Re: [asa] Denver RATE Conference (Thousands...Not Billions)_Part 2

> On another subject, does anyone has any technical response to Baumgardner's
> comment on the "excess carbon may have diluted the C14 in the pre-flood
> world such that the initial C14/C12 ratio would be a lot smaller; perhaps by
> a factor of 100 - 500 times" ? This sounds to me like pure hand-waving,
> like "theory" in the common sense of "speculation" rather than the
> scientific sense of the word, simply to make a rhetorical argument that
> agrees with what the audience wants to hear, i.e., that a 5000 year old
> earth might have some scientific plausibility. Does anyone know what he's
> talking about, and what (if any) basis it has in fact or evidence?

This would work only if the excess carbon was supplied by a source
depleted in 14C, e.g., a large reservoir of carbon that was over 50000
years old at the time.

The modern (past half-century or so) 14C levels are significantly
higher than those prior to atmospheric nuclear testing, making trace
contamination even more likely.

The latest volume of PSCF has an article pointing out that, even if
the reported trace levels of 14C were genuinely indigenous to the
samples, one can easily make a slightly modified radioactive decay law
to match it within an old earth context. In other words, the jump
from "traces of 14C" to "young earth" is invalid.

The levels of 14C in old samples that are quoted in that article from
RATE publications are generally within 2 s.d. (as quoted) of zero. I
expect that the measurement techniques cannot give a negative value,
which changes the appropriate statistical model to make it even more
likely that small values are merely noise around zero.

It doesn't seem to affect most of his examples, but the description of
the sourcing of 14C into organisms is a bit oversimplified, given that
some organisms are less closely connected to atmospheric CO2 than
others (e.g., those living deep in the ocean). What is somewhat
affected is the question of diamonds. They neither photosynthesize
nor eat. Working out the details of where they get their carbon and
what fractionation may occur would be necessary to sort out what the
expected 14C levels would be.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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