Podcast #66: The Schumann Resonance

This is a somewhat shorter episode, mainly because I’m working on three grants at the moment due next week. It’s about the Schumann Resonance, something you probably never heard of unless you’re an amateur radio operator or listen to way too much Coast to Coast AM. Listen to the podcast for more .

The main additional segment to this is the announcement I made a few days ago about me doing a workshop at TAM. Well, I also mentioned that the next episode will be about the meteorite that landed in Russia last week and the related conspiracies that cropped up within hours.

Podcast Episode 50: Lunatic Earthquakes

Do lunar tides actually cause or trigger earthquakes, and is there a vast conspiracy to cover it up? Or do the people who make this claim misunderstand the data and statistics?

Well, since this is the Exposing PseudoAstronomy podcast, you can guess what the conclusion is. But, it’s a ~50-minute exploration of the claims and evidence dealing with this claim, and for those of you who like logical fallacies, you’ll really like this episode. I hope. I’ve also written up a document of the statistics I did for this.

Other segments: Q&A, Feedback, Announcements … and TWO puzzlers!!

The two announcements are: (1) I need to drop down to 2 episodes/month, at least for September. We’ll see what happens in October, but likely this will hold at least through November. (2) I’ll be in Flagstaff, AZ (USA) for a conference for September 18-23. If you’re interested in meeting up at all, send me an e-mail.

Podcast Episode 40: Crater Age Dating Explained, Part 1

This is a bit of a longer episode. ‘Cause, this is what I do.

I give you a pretty detailed overview of how crater age dating works, the difference between absolute and relative age dating, how we can assign absolute ages to the relative ages of craters, how geologic mapping works and why it’s important for crater age dating, and then many of the known problems and caveats with the method.

Finally, there’s an open question about the puzzler: Is it worth doing? I wanted to do it initially to get interaction between me and the listeners. But participation has been around 1 for each. So if you have any opinion regarding the Puzzler, please let me know in the Comments to this post.

Podcast Episode 39: Young-Earth Creationist Attempted Refutations of Radiometric Dating

A slightly delayed episode is finally up. Part 2 of the series of 2 on radiometric dating, part 2 of the series of 4 (this month’s theme) on dating techniques. I talk about four of the main categories of claims that young-Earth creationist arguments fall into in their attempts to refute radiometric dating.

It’s also the first regularly formatted episode since #35, including the main segment, new news, Q&A, feedback, puzzler, and announcements.

Podcast Episode 38: Radiometric Dating Explained, Part 1

This is Part 1 of two parts, the next to be in the next episode, conveniently, and will discuss what young-Earth creationists say about the topic.

But in this one, I give you a 50-minute interview with geologist Rachael Acks who explains some of the history of radiometric dating, the very basic physics of it, how it works in practice, and some cases of when and why you can’t use the method.

This month begins a four-part series (though it’ll be labeled as two Parts 1 and 2) on age-dating techniques and then the young-Earth response. The first set is radiometric, second set will be craters. It’s a bit of a different thing, so we’ll see how it works out.

Note that because this interview ran longer than I like to make normal episodes, I’m pushing the not-main segments to Episode 39.

Podcast Episode 36 BONUS! – GAPs Young-Earth Creationists Must Believe or Ignore (Geology, Astronomy, Physics)

I ended up giving my talk anon how YECs arrive at their conclusion of a young Earth versus how “secular scientists” do it. This episode has been posted in both audio and video. Hopefully they both work, and hopefully not too many will yell at me for posting a 90 MB video without warning to the RSS feed. The video is MP4 format … that is the general universal format these days, right?

Key Topics for a Young-Earth Creationism Talk on Geology, Astronomy, and Phyiscs

This Saturday, May 5 (as in, in 3 days), I’ll be giving a half-hour talk entitled, “GAPs Young-Earth Creationists Must Believe or Ignore (Geology, Astronomy, Physics.” I’ve written a lot about YEC on this blog, so narrowing topics down to be explained well within a half-hour window is a bit difficult.

I’ve already given a talk before where I talked about radiometric dating, Earth’s magnetic field, comets, spiral galaxies, and universal constants. But, these were more targeted mini-topics and didn’t really tell a cohesive story. I’d like to make this talk more a top-down picture hitting large, broad topics that creationists use … rather than the bottom-up “let’s pick a bunch of random topics and discuss them” approach of my previous talk.

