John Baumgardner's Model for carbon 14 raise

Quote:

Just a brief comment relating to the ¹⁴C dates of more than 5 kyr for human bones and artifacts. In my chapter on ¹⁴C in the 2005 RATE technical report, I pointed out that the significant quantity of accelerated nuclear decay during the Genesis Flood would have generated a significant quantity of ¹⁴C in crustal rocks. This ¹⁴C would have outgassed from the crust during the centuries following the Flood, increasing the atmospheric ¹⁴C concentration from about 0.01 pMC at the end of the Flood to near the modern level by, say, 1500 BC. That history of atmospheric ¹⁴C levels would have the effect of producing falsely inflated ages as one goes back in time beyond about 1500 BC.

Disagreements and possible problems for his model:

• 1) I think the ¹⁴C level at the end of the Flood was c. 1.4 pmC. Not 0.01 pmC.
• 2) Baumgardner himself considers fossils from Flood to range from carbon ages 44 000 BP to 20 000 BP (from memory), and this means the extra years range from 15 500 to 39 500 - or original ¹⁴C level from 0.841 to 15.335 pmC. Perhaps he means those with 15.335 pmC at Flood are remains with unusual nuclear activity, but that would leave any carbon in crustal rocks at 15.335 pmC at most too. Of which 58.022 % would be left now, accounting for only 8.898 pmC out of 100 today. Or of which 88.606 % would have been left 1000 years later, in 1500 BC, accounting for only 13.588 pmC out of 100 back then.
• 3) If he thinks concentration of ¹⁴C in crustal rocks was far superior to 15.335 pmC, where are the fossils with those higher original pmC?
• 4) I have another theory on why ¹⁴C levels rose: by divine fiat or by obedience of sun's angel, cosmic rays were turned on to max, effecting three things:
  
  
  • a) ice age (see Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : With Jay L. Wile on C14 Build-up)
  • b) lowered life spans (exposition to milliSieverts higher than present was bad, and this would be how God realised the project of Genesis 6:3)
  • c) rapid rise in ¹⁴C levels.

However, the model he gives might give more room for tables of calibration corresponding to his chronology (both as to Masoretic and as to Neanderthals after Flood, perhaps even as to Exodus and taking of Jericho after Hyksos, though I doubt it), it does not in any way invalidate my tables (Roman Martyrology, 40 000 BP as carbon date for the Flood in 2957 BC). I have no deep quarrel, I am just saying, and I think my points 2 and 3 above would argue against the crustal rocks explaining all of it./HGL

Carbon level / years correspondence, as per
Carbon 14 Dating Calculator
https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/c14/carbdate.html

Carbon Dating and Belfast Series

Went to "My" Topic, Ignored My Work · Carbon Dating and Belfast Series

I can basically only endorse what Gavin Cox says about treering dating here*:

That being said, the Belfast data is a well-known example of a lengthy, (claimed) continuous tree ring chronology, from AD 5 – 2006, but this particular example (methodological assumptions aside) is obviously not a problem for the biblical time-scale. I also mention supposed agreement for bristlecone pine (BCP) tree rings in my article, but that depends on matching rings from living and dead trees (“prone wood”) that has been ¹⁴C dated to multiple thousands of years.

His discussion of BCP series is here*:

Significantly for biblical creationists, a timeline for the growth of bristle-cone pines (BCPs) (Pinus longaeva), growing in the White Mountains of eastern California, has been calculated at 8,700 years. One tree dubbed ‘Methuselah’ has been tree-ring counted to 4,600 years, which, assuming the chronology of the Masoretic text for the Old Testament, places it well before the Flood, which is clearly incorrect. CMI has pointed out that BCPs can grow multiple rings per year, due to their dry environment. Extended chronology relies upon correlation of prone dead wood, with similar ring structures, which are then dated using ¹⁴C. Where overlaps with ‘identical’ ring structures are found, the chronology is considered to be extended. This is a highly subjective endeavour, which also implies prone wood lay around on the ground without rotting for thousands of years, which is demonstrably false. The entire method of ¹⁴C dendrochronology correlation is therefore an exercise in circular reasoning.

