Why is it so Difficult to Obtain Accurate Dates? – Part VI

Continued from the previous post regarding Carbon-14 dates being manipulated by scientists in order to provide the dates needed to support personal views and paradigms, and the problems associated with it, which involves how scientists manipulate the findings of the carbon testing so that the dates they use from the testing agrees with the accepted view of the evolutionary geologic column.
    Since so much depends upon an accurate understanding of correct time frames and fully understanding how inaccurate the geologic clock of evolution is, it cannot be overstated that the famed Willard Libby Carbon-14 “time clock” dating is based on the fallacy of a constant amount of C-14 or equilibrium in the atmosphere, as well as the fallacy of a constant ratio between C-12 and C-14.
    There are many situations and events, as pointed out earlier, that can skew the data regarding the carbon content in the atmosphere. Take for example in our recent history of the nuclear testing in the atmosphere that has increased dramatically the carbon content.

Atmospheric Carbon-14 measured in (red line) New Zealand (Southern Hemisphere) and (blue line) in Austria (Northern Hemisphere), showing a 40-year spike that altered the Carbon-14 in the atmosphere as compared to the (green line) natural levels

The New Zealand curve (above) is representative for the Southern Hemisphere, the Austrian curve is representative for the Northern Hemisphere. Atmospheric atomic and nuclear weapon tests almost doubled the concentration of Carbon-14 in the Northern Hemisphere (I. Levin, et al., “ōC-14 Record from Vermunt,” Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, 1994).
    Thus, the nuclear weapon testing in the atmosphere caused a drastic spike in the Carbon-14 content. When this testing was stopped, the peak started to decrease through interaction of the atmosphere with the other carbon reservoirs. Thus, the C-14 data showing the bomb peak on the northern and southern hemisphere reflect the exchange between both hemispheres, which is quite different, and though totally understood by scientists today, some unknowing measurement centuries from now would  be faced with the following problems:
1. When did the spike occur?
2. Was it world-wide?
3. What caused it?
4. Did animal life absorbing the spiked amount move about? (such as from one hemisphere to another, changing the inside ratio to the outside ratio—an unknown factor to the future scientist).
    This is pretty much our difficulty in trying to determine changes in the distant past. We don’t know if circumstances changed in any of the periods being measured. Since big changes in the atmosphere can throw off this method, like releasing tons of extra carbon dioxide into the air from burning fossil fuels—because fossil fuels like coal and oil are so old, they have no radiocarbon left. When burned, they increase the amount of carbon dioxide, which dilutes the radiocarbon in the atmosphere and the amount that can be absorbed by organic material (Alison Kanski, “Fossil Fuels May Bring Major Changes to Carbon Dating,” Climate Central, Princeton, New Jersey, July 28, 2015).
    This is what has happened in the past, with one exception—we don’t know if and when some occurrence changed the Carbon-14 content, how often such changes occurred, and what might have cause it.
    It should be noted that when the problems of C-14 amounts not being constant were discovered, scientists decided to use the amount in the atmosphere in 1950 as a standard; and when the dates still didn’t match the assumptions of the scientists, they applied a “correction table” to make them match. And if, after all of these “adjustments” are made, a carbon date still doesn’t match the ideas of the scientist, the carbon dating data is simply ignored (Bruce A. Bucholz, et al., “Bomb Pulse Radiocarbon Dating of Skeletal Tissues, Science Direct, in Krista Latham, et al., New Perspectives in Forensic Human Skeletal Identification, Academic Press (Elsevier), Cambridge, MA, 2018, pp185-196).
    This is basically the way we have arrived at the understanding that carbon in the atmosphere is in “equilibrium.”
    To see how this looks in a real application, we can examine the example of what scientists call Cro-Magnon man. According to scientists, Cro-Magnon footprints recently found in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France, which contains some of the best-preserved figurative cave painting in the world, are estimated to be about 26,000 years old.

