This paper has a whole host of consistent data for a speleothem data set, tree rings, and lake varves.
https://www.ess.uci.edu/sites/default/files/pictures/1-s2.0-S0277379111003817-main.pdf
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The evidence determines if it is a fundamental law, and there are mountains of evidence that support it.
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Love it â bat breath testifies to an old earth (and mutually validates radiometric dating): 
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Sure carbon dating is pretty accurate until a few thousand years ago, and can be verified against historical events. Iâm not doubting the first 3000 years, but then dont see the extent of verification as trustworthy further back. Adjustments are made due to the reduced atmospheric carbon when the magnetic field was stronger, but there is an additional affect on the actual decay of carbon 14 which could be underestimated over the long run. How do we know to what extent the flux in background radiation affects carbon 14 decay? Have you any studies that analyze correlations between muon density and carbon 14 decay rates? Sure these are not needed while muon density remains approximately constant, but when muon density was significantly lower, how did that affect carbon 14 decay rates. Itâs all good and well to adjust for reduced carbon in the atmosphere, but did they adjust for reduced background radiation?
I really enjoyed your bathroom analogy, haha. Well expressed. Nevertheless, the fluctuations were not perfectly random, but in each situation the outside cause also affected background radiation, yet instead of looking at background radiation as the cause they distracted themselves with the neutrino theory. So we have a possible relationship in view, when background radiation changes slightly, decay rates change slightly. This needs to be studied further to see if the relationship exists or not.
Furthermore, in the past background radiation would have been far lower, due to the higher atmospheric air pressures. So we are looking at a possible major influence on decay rates. While that possibility remains, I will not trust radiometric dates.
The measured decay rate changes. We still have to determine if the measured rate is the actual rate. Why couldnât the increased background radiation mess up the measurement?
Wouldnât you need higher decay rates in order for the Earth to be younger?
From what I have seen, you are rejecting radiometric dates because you donât like them and trying to find excuses to justify your already held conclusions.
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I recommend we just stick to science instead of speculating on my motives.
Letâs not confuse the background radiation caused by solar wind and cosmic rays, with the decay of parent isotopes. These are two different processes. Higher air pressures would reduce or eliminate the muon impact on the earthâs surface, muons being the main source of background radiation.
Would decay speed up rapidly when not energized continuously by muon induced background radiation? We donât know, ancient decay rates are assumed to be constant, thatâs quite an assumption considering even solar flares appear to affect decay rates.
Can you show any appreciable and verifiable muon induced decay in the isotopes used for radiometric dating?
Nuclear weapons have uranium and plutonium cores that are just on the edge of going critical. If decay is not constant and suddenly increases then they would all go off. Do you think this is a risk?
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You are asking me to show you studies that do not exist. That is what I am disputing, the constancy of radioactive decay has not been studied under the different conditions that did actually exist in eras past. One such past condition is that higher atmospheric air pressures do block muons from reaching the earthâs surface.
I am not suggesting that muons induce the decay, I am wondering if muons slow the decay through energising parent isotopes. When you block the background source of energy, then does decay speed up? We donât know, we assume the constancy in historical conditions without studying the constancy in those particular conditions. That is very unscientific.
If air can block muons, then rock would definitely block muons. Therefore, I donât see how this could be a factor for isotopes buried in rock.
At first blush, if fission was caused by muons then I would expect a different daughter isotope than that seen with spontaneous fission. From what I have read on the subject, the standard uranium decay chains are seen in rocks with the expected intermediates at the expected equilibrium in the proper samples.
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The irony is that air can block muons, yet muons can also penetrate into great depths in rock. Please note that muons are susceptible to the forbrush effect, which directly relates to solar flares :
So muons are susceptible to air pressure, yet can still penetrate rocks to great depth
In the last article, you can see how they can penetrate deeply, yet are susceptible to seasons and weather.
So muon density is affected by solar flares, and seasons, yet in other studies they show daily cycles. These same causes of variation, also cause variation in the decay of parent isotopes. So it would be an interesting exercise to study if there is a relationship between the two.
Iâm gratified that minds immeasurably superior to mine agree itâs the measuring equipment thatâs flawed, when that has historically eluded other such minds.
I think you are confusing muon penetration with muon production.