I'd disagree on Methusalem, since I think the Flood occurred 5000 or 5300 years ago (2957 or 3266 BC, to be somewhat more precise), depending on which version of the LXX chronology (Roman Martyrology of St. Jerome, as I have seen it attribued, or Byzantine of George Syncellus) is the correct one, Masoretic not being so, but being changed in order to accomodate an equation Shem = Melchisedec in polemics against Epistle to the Hebrews.

Now, it is also to be noted that similar ring structures may sound a good bet, if you narrow it down to identical. However, identical is not exactly what you get. OK, if you stay in one place, theoretically you can get that too. There is an early exercise in carbon 14 and ring tree dating with a very close match for a certain Pueblo in, I think Arizona. But this is concerning trees from a very restricted area and only concerns last pre-Columbian centuries - the dates could perhaps even be checked against indigenous narratives taken up by Spanish missionaries, if any. Or confirm narratives taken up centuries later by American folklorists.

But the further back in time you go, the wider you have to search to find wood, just to get a match for each year (if you have even one gap in dendro, you cannot determine if it is 1 year or 3000 years except by using other methods, the only reliable one that for back being narrative). This means, you need to accept imprecise matches. Similar, but not identic ones.

And even more, if you are dealing with small pieces of wood, maybe an identic one for ten or twenty rings is no real proof, since it might not be unique in time and space - you might need more material to get that. Hence, further back dendrochronology goes, the more it is taking a chance.

So, no, dendro is so far as I know not an independent way of calibrating ¹⁴C dates to 6,700 BC.

That said, CMI is being incomplete on the issue. ¹⁴C is used very regularly for very basic datings in the close to present. A statue from Benin, is it from Benin's Golden Age (including Golden Age of slavery, but that is another matter) from 1400 AD? Or is it from 1900 AD, that is a later imitation of the style, or even outright forgery? You ask someone to take a sample from a not too conspicuous part of the statue and you ¹⁴C-test that sample.

This means, there is a section of ¹⁴C-dating which is very parallel to the Belfast series. Now, Gavin Cox has explained very well why Belfast series is reliable (it is connected to trees known in the present and from so recent times that wood can be sampled from a fairly small region in fairly big chunks with fairly many rings), while other series are not (they are disconnected from Belfast series, their connection to time involves ¹⁴C-dates, they are from so far back that samples are smaller and from a wider area than would be really useful).

For ¹⁴C-dating, I'd appreciate a similar approach. Show why ¹⁴C-dating is reliable when dating sth from Gettysburg (if needed) but unreliable (as it definitely is in absolute dates) when it comes to dating Göbekli Tepe.

Hint : ¹⁴C-dates are different from tree ring dates. In a tree ring dating, each date depends on the one before that more recent in time and closer to when ring dates coincided with AD dated Gregorian calendar dated tree growth. So, one disconnect is enough to send a pan of 500 years (which possibly could be correctly dated internally in relative dates) floating on whenever its end is however long before the next series that is connected, whegther one connected to present or one not directly so connected.

This should imply : ¹⁴C-dating depending on another assumption, it has another set of problems. Let's identify them as candidly as Gavin Cox did with dendro! And first, let's identify Gavin Cox' candidness on this matter.

Bill N. of Australia

There are over 100 C14 labs doing a total of 10s of thousands at least of tests annually. If C14 is so unreliable, why haven't researchers who send their specimens for testing noticed it? What does CMI do to disillusion them?

Gavin Cox

But, contrary to your comment, researchers have actually noticed anomalous results for their samples for decades, and CMI has simply reported on their results. There was a major study of ¹⁴C reported by the RATE team (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth) back in 2005. They listed 90 peer-reviewed papers, going back to 1984, that reported anomalous results for 14C in samples supposedly 100,000 to multi-million-years (in the evolutionary time-scale). Of course, this is an impossible situation, unless these ancient materials are young—which we believe they are.

Gavin Cox has at best misunderstood the actual argument. The vast majority of the thousands of tests annually are NOT concerned with very old dates for which such anomalies (which only are so on Uniformitarian view, not for ¹⁴C per se), but simply with things like this coroner deciding whether such and such a skeleton belongs to the battle of the Marne or the rampages of a later serial killer, whether it should go to war memorial or to coroner for investigation and for families that are kin to victims of the stabber. And the more like near totality do not show this kind of so called anomalies.