I’m having a brain freeze at the moment, so I’m soliciting ideas from you. I think, if nothing else, I do need to tie in the Magical Noah’s Flood that is used to explain fossil layers, craters and water on Mars, Earth’s magnetic field, old radiometric ages, etc. Maybe that could be used as a branching point?

Please feel free to leave some ideas in the comments section!

Podcast Episode 17: Gregg Braden and Data Mining

Quick post for a new Gregorian calendar year: Episode 17 of my podcast is now posted. This is a ~31-minute episode that focuses on two of the claims of Gregg Braden (which you may remember from this blog post about 45 days ago). I also use it as a case-study for the fallacious way of arguing known as “data mining.”

Eroding Continents, Uniformitarianism vs. Catastrophism, and Young-Earth Creationism

Introduction

Recently, I’ve done a lot of posts on young-Earth creationism (YEC), and the majority of those have been based on the Institute for Creation Research’s daily “science” updates (or as the Eye on ICR blog calls them, “daily pseudoscience updates” or “DpSU”). As such, when yet another geology-related one came out this week, I was going to ignore it. Especially because said Eye on ICR blog already covered it (don’t you have homework, Peter?).

But then I read this particular “DpSU” again, entitled “Continents Should Have Eroded Long Ago,” and I decided that, actually, there was something I wanted to cover from it.

The Obligatory Summary and Wrongness of the ICR Article

I do have to briefly summarize these points before I get to the larger issue I wanted to address. Basically, in said article, the “science” writer Brian Thomas talks about a recent paper that estimates the rate of erosion of continental crust material. The paper, by Eric Portenga and Paul Bierman, is freely available for anyone to read and it is in a legitimate publication (as in it’s not something like the “Answers Research Journal” or “Creation Science” or “Origins”).

The paper itself is actually somewhat interesting. It’s about 7 pages long, has big pretty full-color images, and may be somewhat understandable to someone without any background in the field (I do apologize, but even though I swore I never would, I do lose track of how much background the general public has in these areas). I should also note that this paper is a metanalysis of previously published data, so the authors themselves did not go into the field but rather pulled a lot (1599) numbers from the literature. The paper was really comparing two different erosion rates, that of rock outcrops to those of basins. To quote the very first page, they found “Drainage basin and outcrop erosion rates both vary by climate zone, rock type, and tectonic setting.”

But, they calculated an average erosion rate of 12±1.3 meters per million years (or 12±1.3 micrometers per year) though the median was 5.4 µm/yr. This large difference of a factor of ~2x between the average and median (median is the middle number of a sorted list) indicates that the data are highly skewed towards lower erosion rates. They found erosion rates within drainage basins to be about a factor of 20x larger with a 218±35 meters per million years (218±35 µm/yr) average, or 54 µm/yr for the median (again indicating a skew towards slower rates). They then discuss variations in different locations, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and have more discussion in the paper than I want to put here.

So, that’s what the authors of the paper found.

Where Mr. Thomas comes in is the following: “According to the study, the average erosion rate for outcrops was 40 feet every one million years. The average thickness of continental crust above sea level can be estimated at about 623 meters, or 2,044 feet. To erode 2,000 feet of crust at 40 feet per one million years would require only 50 million years. So, if the earth is billions of years old, why is its surface not completely flat?” He does the same with basins and claims that this puts a limit at 3 million years.

He then shoots down the idea that geologic uplift is happening with a 1986 paper by a creationist in a creationist publication and then states, “The fact that mountains and even continents still exist is testimony to the young age of the earth. It looks as though the continents cannot be billions of years old, because they would all have eroded in a fraction of that time. And yet they still stand tall.”

Well, one problem with this is simply that, even if we assume everything he wrote is true, we could still easily have a million-year-old planet, no problem, not a 10,000-year-old one.

Another problem is simply that he’s wrong wrong wrong. Did I mention he’s wrong? He ignores things like isostasy where regions of continents are still moving upwards from the last ice age. He ignores volcanism and how volcanoes build mountains (do I really have to cite a source for that?). He ignores that fact that non-volcanic mountain ranges are still growing, where, for example, the Himalayans are growing at a rate of about 6 cm/yr (2.4 inches/year). For those who are really really bad at math, 6 cm/yr is much larger than 5 µm/yr — larger by a factor of 12,000. More than enough to keep up with erosion.