Within the cave are hundreds of animal paintings that have been catalogued, depicting at least 13 different species, including some rarely or never found in other ice-age paintings. Rather than depicting only the familiar herbivores that predominate in Paleolithic cave art, i.e. horses, aurochs, mammoths, etc., the walls of the Chauvet Cave feature many predatory animals, i.e., cave lions, leopards, bears, rhinoceroses and cave hyenas (Laurie Adams, Art Across Time (4th ed.), Mc-Graw Hill, 2011, p34).
    The soft, clay-like floor of the cave retains the paw prints of not only bears, there were large, rounded depressions that are believed to be the "nests" where the bears slept. Fossilized bones are abundant and include the skulls of cave bears and the horned skull of an ibex. A set of foot prints of a young child and a wolf or dog walking side by side was found in this cave. This information suggests the origin of the domestic dog could date to before the last ice age (Laura Hobgood-Oster, A Dog's History of the World, Baylor University Press, Waco, Texas, 2014, pp6–7).
    The estimated age of the footprint is based on carbon dating of the soot from torches on the cave ceiling and floor. The test shows about 2%-3% of the C-14 present in the soot as would have been present in 1950 (the standard year). Since it would take about 26,000 years for the C-14 to decay that far, the age is set at 26,000 years old. This assumes, of course, that the world’s carbon-14 content in the atmosphere is both in equilibrium and has held constant over the extended period of time.
    However, because we know C-14 is not in a state of equilibrium (stable), and that it is unstable, it is necessary to “estimate” what it would have been in the past. If we use the current growth rate of C-14 in the atmosphere and calculate back from there, we find it actually may have been only 4,000 years ago that the 2%-3% figure would have been true.
    This is because in calculating backward how much C-14 was in the atmosphere last year, and 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago and so on. Since about 4,000 years ago there would only be about 19 percent as much C-14 in the atmosphere as the standard year of 1950, the wood the soot comes from would only have absorbed 19 percent as much C-14 as expected. Then, knowing the half-life/decay rate, we can calculate the 2%-3% figure to be all that would be left today.

So the footprints of Cro-Magnon man, considered by evolutionists to be 26,000 years old, may well be only 4,000 years old. Of course, most scientists simply reject such figures. After all, “everyone knows the Earth is millions of years old.”
    It comes back to one of the center-planks of modern science, evolution. Anything that does not support evolution is considered wrong, and no further questions are tolerated.
    Regarding the variations in atmospheric Carbon-14, changes in climate from ice-age to warmer periods, and all the other unknown factors of the distant past, scientists simply do not know and there is no way to know, so they arrive at an average or determine the present rate of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere and all measurements are then based on that assumption (as they have done with the 1950 baseline). Yet scientists agree that the present burning of fossil fuels releases the carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere that “within the next 20 to 30 years, it will be difficult to distinguish newly produced materials from historical artifacts several hundred years old using radiocarbon dating techniques (Heather Graven, “Impact of fossil fuel emissions on atmospheric radiocarbon and various applications of radiocarbon over this century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science)s.
    In fact, it is claimed that by the year 2100, with forecast emissions, the atmosphere will have a radiocarbon age of 2,000 years old (Adrienne LaFrance (executive editor), “Global Warming Could Make Carbon Dating Impossible,” The Atlantic, Boston July 23, 2015).

The four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) expected throughout this century will range from very high (RCP8.5) through to very low (RCP2.6) future concentrations (The numerical values of the RCPs (2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5) refer to the concentrations in 2100)

It should be kept in mind that the population would have been greater before the Flood than after, affecting a lengthy change in the Carbon Dioxide, thus making the projected steady-state accumulation of Carbon-14 emissions in the atmosphere non-steady and therefor different than scientists claim.
    The point is, throughout world history, there have been numerous incidents that would have affected the amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere, thus rendering the measurement of such without such knowledge could only result in erroneous measurement years.
    However, once again, the carbon-14 time clock, according to Bronk Ramsey, a geochronologist at the University of Oxford, U.K., ”assumes that the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere was constant—any variation would speed up or slow down the clock. The clock was initially calibrated by dating objects of known age such as Egyptian mummies and bread from Pompeii; work that won Willard Libby the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
     But even he “realized that there probably would be variation.” In fact, since the 1960s, scientists have started accounting for the variations by calibrating the clock against the known ages of tree rings. As a rule, carbon dates are younger than calendar dates: a bone carbon-dated to 10,000 years is around 11,000 years old, and 20,000 carbon years roughly equates to 24,000 calendar years (Ewen Callaway, “Carbon Dating Gets a Reset,” Nature Magazine, October 18, 2012).
    Thus, it is obvious that various geologic, atmospheric and solar processes can influence atmospheric carbon-14 levels.
(See the next post, “Why is it so Difficult to Obtain Accurate Dates? – Part VII,” for more on the manner in which C-14 dates are manipulated by scientists)