What is 90 peer reviewed papers compared to more than 34 000 tests with no such anomaly (we are 34 years after 1984, and there are thousands of tests per year)?

Now, seing that Gavin Cox is not quite helpful, what is?

The assumption which is most likely to be wrong in a dating conflicting with Biblical chronology is not uniform speed of decay, whatever Setterfield and his fan Habermehl may think of that, it is how much the initial carbon was at.

If Göbekli Tepe organic samples had c. 100 pmC when they stopped breathing, Göbekli Tepe is 11 600 to 10 600 years back in time. If on the other hand Göbekli Tepe is Babel, between death of Noah and birth of Peleg, between 350 and 401 after the Flood, perhaps not all of these years, then for one thing the earliest and lowest layers as well as the highest and most recent ones started out with less than 50 pmC when they stopped breathing, and for another, the at most 51 years (I'd go for 40, though) are only spreading out to 1000 years because during this time, ¹⁴C is on the rise.

And this is my option. The things that are a definite anomaly to uniformitarians, ¹⁴C from layers supposed to be over 100,000 years old, and which is noted as an anomaly for Uniformitarians by Baumgartner, well, we as knowing better should be giving an account making it no more anomalous, I do, the "every level in the Phanerozoic portion [life-bearing] of the geological record" is simply usually either buried during Flood or during early post-Flood mudslides, and that means we can start calculating what the ¹⁴C level was at the Flood, 350 years before Göbekli Tepe started and 401 years before Peleg was born (and if you think Peleg was born just 101 years after the Flood, as per Masoretic with Vulgate text, you run into a problem, a too steep rise in ¹⁴C levels).

Perhaps my work has been ignored simply for the fact that as a Catholic, I don't feel bound to promote Jewish tradition over Catholic or Orthodox tradition, and therefore also not bound to take Vulgate over Roman Martyrology or Historia Scholastica. Let alone King James. (Which on top of being Masoretic in OT is also mistranslating the Greek of the NT, as in "repetitions" for Matthew 6:7**). My work is ignored, because it challenges the Protestantism of these usually Protestant researchers, indirectly, but if you scratch the surface, after all rather firmly.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Immaculate Conception
of the Blessed Virgin Mary
8.XII.2018

PS, in case you argue I am just a blogger, how about checking out this piece of news:

One Man's Discovery Sinks Major Climate Study
Bill Whittle | 15.XI.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpLVRPJnL4M

* The two articles are:

¹⁴C dating—who is fooling who?
Published: 8 December 2018 (GMT+10)
https://creation.com/carbon-dating-fooling-who

How old? When archaeology conflicts with the Bible
by Gavin Cox, Published: 1 November 2018 (GMT+10)
https://creation.com/how-old-archaeology-conflicts-bible

** Matthew 6:7 in King James. And in Douay Rheims. Link to discussion of meaning of battologein.

Why CMI in Public Ignores Me (One Probable Reason)

See this essay by Oard:

Can the relative timing of radioisotope dates be applied to biblical geology?
by Michael J. Oard
https://creation.com/can-the-relative-timing-of-radioisotope-dates-be-applied-to-biblical-geology

Summary : no it can't.

Argument : "However, a closer look reveals that the dates vary by around 200 Ma and include outliers that are billions of years too old! One example of an outlier is the 1.3 Ga Rb-Sr isochron age for lava that erupted after the Flood on the northwest rim of the Grand Canyon.10 It is obvious that the precision of relative dates is far from satisfactory to be used for absolute biblical dates."

Observation is valid for Ka-Ar, but not for C14.

Argument : "Baumgardner mentions how fission track dates agree with K-Ar radiometric ages on the Peach Spring Tuff and a tuff within the Jurassic Morrison Formation of southeast Utah.1 He argues that this a greement justifies relative dating. However, an examination of fission track data in the RATE book18 shows that indeed the dates for the Peach Spring Tuff are tightly constrained, and do agree reasonably closely with the radiometric dates. We wonder if circular reasoning wasn’t used to get the Peach Springs dates to agree. Circular reasoning is a common problem in uniformitarian earth science (see below)."

Observation is valid for fission track dates, but not for C14.

Solution proposed : "Baumgardner assumes the Flood began in the very late Precambrian.1 He sees that as an anchor point separating the antediluvian rock and the fossil record from the Flood. He also concludes that the post-Flood boundary is in the Pliocene, which is fairly close to my assessment of the situation."

