Have uniformitarians rescued the ’Pacemaker of the Ice Ages’ paper? | The Institute for Creation Research

 
Have uniformitarians rescued the ’Pacemaker of the Ice Ages’ paper?

In Journal of Creation 33 (1): 102-109, April 2019

The current dominant Ice Age explanation is the astronomical, or Milankovitch, theory. This theory posits that slow changes in Earth’s rotational and orbital motions ‘pace’ the timing of ice ages by modulating the manner in which solar radiation incident on the earth is distributed with season and latitude. This theory is widely accepted because of an influential 1976 paper entitled “The Pacemaker of the Ice Ages”. However, the paper’s results were critically dependent upon an assumed age for the most recent geomagnetic reversal, an age which even uniformitarian scientists no longer accept as valid. If one re-does the calculations using the new uniformitarian age assignment, the results are greatly weakened. Although additional evidence for the Milankovitch theory seems weak, a 1997 paper seems to ‘rescue’ the results of this iconic paper. However, this ‘rescue’ may be influenced by ‘selection bias’ and arguably requires arbitrary, capricious handling of seafloor sediment data. Hence, these 1997 results are not terribly convincing.

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