Now, I really don’t think I have to go much further in showing the sheer willful ignorance of Mr. Thomas on this topic. But this feeds into a much larger one that is near and dear to every YEC’s God-given heart.

Uniformitarianism versus Catastrophism

I can almost guarantee that you will never hear the terms “uniformitarianism” nor “catastrophism” unless you pay attention to creationist writings or you delve very deep into the history of philosophy of science or, specifically, geology.

Over-simplified, uniformitarianism is the notion that all processes that exist now are the same as they have been. Creationists assume this when they say the Moon cannot have formed 4.5 billion years ago because it is currently moving away from Earth at a rate of about 1 inch per year and if you run the numbers backwards (assuming uniformitarianism), then it crashes into Earth way before 4.5 billion years ago.

In contrast, catastrophism is the opposite, where rates of change will change, sometimes being faster and sometimes slower.

What I find fascinating is that YECs will use catastrophism to explain practically everything in their view of natural history. God stretched out the heavens so we get away from the “distant starlight problem.” God made the world and all that stuff in a day or two so we don’t have to deal with formation times of the solar system. The flood explains the Grand Canyon, sedimentary rock layers, Earth’s magnetic field reversals, and lots of other things. All fall under catastrophism.

As a consequence of this embrace, they deride us evilutionists for assuming uniformitarianism. Hence uniformitarianism is assumed with the speed of light, universal constants, radiometric dating, continental drift, etc.

And yet, when given the opportunity to take a bit of modern science and twist it to their own agenda (as in the case of this paper), they assume uniformitarianism! Thomas’ assumption that the basins would be flat within 3 million years is based on the currently observed rates. Same with the continents. And same with several other topics I’ve addressed in this blog over the past three years.

Final Thoughts

I realize that those of you who are not YECs are going to read the above section and think, “What do you expect? Creationists are never consistent with the facts, they distort them to suit their argument-of-the-minute.”

Fair enough. But, I find it enlightening and, yes, even slightly exciting to find yet another inconsistency in their arguments. Granted, the argument in the particular article of this post is completely wrong based on very basic geology that I think most third graders have learned (if you know about volcanoes, you know his argument is wrong). But, it also exposes this inconsistency.

When it suits them, the catastrophic Flood explains everything we can throw. But when it suits them, they take a modern scientific measurement, assume a dramatically flat uniformitarian extrapolation, and hence show that Earth can’t be as old as it is.

Now, it’s been awhile since I’ve pointed out formal logical fallacies, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think there are two basic ones here. The first is a reductio ad absurdum where he’s reduced the study’s results far beyond what the authors intended. The second would be a basic straw man where, as a consequence of reducing the study to something stupid, they’re extrapolating it to argue a point that is obviously false but was never intended to be made.

Edited to Add …

I can’t believe I left this out, that that plucky guy over at Eye on ICR pointed it out quite well: The paper that Mr. Thomas is pulling the latest erosion estimates from relied upon ¹⁰Be-based ages. It’s not important to go into the mechanics for this particular method here, suffice to say this is a radiometric-based age. But, wait a sec, creationists – including Mr. Thomas – very frequently argue against radiometric ages because they seem to think they don’t work! (Check out, for example, “Radiometric Dating: Making Sense of the Patterns” from AiG, “Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth” from AiG, “Feedback: Dating Techniques” from AiG, “Fluctuations Show Radioisotope Decay Is Unreliable” from ICR, “The Sun Alters Radioactive Decay Rates” from ICR, “Dating in conflict: Which ‘age’ will you trust?” from CMI, or “Nuclear physicist embraces biblical creation” from CMI, if you don’t happen to believe me.)

So yeah, I guess we can believe radiometric dates when they support creationism, but otherwise they’re wrong and full of flaws. Hmm. This is actually something that I often point out when I give a public lecture on these kinds of topics, and one that I’ll be doing when I give my Apollo Moon Hoax talk in a few days: Science presents a cohesive story. Pseudoscience does not. You either have these flaws in radiometric dating that doom it (as creationists almost always argue), or you can trust the scientists to know what they’re doing and take the results from that (as Thomas is doing in this one instance). You really can’t have it both ways.

Does Earth’s Decaying Magnetic Field Mean it Was Created 6000 Years Ago?

Introduction

I took a look through my blog posts for the last nearly three years and was actually surprised to find that I have not yet addressed one of the main young-Earth Christian creationist (YEC) claims for why at least Earth supposedly cannot be more than 6000 years old: Earth’s decaying magnetic field.