Objection, this presupposes that "geological column" corresponds to different stages of the Flood.

In fact, it corresponds to zoo-geography in the immediate pre-Flood world, more usually.

Their proposal on what "relative timing" means : "The idea of using relative radiometric dating as a template for biblical earth history mostly sandwiches 4.567 billion years of uniformitarian history into 377 days of biblical earth history."

Objection, that would be the attempt to pull in ALL radiometric and uniformitarian dating under a single heading.

That is done by Setterfield and Habermehl.

I am singling out C14 for special treatment. Why? In C14, the thing to compare with present content of parent isotope is NOT present content of daughter isotope. It is atmospheric content.

And while atmospheric content has not been even roughly constant for 100 000 years, as Uniformitarians would like us to believe, it is also by the nature of the case, unlikely to change drastically from one day to the next.

The changes in atmospheric content would, mainly, have been upward. These upward changes would be complete by 500 BC, when Babylonian captivity destruction of Jerusalem is carbon dated to 2500 years ago (+83 or 86, I think). Since then, carbon dates are generally useful as given.

Now, the constant content would imply a balance between decay (the sample in the atmosphere is also a sample, and also decaying) and production of new carbon.

However, there are in fact - indirectly - limits on how quickly new carbon can form while life on earth survives, since too much cosmic rays would be lethal. We cannot have been having an incoming cosmic radiation so huge that radiation doses either at pole or equator would have equalled, for instance, those at Chernobyl 13 days after Wojtyla visited a Synagogue in Rome. Not the doses immediately close to the reactor.

This poses a limit of some kind on the speed of production of new carbon 14. And it seems the limit would depend on lots of parameters, and Ilya Usoskin has not been testing the ones I proposed around All Hallows. And this speed limit poses in its turn a limit on the disequilibrium between decay and new production, and therefore a speed limit on the rise of carbon in atmosphere and therefore ... can help with a relative chronology.

Note very well, C14 is not in any way shape or form concerned with "4.567 billion years". Anything dated in "millions" = Ka-Ar = virtually undated. Not carbon dated.

Note also, my carbon date ball park for Flood itself is fairly close to 40 000 BP, perhaps up to 5000 years younger. Anything carbon dated younger than that (including some of Armitage's dinosaurs and soft tissue) is post-Flood.

I suppose, after the Flood, the sediments were for a time still wet and soft, in order to speed drying up, God folded mountains, and while main effect was, water ran out quicker and they dried quicker, one side effect was a hazard of mudslides, providentially directed mostly to dinosaurs. Any men hit? Job perhaps asked once for mountains to cover him ... a Hadrosaur dated to 22 000 BP is from on my view, between Flood and Babel, and killed by a mudslide as described.

This is not in any way related to how the Hadrosaur is conventionally described as in Jurassic or Cretaceous or perhaps even Triassic, but only because of the carbon date; another Hadrosaur, dated to 40 000 BC, would be a pre-Flood one. This therefore means that Jurassic, and its "neighbours" Cretaceous and Triassic, are not informing us of the time scale, but of the usually pre-Flood, sometimes post-Flood biogeography.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Clement I, Pope and Martyr
23.XI.2017

Pre-Flood Biomass and More

Creation vs. Evolution : 1) C14 Calibrations, comparing two preliminary ones, mine and Tas Walker's · 2) Radioactive Methods Revisited, Especially C-14 · 3) What Some of You are Thinking / Ce que certains de vous sont en train de penser · Great Bishop of Geneva! : 4) Carbon Dating of Turin Shroud and Hacking and Conventional vs Creationist Dating · Creation vs. Evolution : 5) A Fault in my Tables? A Plan for Improvement? · 6) Pre-Flood Biomass and More · 7) Advantages of a Shorter Carbon 14 Chronology · 8) Hasn't Carbon 14 been Confirmatively Calibrated for Ages Beyond Biblical Chronology? By Tree Rings? · HGL's F.B. writings : 9) Comparing with Gerardus D. Bouw Ph. D., Debating with Roger M Pearlman on Chronology · 10) Continuing with Pearlman, Especially on Göbekli Tepe and Dating of Ice Age