Or better yet, it is related to the decay constant of muons:
Starting from the begininng a varve is a sequence of alternating layers. There is a layer of organic material and a layer of non organic material. You get layers of organic material in the spring and summer time. But when there is not a lot of organic material in the air, you see effectively none of it in the actual portion of that varve (you want a place that has very little seasonal flooding). Varves are created all of the time in lakes, but you can have the formation of pseudo layers in between the annual sequence. For example, there are the Lake Steele varves that form a nice sequence going back 5 thousand years but not much further. Sometimes, like in Lake Suigetsu, layers are interrupted by a thin layer of volcanic ash. One of the amazing things that you can do is you can count the layers going down and you can cross check that with either radiocarbon dating on the organic material or by using potassium-argon dating in the layers of volcanic ash. Remarkably when you compare the dates you get from simply counting annual layers and the radiometric dates you find that they are in agreements. Thatâs why varves are such a powerful piece of evidence.
We definitely know that that is not true. One of the simplest ways to definitely know thatâs not true is because of what a varve actually is. You donât have the continual deposition of organic material in the winter time. The only way for your proposal to be true would be if rainfall flooding added sediments to a sequence of constant organic material deposition. But we know for a fact the deposition of organic material is not continuous and the layers of nonorganic sediment are slowly deposited. But even then your model doesnât actually explain the sequence of what a varve actually nor can you explain how why would we go downwards we can just simply date the different layers of varves and the number of annual layers corresponds to the number of years obtained from radiometric dating
This is definitely not an example of blind acceptance of scientific conclusions. Maybe you arenât familiar with the body of research so it feels like you are blindly accepting them, but thatâs not what youâre doing when you actually accept the scientific consensus. There are hundreds and hundreds of papers and people who have spent really their lives doing research on this sequence of varves. And it is really out absurd to think that an individual like you or me can just come in and understand everything better then all of those people and all of their expertise combined. Go and read some of the papers written on varves. There are hundreds and hundreds of careful scientific research.
Finally, these are not opinions about what just some people kind of think is true. These are actual measurements, that took tens of thousands of hours to do if not more than that. These are things that have been independently tested by hundreds of laboratories around the world. Itâs not anyoneâs opinion, but it is a well-established scientific consensus and is as good as any fact that you might be aware of. And it establishes without a doubt that radiometric dating is not flawed.
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What data are you basing the magnetic field strength on? What data shows that relates to a atmosphic carbon in a causative fashion?
Based on what? Why is that? How much higher was the air pressure? It seems to me a lot of science fiction rather than science. I would welcome some references.
Well said and thank you for correcting me. Muons are not âblockedâ as I said, but there is less production in the atmosphere under some changed weather conditions. Less muons are produced under higher atmospheric pressures. Muons are the primary source of background radiation, so in eras past when atmospheric air pressures were higher, the background radiation would have been lower. Would that reduced surface radiation then have an effect on radioactive decay? We donât know, we need to measure the rate of decay under those conditions before we can be confident of slow decay rates in past eras.
Varves are not just a single layer, but represent a succession of depositional layers within a season. This is obvious, that each precipitation results in itâs own layer, and the pattern of layers through a season can be recognizable as an annual varve. In what way do the so-called 1mm varves in Lake Suigetsu represent this precipitation based succession of layers which together define a full season? In other words, for that 1 mm layer found in Lake Suigetsu to be regarded as an annual varve, rather than a precipitation event, it would have to show a series of precipitation events WITHIN THE VARVE in a seasonal pattern to be regarded as a clear annual varve.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/42907914/Varves_in_lake_sediments__a_review20160221-9648-7y3uzy.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DVarves_in_lake_sediments_a_review.pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20200303%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20200303T062332Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=6d64b84666ddd45072285adca46d04ccca565accee7f3b956cb20452804d7bb3
Varved records are not the result of a continuous and slow accumulation of particles. Instead, the details of varved records are controlled by a succession of depositional events representing pulses from runoff events (e.g. snowmelt and rainfall), algal blooms or periods of
intense calcite precipitation, so-called whitings (e.g. Stockhecke et al., 2012). In spite of the stochastic nature of the magnitude and timing of some depositional phenomena, the overall varve record remains subject to the overriding seasonal climatic control. Given the dating uncertainties discussed below, the stochastic variations can be regarded as negligible and the term âcalendar year chronologyâ is typically justified.
