Re: AAT:A method to falsify

H. M. Hubey (hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu)
7 Oct 1995 14:59:37 -0400

David Froehlich <eohippus@moe.cc.utexas.edu> writes:

>by suggesting that the water temperature anywhere exposed to the
>atmosphere and not heated by volcanic activity could be 98.6 and that
>hominids were living in it.

1) I don't know how hot the earth was during its prehistory and
asked for it

2) I don't remember saying that the oceans were all 98.6 but
I don't know that it never was

3) It would not have been impossible for some specific
location (an isolated patch in an equatorial region) to
have been this temperature.

3) Until there's some universally accepted reason as to why this
number i.e. 98.6 is the standard body temperature of mammals
it seems that people should ask for it

4) Finally, the first mammal had to develop somewhere and it
could have easily happened in some place where the water was
exactly around this temperature

>The ratio of two isotopes of oxygen can be measured. The change in
>del018 can be directly tied to global average temperature. These 018

Oxygen would have to be locked up in something. Is it the ice
caps in which they find the oxygen (along with the other gases)
and from which they posit earth temperature?

There must be an independent way to confirm the age of the
ice in that case otherwise it's circular. It certainly can't go
beyond the time period in which the earth would have been much warmer
and ice caps melted.

>curves indicate pretty precisely that the earth has not been that warm
>since at least the Cretaceous (I am not a geochemist so thie above is a

135 million year old ice caps?? I guess the oxygen is supposed to
be trapped in something else, like rocks??

>bit of a simplification. If there is a geochemist in the audience would
>you please post a follow up if I am leaving something out).

Yes, I second this request. I'd like to know how we know the
temperature of the earth.

-- 





				Regards, Mark

				http://www.smns.montclair.edu/~hubey