I cannot take credit for coming up with the idea of biomass being vastly greater before the Flood. It belongs to John Baumgardner, Ph.D.*

What difference would this make? Lots more carbon in the atmosphere (and less nitrogen, nitrogen isn't stocked down in the earth, so more biomass meant more of the nitrogen, same total quantity as today, stocked in living creatures and less of it free in atmosphere), along with lots more oxygen (I presume, and I also presume for my part, part of that oxygen is now water after making an oxyhydrogen bang with hydrogen "waters" above that firmament when "the flood gates of heaven were opened"**) - that lots more carbon in atmosphere and less nitrogen, means even an equal production of new ¹⁴C from nitrogen hit by cosmic radiation of even same intensity would result in a lower ¹⁴C ratio in relation to the ¹²C.

And since biological material doesn't just swell the proportion of carbon so as to include more ¹⁴C, a lower ¹⁴C ratio meant, even with equal amount in total, which probably there wasn't, less ¹⁴C in each pound of living flesh, less ¹⁴C stocked in bones or possibly preserved soft tissue.

But of course, with less nitrogen in the air and much more nitrogen in living things on earth, while also less ¹⁴C was being formed, even with an equal amount of cosmic radiation.

That also would radically have altered ¹⁴C ratio downward. Even if the cosmic radiation was as great. Either counting it in relation to incoming radiation from space or in relation to protecting magnetic field. But on top of that it could even have been smaller with a stronger magnetic field, if for instance the flood gates of heaven would have included magnetic field as then stronger used by God for preventing too early formation of Brown's gas (in my scenario).

However, there is a hinch here.

If the rise in ¹⁴C ratio depended solely on the very sudden disappearance of much carbon along with biomass, we would have had a very sudden rise in ¹⁴C formation. And its reflection in living organisms.

On the other hand, in this scenario, there would also have been a more gradual rise (in time with decomposition of nitrogen from animal or plant bodies and evaporation of it from trapped bodies - I am supposing decomposing nitrogen is released again into atmosphere and not trapped forever as ammoniac - this is science somewhat beyond my level), and therefore a gradual rise in what the cosmic radiation had to hit.

This in its turn would have contributed to the rise of ¹⁴C in ways that involved less cosmic radiation beyond ours than I had presumed in my previous studies. So, the cosmic radiation just after Flood might even have been lower than the total background radiation at Princeton, and we still get the kind of rise in ¹⁴C which I describe in the table on the Avec un peu d'aide de Fibonnacci, and its modification in my previous essay on the subject.

More, I am not at all sure biomass could even have been as great as 100 times what we have now. If there was more oxygen (which on my view got down into the Oceans) and relatively less Nitrogen, that would not necessarily have made Earth able to support 100 times as much biomass as we have.

There might also be one hitch in Baumgardner's reasoning behind the 100 times***:

The Bible, by contrast, paints a radically different picture of our planet's history. In particular, it describes a time when God catastrophically destroyed the earth and essentially all its life. The only consistent way to interpret the geological record in light of this event is to understand that fossil-bearing rocks are the result of a massive global Flood that occurred only a few thousand years ago and lasted but a year. This Biblical interpretation of the rock record implies that the animals and plants preserved as fossils were all contemporaries. This means trilobites, dinosaurs, and mammals all dwelled on the planet simultaneously, and they perished together in this world-destroying cataclysm.

No, Evolutionists, the hitch is not trusting the Bible.

The hitch is this: for the trilobites, dinosaurs and fossile mammals actually preserved, this is certainly so.

But Evolutionists have projected each of the categories into a whole Earth fauna with LOTS more than is preserved.

We cannot really count on all that many T Reges, all that many Allosauri or Brontosauri. Or Dimetrodontes or Trilobita. Oh, sure, the ones we find, and certainly some order of magnitude more, but hardly as much as it would be if all the Evolutionist visions of faunae were piled onto each other as contemporary. And dito of florae.

So much for what I understand the argument of Baumgardner as meaning, if accepted and just added to my previous ones.

Now I'll discuss three scenarios, two with very huge pre-Flood and one with smaller pre-Flood biomass.

Let's start with the smaller one. Say it was twice as much as today, if even that. It became mainly fossil fuels, like coal, petrol and natural gas. Much of it has already been used up.