A recent Creation.com article by Dr Jonathan D. Sarfati B.Sc. (Hons.), Ph.D., F.M., reminded me of this. Let’s take a look.

The Background Science Observations

People discovered magnetism centuries ago, and it was really explored and formalized by – what I fondly refer to – as the Old Dead White Guys between about the 1700s and 1800s. (Yes, I realize that women and non-white people have made significant contributions to science and continue to do so, and that the Arab world kept science going while Europe was in the dark ages. But, let’s be objective: Most of the basic fundamentals of science today were figured out by white European men between the 1600s and early 1900s. We’re talking Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Gauss, Kelvin, Maxwell, Einstein, and Schrödinger here.)

Moving on, ship captains used Earth’s global magnetic field to navigate, but even in the 1700s, they realized that Earth’s magnetic field changes from year-to-year. In fact, they had to purchase new maps to correct for magnetic pointings to actually know where they were. Without a correct and current map, they could be off by tens or hundreds of miles — something significant when that reef is coming up.

Around the turn of 1900, scientists were able to start to accurately measure the global magnetic field strength. They have continued to measure it over the past century. What has been found is that the field strength is decreasing. Between 1900 and 2000, the field strength has decreased by very roughly 6%. Based on crustal rocks, we have been able to tell that the decline is about 35% from what it was about 2000 years ago, and it seems to have accelerated a little bit over the past few years.

Another interesting tidbit of information is that in the 1920s, geologists noticed that some volcanic rocks were magnetized in the opposite direction to the current magnetic field. When more and more like that were found, and when they were dated, it was discovered that Earth’s magnetic field seems to have gone through many reversals throughout its history. (If this at all sounds familiar, it’s possibly because my most popular post of all time with 10s of thousands of views, “Planet X and 2012: The Pole Shift (Magnetic) Explained and Debunked,” talks about geomagnetic field reversals, too.)

We also know that the current magnetic north pole is moving, traveling towards Russia at something like 50 km per year, while the south magnetic pole is moving somewhat more slowly these days, but it moved more quickly in the early 1900s.

What this does is paint a picture of a dynamic process that creates a global magnetic field that changes with time, the change being to its strength, specific pole locations, and even overall orientation.

Enter the young-Earth creationists.

Creationist Scenario 1

There are actually two scenarios proposed by different YECs to use this to promote their worldview. The first is one that I could not find anyone who still believes it other than “Dr.” Kent Hovind, a YEC who calls magnetic reversals “just a bunch of baloney … this is a lie talking about ‘magnetic reversals’” (from “Creation Science Evangelism” Series, DVD 6.1).

Anyway, the scenario is summarized by this paragraph:

“In the 1970s, the creationist physics professor Dr Thomas Barnes noted that measurements since 1835 have shown that the field is decaying at 5% per century (also, archaeological measurements show that the field was 40% stronger in AD 1000 than today). Barnes, the author of a well-regarded electromagnetism textbook, proposed that the earth’s magnetic field was caused by a decaying electric current in the earth’s metallic core … . Barnes calculated that the current could not have been decaying for more than 10,000 years, or else its original strength would have been large enough to melt the earth. So the earth must be younger than that.”

That quote is actually from the article in question for this blog post, “The earth’s magnetic field: evidence that the earth is young” by “Dr Jonathan D. Sarfati B.Sc. (Hons.), Ph.D., F.M.” As a side note, I find it interesting that he feels the need to flout his degrees. It’s like me calling myself “Dr. Stuart J. Robbins B.S., M.S., Ph.D., Th.D. (Hon.)” (yes, I have an honorary doctorate in theology from Thunderwood College).

So the basic idea is that if you trace the field strength back in time, based on its current trend, then you reach a point before 10,000 years ago when the field would have been too strong to (a) be physically possible or (b) to allow life to exist.

Seems plausible, except we have that pesky thing of magnetic reversals. And that thing about extrapolating past trends for 100x the length we observe the current trend for something that’s as dynamic as a magnetic field is pretty stupid.

