How do scientists determine how much CO2 was in the atmosphere thousands of years ago, and to what level of certainty are they able to perform these calculations?
In: Earth Science
It is a swag. A scientific wild ass guess. There are some here that will tell you different and that I am wrong, but their methods are easy to disprove. Take the very first one I saw when i opened this up, ice cores. The “layers” are NOT indicative of the age of core. There are more than one layet per year. Google about the P-38 that was lost on the ice in Greenland in WWII. Look at how deep it was in the ice and how many layers there were when they finally found it, dug down to it, and recovered it. Plants preserved somehow from long ago? Nope. First problem is knowing EXACTLY when that plant lived. Unless someone was there and left a note next to it and said note is recovered, then that is only a guess. Age of tnis plant when it died? Also a guess, but can be somewhat accurate with trees. However, we still don’t know when it lived, just about how long it lived. Rock layers? Nope. They are dated by the plants that are found in them. However, tje plants are dated differently, by the age of the rocks they were found in. I’m 55 years old. My shoes are 10 years old, you cannot tell the age of one based on the other and then reverse it and derive the age of the first based on the age of rhe second. Is my foot then 10 years old or my shoe 55? Are you beginning to see tje problems here? Carbon 14? Totally inaccurate because it is based on how much Carbon 14 exists today, which is more than a year ago. It would be a somewhat accurate way except for one major problem. It doesn’t get produced in the cells of living organisms, but in the atmosphere. That is a huge problem because of how we get it in our bodies, just like every other living thing, we absorb it. It can be absorbed from the atmosphere, or when we consume something that has Carbon 14 in it. The issue then becomes has the organism being tested reached saturation/equilibrium. That means is it at the point where it cannot absorb any more and it is losing it at the same rate as it is gaining it. Think of a 55 gallon barrel with a line of holes up the side of it. You put a hose in the barrel and start to fill it with water. As the water rises it starts to come out of more of the holes. When it gets to the point where the hose output id equal to the amount escaping from the holes the level no longer rises, nor doea it fall. That is the point of saturation/equilibrium. Since we cannot know if the organism being tested has reached that point then any measurement of how much Carbon 14 remains is useless as a way to determine how long ago it lived. So, there you have it, there is no way to accurately tell.
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