Have you noticed that the atmosphere is nearly as rich in ¹⁴C as before? The level hasn't dropped down to the presumed pre-Flood level - or to the actually proven pre-Flood level. I am presuming the amount released into atmosphere as gasses outweighs that tied down as plastic.

If that is all there is to the biomass from before the Flood, the argument is gone for Baumgardner. Also, petrol and other mineral resources will soon be up. That is not a disaster, for fuel one can use wood or dried cowdung. Or even dry seaweed, perhaps. And petrol per se is not among the things that make an acre more productive as arable land.

see enumeration on
New blog on the kid : More from wiki Arable land
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2016/11/more-from-wiki-arable-land.html

Other possibility (purely speculatively, without testing other consequences which might falsify, just taking the cue from Baumgardner), it was much larger, if not 100 times, 50 or at least 20 times the present. In this proposed case also, most went down into Earth, mineral carbon is very far from depleted due to this being much larger. If all were burnt, it would make a huge difference in the atmosphere and ¹⁴C would drastically sink. Because the new total level of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be very much greater.

In and of itself, that would not be a disaster, it would restore levels of pre-Flood carbon dioxide. But it might flood parts of the Earth and dry out parts of the Earth.

Since Earth has since Flood much more water in the Seas, dry land after Flood depends much more on water not rising.

This part could be a non-possibility right there, if seas encroaching that much on land contradict:

Jeremias (Jeremiah) 5:22 Will not you then fear me, saith the Lord: and will you not repent at my presence? I have set the sand a bound for the sea, an everlasting ordinance, which it shall not pass over: and the waves thereof shall toss themselves, and shall not prevail: they shall swell, and shall not pass over it.

Unless God's keeping of this word involves us not burning too much petrol. Not "depends on", God has promised, but averting that we burn too much may be part of God's keeping this promise.

Third scenario, here also biomass was much larger, but it has gone into the seas, the carbon cycle of the seas, carbon dioxide streaming upward to the algae and cyanobacteria, biomass and dead biomass gravitating in steps to the deep, took care of far more than ever the fossil fuels.

This retains the argument of Baumgardner, but leaves the environmental issue as with a low pre-Flood biomass scenario. As, therefore, no big deal.

It also helps to explain the reservoir effect of dating things that live off lots of sea food. Though for this, it is enough that the carbon cycle of the Ocean is mainly distinct from that of the atmosphere. Mainly, it cannot be totally so.

But let's count a bit on biomass again.

I proposed that biomass 100 or even 50 times as great would involve Nitrogen being more tied up in organisms. Wouldn't that also be the case of Carbon? And wouldn't that in its turn have made the carbon that was forming as ¹⁴C rather more dominant in the pre-Flood atmosphere, making the ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio in atmosphere and therefore in living things much higher?

That would destroy Baumgardner's argument.

Or, suppose, small scenario, carbon cycle in atmosphere certainly totally outweighs that tied up in biomass, and did so nearly as much before the Flood, that would have left the ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio before the Flood about equal to now, if otherwise as much ¹⁴C was forming.

That is why I think we need, as Creationists, to presume less overall ¹⁴C was forming up to Flood. Either less cosmic radiation was produced, and stars and Sun obeying God started doing more of it just after Flood, or magnetic shield was far stronger and was suddenly weakened after Flood, or both.

And the kind of rise in ¹⁴C which has been seen since the Flood (and it is a gradual rise, you cannot squeeze all the stone age into the first decade after Flood, since then there lived only 8 adult persons, all born after Flood were as yet babies) means that more ¹⁴C was being added just after Flood (though gradual, it was arguably rising much faster after Flood than before stabilising), both more than before the Flood and more than even now.

Taken with the magnetic shield only, this gives a scenario of:

• very strong shield Creation to Anno Mundi 2242, year of Flood
• very weak shield just after Flood
• gradual strengthening of the shield from 2242 to sth like anno Mundi 4700, that is 500 BC.
• since then a stable level of ¹⁴C depending on a half strong shield.

And here I am contradicting "mainstream Creationist" scenario for magnetic shield, amn't I?

Sarfati's diagram from 1998 or from 2014 (article's writing date and update date) shows a maximal but decaying intensity up to Flood. Then a sudden drop at Flood with some reversals even, then fluctuations up to Christ, then a steady decay up to now.