Creationist Scenario 2

The second scenario was done by Dr. Russell Humphreys, a person that, if you are familiar with YEC “science”-based claims, you likely have run into before. From the Creation.com article I referenced before:

“The physicist Dr Russell Humphreys believed that Dr Barnes had the right idea, and he also accepted that the reversals were real. He modified Barnes’ model to account for special effects of a liquid conductor, like the molten metal of the earth’s outer core. … Now, as discussed in Creation 19(3), 1997, Dr John Baumgardner proposes that the plunging of tectonic plates was a cause of the Genesis Flood. Dr Humphreys says these plates would have sharply cooled the outer parts of the core, driving the convection. This means that most of the reversals occurred in the Flood year, every week or two. And after the Flood, there would be large fluctuations due to residual motion. But the reversals and fluctuations could not halt the overall decay pattern — rather, the total field energy would decay even faster (see graph above).”

The graph referred to is something that I have recreated as a vector graphic and used before in a presentation. I show it below:

Magnetic Field During the Flood (Young-Earth Creationist Model)

When I’ve done talks on this, I explain it as, “Supposedly, we started at a high field intensity during creation, it decayed, then dropped to zero at the beginning of the flood, reversed a lot really quickly, started to climb back up to reach a relative high around the time of Jesus – I guess he had a magnetic personality [pause for laughs] – and then continued to decay as before like nothing happened.”

I’m reminded of the disclaimer during the South Park episode about Scientology that stated, “YES, SCIENTOLOGISTS REALLY BELIEVE THIS!” Yes, YECs really believe this, at least some of them. I’m really not sure what else to say here — it’s just kinda laughable; it makes no sense, and it’s pretty much 100% up to the creationists to provide any evidence for it.

I should also note that the evidence shows there have been dozens if not hundreds of these reversals throughout time. Now, my understanding was the Judeo-Christian biblical flood lasted 40 days. And then roughly a year before they went away (um, where?). So you’d need to flip that field something like once every three days for that to work out, just FYI.

A Test for Scenario 2?

I’m impressed that the Creation.com article actually does propose a test:

Dr Humphreys also proposed a test for his model: magnetic reversals should be found in rocks known to have cooled in days or weeks. For example, in a thin lava flow, the outside would cool first, and record earth’s magnetic field in one direction; the inside would cool later, and record the field in another direction.

The article then claims that two researchers, Robert Coe and Michel Prévot, found just such examples where lava that must have cooled within 15 days had a full reversal within the layer: “Three years after this prediction, leading researchers Robert Coe and Michel Prévot found a thin lava layer that must have cooled within 15 days, and had 90° of reversal recorded continuously in it.”

Their work was done in 1989, and actually published in a reputable journal (one that I just got two co-authored papers accepted in, if I may add). With the wonders of the internet, and people posting their papers on their personal websites, you can view it yourself. IF you’re a close reader, you can quickly see that the Creation.com article does misstate their research, for their paper clearly states they found evidence of a change of 3°/day, which means it would be 60 days for a full 180° flip.

I actually contacted Dr. Coe, who is a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department. I explained the situation and asked him for his “side” of the story. (I forgot to ask him permission to post his response — if he gets back to me and says no, I’ll remove it.)

“In both our papers proposing a rapid field change hypothesis it was for episodes during a reversal. We explicitly stated that there was no evidence suggesting that the reversal occurred in less than the several thousand years duration typical for polarity changes. We have recently been working more on that same reversal, and our paper should be published this month (Jarboe et al., Geophysical Journal International). In it we show that the second directional jump is almost certainly due to a temporal gap in the lava-flow succession rather than rapid field motion. [emphasis mine]

“I wish you well in your campaign against creationism.”

I think if the main author of the paper the YECs cite says that they have misinterpreted his work, we can lay this to rest, despite the article’s claim: “This was staggering news to them and the rest of the evolutionary community, but strong support for Humphreys’ model.”

Final Thoughts

I’m not sure why it took me so long to do a post on the creationist claim of a decaying magnetic field being evidence for recent creation. Oh well.

Anyway, I hope that if you have some creationist leanings and have thought that this claim held charge, that you have at least begun to re-examine it and will dig deeper. DON’T take my word for it, but use this as a starting point to inquire further.

If you are someone on the fence, I hope this will push you over onto the side of real science and not the side of making things up.

And if you were already science-minded and didn’t believe the YEC side, but you didn’t know exactly how to refute this particular argument, I hope that I have helped arm you for the future.

P.S. Based on the Creation.com article number, I don’t actually think that it is very recent, but it was at least (re-)posted in the last few days of writing this.