Early Atmosphere: LARGE Error Factors

 Often you'll hear Evolutionists speak as if we knew all kinds of amazing things,
like the chemical composition and proportions of the elemental gases
in the Earth's Atmosphere stretching back hundreds of millions of years.

These projections are often used to support one theory or another
about how and when and why gargantuan anomalies in the fossil record,
as reconstructed by themselves, 'must have' occurred.

Thus for instance, it is acknowledged that there was no significant evolution
after the plentiful presence of bacteria and protozoa for at least
2.5 BILLION years.

But this is 'explained' by the fact that 'there was no oxygen in the air',
until suddenly about the beginning of the Phanerozoic Era
the oxygen levels jumped from less than 1% to a whopping 21%.
This is supposed to have 'kicked off' the rapid Evolution and speciation
we are told happened in this Era.

Oxygen Levels are coordinated with proposed "Geological Ice-Ages" and other
geophysical phenomena speculated to have occurred and usually dated using
an interdependent web of 'mutually corroborating' data and theory.

The charts always look professional, and it is natural to assume,
(having been trained in school to provide error estimates),
that the error-estimation in these graphs are included or unremarkable.

What the typical readers (young students) are not often privy to,
is the incredibly large ERROR FACTOR in these hypothetical reconstructions,
which in effect render such calculations and charts extremely suspect and
open to many contradictory interpretations.


CO2 Error Estimates




Take for instance, CO2 content in the Atmosphere,
a critical component for control of rapid oxidation (fire),
and the support of ecosystems:

The typical chart looks very impressive, 
 and based on the way the data is displayed,
the assumption is that this chart will be accurate
 (+- some small % error), in what it is displaying.

Helpful is the source of the data, included in the chart.
However, we fully expect that 99 / 100 readers will
not follow up and check the data or margin of error.

In fact the work is based on a combination of two
theoretical models,  the first is called GEOCARB II,
(an earlier projection) and the final is GEOCARB III (2001).
This model was constructed by a team of geophysical scientists,
whose purpose was to come up with a model of the CO2 content
based upon various assumptions (explained in the original text).

The ORIGINAL Graph is shown below,
and includes quite clearly the estimated margins of error
believed to be true by the scientific team that created the chart.

 

Here we have colourized the ERROR Margins for easier viewing,
showing the whopping range the actual values might take,
with better data or better modelling.

What the scientists are telling us, are several important points:

(1)  The Estimated Margins of Error overwhelm any smaller variations between the models.

(2)  Neither model (GeoCarb II or III) can offer a more reliable graph.

(3)  Neither model offers reliable results closer than +- 5% for the more recent half of the period.

(4)  Neither model offers results closer than +- 20-80% (!) for the first half of the period.

(5)  The scientists themselves have no confidence in the results at all
for the period between 600 and 300 million years ago, beyond a general
presumption that the CO2 level was higher than 3%.

It should be obvious that the scientists themselves have been quite honest,
in soberly assessing the poor reliability of their own models.

Evolutionists however, have presented such studies as if they
actually reflected our true knowledge about the composition
of the Earth's Atmosphere millions of years ago, when in fact,
we don't know squat about it.