This steady decay up to now would involve more ¹⁴C forming, and the decay keeping up with it less. And this would mean we would be in a growing ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio.

Not so, I have proven, in my essay Examinons une hypothèse qui se trouve contrefactuelle un peu de près, that this would mean that if halflife were calibrated by actual dating results, these would be shortening the halflife radically. As well as making it inconsistent : you would not be able to use the halflife calibrated by one histoirically datable object to accurately date one from a different century.

This means, I have to be very sceptical about Sarfati's model for the magnetic field. Now, he is giving a reference as an argument.

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 century1 (also, archaeological measurements show that the field was 40% stronger in AD 1000 than today2).

From: CMI : The earth’s magnetic field: evidence that the earth is young
by Jonathan Sarfati | March 1998; updated August 2014
http://creation.com/the-earths-magnetic-field-evidence-that-the-earth-is-young

Footnote 1 K.L. McDonald and R.H. Gunst, ‘An analysis of the earth’s magnetic field from 1835 to 1965,’ ESSA Technical Report, IER 46-IES 1, U.S. Govt. Printing Office, Washington, 1967.

Footnote 2 R.T. Merrill and M.W. McElhinney, The Earth’s Magnetic Field, Academic Press, London, pp. 101–106, 1983.

No actual indication as how Merrill and McElhinney derive their view on Earth's magnetic field 1000 years ago is given, and the analyses ranging 1835 to 1965 could be a temporary trend.

I am not saying I am absolutely right here, but for the moment I can't see exactly how I could be wrong, if on the one hand datings of historically well dated objects (i e last 2500 years) confirms known dates and stable half life, and on the other hand ¹⁴C rose very steeply after Flood planing out up to then.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Dedication of
Our Saviour's Basilica
of the Lateran in Rome
9.XI.2016

Update next day:

I forgot (such was my lack of sleep) to add that if there is anything at all in a minor way with the argument of Baumgardner, it is at least enough to push the ¹⁴C from a pre-Flood value as per Baumgardner 0.4% to my initial post-Flood values of 3-4.sth %. Especially as the pre-Flood value would be the somewhat higher 0.43% of present, if replacing his equation:

With this more realistic pre-Flood ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio, we find that a value of 0.24 pmc corresponds to an age of only 4200 years (0.004 x 2^-4200/5730 = 0.0024 = 0.24 pmc).

With this: we find that a value of 0.24 pmc corresponds to an age of only 4973 years (0.004379975236037067013526 x 2^-4973/5730 = 0.0024 = 0.24 pmc)./HGL

* "However, uniformitarian assumptions are inappropriate when one considers that the Genesis Flood removed vast amounts of living biomass from exchange with the atmosphere—organic material that now forms the earth's vast coal, oil, and oil shale deposits. A conservative estimate for the pre-Flood biomass is 100 times that of today."

ICR : Carbon Dating Undercuts Evolution's Long Ages
by John Baumgardner, Ph.D.
http://www.icr.org/article/carbon-dating-undercuts-evolutions-long-ages

I must admit that in the following words he gives a somewhat possible alternative explanation to my model:

"If one takes as a rough estimate for the total ¹⁴C in the biosphere before the cataclysm as 40% of what exists today and assumes a relatively uniform 14C level throughout the pre-Flood atmosphere and biomass, then we might expect a ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio of about 0.4% of today's value in the plants and animals at the onset of the Flood. With this more realistic pre-Flood ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio, we find that a value of 0.24 pmc corresponds to an age of only 4200 years (0.004 x 2-4200/5730 = 0.0024 = 0.24 pmc)."

Obviously we are not talking the same timescale, not exactly, since he considers Flood centuries more recent than I do.

** This scenario, however, I can take credit for, see my debate with GreedyCapybara:

"I have my theory that both atmosphere with Oxygen and a Hydrogen vault were made as the air (oxygen) separated waters below the firmament (H₂O) from waters above it (mostly H₂ which is "instant water" if you add oxygen and a spark) and that some of both atmosphere and hydrogen layer were used up to make flood water."

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Flood with GreedyCapybara7 (snappy version)
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.fr/2014/01/on-flood-with-greedycapybara7-snappy.html *** Quote from article cited above.