No, and no. What I was doing was "testing," using data easily found,
whether the hypothesis that all coal was formed from biomass present at the
time of Noah's flood. YECers, IMHO, and I am sure there are exceptions,
don't look up much primary data -- it occurred to me that one piece of data
easily looked up, and one which could hardly be refuted, would be the
volume of coal mined in the world to date. The best I could find was a US
number for a recent (I think 1991) year. I used 150 years as a rough
estimate -- perhaps 100 would have been better. Somewhere an "actual"
number exists -- do you have it? The aim was to see if either I could
disprove the hypothesis (if the answer had come out 3,000, that ought to
disprove it) or, perhaps, show it as a possibility, (if the answer had been
0.03 pounds, for instance). The "3" answer I came up with seemed high
enough to make the hypothesis very unlikely.
Art also wrote, " In any case the amount mined thus far is insignificant.
Below are the proved and estimated world coal reserves:
Region Total Recoverable
billions of tons
N America 2685 187
S America 35 10
W Europe 419 82
E Europe 170 46
USSR 4860 110
China 1438 99
India 57 34
S Africa 173 34
Australia 263 27
World totals 10100 629"
That's nice data, but do you see the problems with it? First, the data is
not readily available (i.e. in an almanac) to a YECer. More importantly, it
is not "real," it is a set of estimates based on non-YEC assumptions.
Easily dismissed by the YEC adherent. OTOH, actual coal mined, to date, is
not dismissable -- it is verified by bills of lading, invoices, truck
records, mining records, royalties paid, and 1000s of other BUSINESS (not
scientific) documents. The almanac said "900 million tons of coal were
mined (US)in one year; that number is hard to argue with.
Art -- from your quick response, I suspect you know a heck of a lot more
about coal & coal mining than I ever care to know. Shoot, that would not
have to be much! Do you happen to have the numbers on actual tons of coal
mined, worldwide, in recent years? Second, does it take 10 pounds of
biomass to form one pound of coal? Or more? Or less? Third -- how does the
argument look using your numbers, surely more accurate than mine?
Burgy