How reliable is geologic dating?https://www.sciencemeetsreligion.org/ev ... bility.php(long article - excerpt)
.....................
Along this line, Roger Wiens, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, asks those who are skeptical of radiometric dating to consider the following (quoted in several cases from [Wiens2002]):
There are well over forty different radiometric dating methods, and scores of other methods such as tree rings and ice cores.
All of the different dating methods agree--they agree a great majority of the time over millions of years of time. Some [skeptics] make it sound like there is a lot of disagreement, but this is not the case. The disagreement in values needed to support the position of young-earth proponents would require differences in age measured by orders of magnitude (e.g., factors of 10,000, 100,000, a million, or more). The differences actually found in the scientific literature are usually close to the margin of error, usually a few percent, not orders of magnitude!
Vast amounts of data overwhelmingly favor an old Earth. Several hundred laboratories around the world are active in radiometric dating. Their results consistently agree with an old Earth. Over a thousand papers on radiometric dating were published in scientifically recognized journals in the last year, and hundreds of thousands of dates have been published in the last 50 years. Essentially all of these strongly favor an old Earth.
Radioactive decay rates have been measured for over sixty years now for many of the decay clocks without any observed changes. And it has been close to a hundred years since the uranium-238 decay rate was first determined.
A recent survey of the rubidium-strontium method found only about 30 cases, out of tens of thousands of published results, where a date determined using the proper procedures was subsequently found to be in error.
Both long-range and short-range dating methods have been successfully verified by dating lavas of historically known ages over a range of several thousand years.
The mathematics for determining the ages from the observations is relatively simple.
.... and, yes, I know they generally can't narrow a specific sample down to a few years, and I was expecting the correlation/causation thingy, but it's quite clear that:
rising levels of atmospheric CO2 coincide with rising temperatures (that mechanism is well understood),
that we are pumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year,
that the current rising temperature trend coincides with the onset of the industrial age and dramatically increased burning of fossil fuels along with vast human destruction of carbon-sequestering mechanisms,
that the vast majority of climate and atmospheric scientists agree that humans are warming the planet,
that the Arctic and Greenland are melting at an accelerating rate,
that this process has been scientifically predicted for over 100 years,
that most current organisms on Earth are adapted to a fairly narrow range of temperatures,
that extinctions and other environmental degradations are proceding apace, many accelerating,
that human population and consumption are increasing,
..... and that virtually all measurements of these things coincide.
Your mother may have raised a fool, but mine did not. Considering the above (and many other factors) I'm certainly not going to fall for some weak-assed argument about how "correlation doesn't prove correlation". I mean,
really? If some guy bops you in the head with a ball bat, are you going to blame the pain on a headache? A brain tumor?
.... and while we're at it, let's throw in a few million tons of methane, just for good measure.