since this is a second version of the topic, but do the readers know the significance of correlations?Mind you, I'm drawing from the statistics classes I took for my Applied Math Bachelor's from 30 years ago. When you take a data sample from a population of data points, there's an interval of confidence, which basically is the probability that your sample is indeed representative of the population being sampled. Correlation is when you take a number of different independent samplings that agree with the other samplings.An interval of confidence is given as a probability, which by definition ranges from greater than zero to less than one (since zero is absolute impossibility and 1 is total inevitability), hence it ranges exclusively from zero to one (ie, between, but not including zero and one). Admittedly, after all this time I've forgotten precise nomenclature and undoubtedly have merged in Boolean Algebra, but when you AND independent probabilities together, you do so by multiplying them together. Whenever you multiply together two positive factors that are less than one, the product is always less than either factor.OK, an example to demonstrate the principle. Let's say you have a sampling whose interval of confidence is 90% (most are 95% or greater). Then you take another independent sampling that's also 90%. Taken together, their correlation is 0.9 * 0.9, which is 0.89. And a third correlation with the same interval of confidence would be 0.729. And a fourth would be 0.6561. and so on.Or perhaps a better illustration would be one of the weakest of the plethora of weak creationist probability arguments. This one posited coin flips, a sequence of one million coin flips from amoeba to man. Of course, the first less obvious problem with this model is its implicit requirement that each and every step had to succeed; many steps could not advance and then eventually advance -- for a much better model of stasis/advancing/backsliding refer to my MONKEY implementation of Dawkins' WEASEL, complete with mathematical analysis. The probability of getting heads in a coin toss, ignoring biasing from the unequal distribution of mass in a coin, is 50%, 0.5. Getting heads twice is 0.5², which is 0.25. The formula is P=pⁿ, so 0.5^1,000,000 is ... . Well, Window's calc refuses to work with those figures, but it turns out to be extremely small, well past the point of virtual impossibility.Of course, that particular "model" is fatally flawed (especially since it doesn't actually model anything), but the illustrative point remains that the probability of several independent things all being true is the product of all their individual probabilities. And as we factor them all together, the overall probability diminishes rapidly.OK, here's how this relates to correlations. What's the probability that any one independent set of data is correct? 90% to 95% with the higher figure being more likely, so let's choose 95%. What's the probability that ten independent sets of data are correct? 0.95¹⁰ or 59.87%. That twenty independent sets of data are correct? 35.85%. That thirty independent sets of data are correct? 21.464%.So out of pure chance, what is the probability that several sets of independent data should agree with each other? An increasingly small probability. But what do we observe instead? All these different independent sets of data agree with each other. What are the odds of that? That is why correlations are so important. There is a possibility that they could all just by chance agree with each other, but we are able to calculate the probability of that happening. And we can clearly see that that probability becomes vanishingly small. And yet despite those odds all those correlations come up with the same answer. Which lends strength to their all pointing to the same truth.

Hi dwise1, Actually this is version 2.1, with previous versions 1.1 (297 posts), 1.2 (306 posts), and 1.3 (357 posts) reaching a total of 960 posts without a single correlation being explained by a single creationist.Notably, it seems, creationists avoid this thread (the information is too dangerous?) or they just don't have a clue (information, education, etc) how to respond. And because there is a wide variety of systems, that each would need a different kind of tweaking to squeeze in a young earth concept, the likelihood of a single process explaining all the data shrinks down to one: they correlate because they represent the actual age of the earth.Or god-did-it-all and all the evidence is illusion.Enjoy.

From Message 1:

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We see many creationists saying that dating methods are not accurate and are prone to errors. The problem is that these methods all correlate with each other in many rather astounding ways, given that they are based on very different mechanisms.

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To address this issue of correlations, and to bring this issue to the fore, this topic starts with ones that have direct methods of counting ages due to annual layers, how those annual layers validate each other and how several radiometric methods enter into the mix -- correlations not just with age but with climate and certain known instances that occurred in the past and which show up in these records just where they should be.

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The challenge for the creationist is not just to describe how a single method can be wrong, but how they can all be wrong at the same time and yet produce identical results - when the errors in different systems should produce different random results.

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Either explain the correlations or accept that the evidence shows the earth is old.Enjoy.

I pretty much agree with the tree dating. except:
"This is already older than many YEC models (6,000 years for those using Archbishop Ussher's calculation of a starting date of 4004 BC). This also means that there was absolutely NO world wide flood (WWF) during those 8,000 years, as there would be no possible overlap of tree ring chronologies if there were some point at which ALL were dead."
Who says that trees died in the flood? and 4004 BC is suspect! Are You suggesting that in 10,000 bc we had a ice age and the trees started growing after? Good theory. Because if you do not then it is hard to explain just why trees only have a shelf life of 12 to 4 thousand years. This is a range that vreationist suggest and is a very good point for them since clearly no tree is over 12,000 years. Any older is deemed not accurate.
I can ask why carbon dating is not used in all dating but I know. The same reason that yourr methods you do use have, it can not persisely predict over 100,000 years.
I qoute from your texts:
"assumptions made"
"measurement is then transformed by a mathematical formula based on radioactive decay into a theoretical "age," but this "age" is really just a mathematical scale for displaying the actual amount of carbon-14 in the sample." theoretical age? my point
"No fantastic scheme invented to change the way radioactivity works will change that simple fact." How does radioactivity work? You know how it all works?
"for whatever is changed in one sample is changed in all the others of the same time."
Why is this so?
"The level of Carbon-14 has not been constant in the past, as it is known to vary with the amount of cosmic ray bombardment and climate change." The past, modern past or acient? How do you know this happened and didnt happen in acient times? How do know todays constants were in acient times?
"The age derived from Carbon-14 analysis is consistently younger than the actual age measured by the numerous tree-ring chronologies in pre-historical times, meaning that C-14 dating underestimates the ages of objects."
This states that your dating techniques are consistently off regardless which way. And why are they not correct anyway?
"False tree-rings for each and every one of the different species that were used on the calibrations curve would have to have occurred at the same time in several different habitats, locations and environments around the world to produce simultaneous false results. "
And why is that?
Ill read further when these are answered.