Itâs a well known fact that the magnetic field fluctuates and therefore carbon dates have to be adjusted according to changed carbon production in the atmosphere:
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1326&context=tnas
The variation of atmospheric radiocarbon concentration over the past 8,000 years is generally well explained in terms of the modulation of radiocarbon production by the Earthâs magnetic field. The reconstruction of this variation as based upon the known fluctuation of the Earthâs field, however, is slightly out of phase with and of a smaller
amplitude than the empirically derived curve. Correlations between solar magnetic activity and climatic trends are well established over a period of a few hundred years. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the solar magnetic field modulates the production of radiocarbon in the same manner as does that of the Earth. By assuming that the correlation between solar activity and climate stems from some fundamental process, climatological information can be used to derive the behavior of the solar field over an extended period of time. The solar field thus established, along with knowledge of the Earthâs field, yields a curve of radiocarbon concentration which is in much better agreement with the empirical curve.
This increased atmospheric pressure in eras past, is well known. I cannot say the extent of the increased atmospheric pressure, but certainly enough to make flight easier:
The fact that the oxygen would have increased the air pressure as well meant that the large flying insects of the time would have gotten more lift for each beat of their wings, allowing flying arthropods to reach sizes that are structurally impossible for their present-day relatives.
When there is more oxygen in the air, organisms that diffuse oxygen over their trachea are able to obtain more oxygen with less effort, and it doesnât take as much energy to become large being oxygen is so âcheap.â Likewise, increased air pressure makes flying less costly in terms of energy, as wing size has to go up with decreasing air pressure in order to keep flying animals aloft
If even todayâs fluctuations in air pressure can affect muon counts, how much more so in the Carboniferous?
What was your link to? It doesnât work for me. Itâs definitely true that most sequences of varves are not on the snow accumulation of particles. Thatâs why the Lake Suigetsu varve sequence is so special and why, when rigorously tested against other dating methods it produces a continuous sequence. Data like this help demonstrate again why youâre wrong just dismissing the entire varve sequence:
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The
Well they actually want to use the Suigetsu varves (so-called varves) to calibrate Carbon dating, thatâs how confident we are in Carbon dates. As for using tree rings, they generally use floating pine chronologies, which are based on matching sequences. The problem with that is the overlaps that continue a chronology are not statistically unique, weather sequences can cause similar looking sequences in tree rings that are actually completely unrelated. So if you want to base the entire history of earth and the accuracy of carbon dating on a few tree rings that âseem to matchâ in sequence, all you will end up with is a lot of confirmation bias.
Answers in Genesis deals with this pretty well as discussed here:
Geologists have known for quite some time that multiple laminae may form very rapidly. French creation scientist Guy Berthault performed groundbreaking laboratory experiments demonstrating that multiple laminations can form spontaneously when sediment mixtures consisting of particles of different sizes are deposited in air, running water, or still water. This occurs because particles of different sizes have a tendency to spontaneously segregate and stratify themselves. Berthaultâs research was published in two papers published by the French Academy of Sciences (Berthault 1986, 1988a), and English translations of these papers were subsequently published in a prominent creation research journal (Berthault 1988b, 1990).
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Individual laminae (and âvarvesâ) result from changes in flow conditions under intermittently energetic conditions (Lazar et al. 2015), not from annual events. Thus energetic conditions are known to result in the deposition of varve-like laminae. Lest it be argued that such energetic depositional conditions never occurred in Lake Suigetsu, numerous turbidite and flood debris layers have been recognized in the drill-cores of the lakeâs bottom sediments and attributed to âpast extreme eventsâ (Schlolaut et al. 2014).
Glock, Studhalter, and Agerter (1960) concluded that development of multiple layers in a single year (sometimes called âfalse ringsâ) was more common than a single layer forming in a year and that very few annual increments consist of only one ring layer. Mirov (1967), in his book on the genus Pinus , concluded that tree âringsâ formed after nearly every cloudburst, tying the appearance of rings to rainfall events in the dry White Mountains climate.
Theres a lot of confirmation bias going on, and different methods being accepted when they appear to tie into other methods. But in the end, itâs just precipitation events being misunderstood as annual events, in ice cores, in lake sediments, and in tree rings. And the unreliability of carbon dating using these other methods for âcalibrationâ.