ScottyDouglas dStart with Message 1 and Message 2: Bristlecone Pines:

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By counting tree rings and matching the overlapping patterns of growth from live to dead trees, scientists have developed a tree-ring chronology of nearly 10,000 years using wood from the Schulman Grove area, California (one tree still living is 4,839 years old).

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Note three things: the tree rings contain climate data, the chronology is not based on one sample but many overlapping and duplicate (from the same tree) samples, and there are other samples that have not been counted yet or that have a break in the climate data that means they are "floating" in the chronology somewhere beyond the end of the continuous record. Adding up all the time recorded by these tree rings would give us a minimum age of the earth for all those years to have passed that generated the rings. We'll be minimalist here and say:

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Minimum age of the earth > 8,000 years based on this data.

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This is already older than many YEC models (6,000 years for those using Archbishop Ussher's calculation of a starting date of 4004 BC). This also means that there was absolutely NO world wide flood (WWF) during those 8,000 years, as there would be no possible overlap of tree ring chronologies if there were some point at which ALL were dead.

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Then consider Message 3: European Oaks:

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The common name for this species is "Post Oak" due to its natural resistance to rot thus making a good material for posts in ancient constructions. This also means that there are a lot of samples that are referenced to and associated with archaeological finds, finds that can be dated by other means, including historical documents as far back as the history goes.

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Now we have a problem for YEC people, because not only do these different chronologies cover the same time, they also have the same pattern of climate shown in their tree rings even though they come from opposite sides of the earth and are in very different kinds of trees, one evergreen living at high altitudes and one deciduous living near sea levels, and anything that can cause errors in one system has to have a method that can cause exactly the same error in the other at exactly the same time. Positing false rings does not accomplish this. All three sets also show the "little ice age" and other marker events at the same ages. They all come to the same age for the matching climate data. We can be minimalist here, and say that the minimum age covered by the European Oak chronology is 10,429 years BP - 0.5% = 10,377 years BP. "BP" means "Before Present" and is defined as years before 1950(1), so this is really 10,434 years ago (in 2007).

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Minimum age of the earth > 10,434 years based on this data.

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This is now older than most if not all YEC models for the age of the earth.

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This also means that there was absolutely NO world wide flood (WWF) during those 10,434 years, as there would be no possible overlap of tree ring chronologies if there were some point at which ALL were dead.

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And this is still just the start: three different dendrochronologies that correlate age with climate and that match - wiggle for wiggle - within 0.5%.

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Most people consider accuracy within 0.5% to be highly accurate.Remember that correlations are the key here. This means that you need to explain how these dates could be wrong and yet still produce the correlations listed. Or you should accept that these dates are an accurate of age.Enjoy.

Answering just one of your silly questions: Tree rings provide accurate counts taking us years into the past. They correlate within historic times with volcanic activity. No serious researchers question their accuracy.The calibration curve is made by dating those individual rings! For the recent part of the curve the rings are dated annually, while for the older parts of the curve they are dated in five or ten year increments.What this does is allow a calibration curve to be constructed which corrects for atmospheric variation. As creationists are wont to point out, the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere is not constant due to fluctuations in cosmic rays and changes in the earth's magnetic field, etc. (They only know this because scientists discovered it--creationists are drawn to research about as much as vampires are drawn to garlic.)Once the individual tree rings are dated, the difference between a known date (the tree ring) and a radiocarbon age can be established. Calibrating this radiocarbon age allows accurate dates to be obtained from unknown materials.So, to answer this question:This method tells us what happened in the past and allows us to correct for atmospheric variation. We know what happened in the past because we have the tree rings from the past!The dates obtained from C-14 dating are not consistently off, they are calibrated so that they are correct.----------I'll await your response to this specific question and once we get this one thrashed out we can move on. No Gish gallop!

According to my earlier reading a couple decades ago, fluctuations in the strength of the geo-magnetic field also affect the production of C-14 in the atmosphere. A few thousand years ago, the field was weaker (contrary to another common creationist claim) so there was more C-14 being produced. This caused radio-carbon dates from that time to falsely appear younger (not, again contrary to common creationist claims, older), as was determined by historical accounts. As I gathered, it was mainly this problem that led to the development of dendrochronological calibration tables as you described.Ironically, a creationist on CompuServe in 1990 brought up this very point, but tried to claim that the excess in C-14 caused the dates to come out older, whereas if he had any understanding at all of the method he would have realized that caused false-young results instead, but then his own wishful thinking got in his way (http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/points23.html). In a similar piece of irony, in response to "John Woodmorappe's" cherry-picked list of 350 radio-dates that were 20% or more off, Glenn R. Morton plotted them on a graph and found that the majority of those dates were too young, not too old as the purpose of the creationist claims require them to be (http://home.entouch.net/dmd/age.htm).