I contacted Don Batten about that article a decade or so ago, pointing out that his comparison of the Pinus radiata vs Pinus longaeva was dependent on his personal opinion, with no data behind it, and was rejectable immediately as an argument from authority. I also pointed out that it appeared to be a flawed authority, since I’d contacted a bristlecone pine researcher directly* who had told me there was only one known example of an extra ring in a bristlecone pine, and that was in a tree growing in a cave with a non-seasonal water supply. Since Don could not himself provide an example of an extra ring in Pinus longaeva, his argument went nowhere.
Don Batten replied by sending me a picture of some of the extra rings in a Pinus radiata that were undetectable under the microscope. Unfortunately for him, while they might have been undetectable under the microscope, they were easily detectable by eye.
He never did explain why, if the various Pinus longaeva specimens had in fact produced many rings per year that fit into the biblical timescale, why there was not only consilience between individual trees but also consistency with carbon dating and a correlation between very small or even (in some trees) missing rings and known dates of volcanic eruptions.
Exactly. It doesn’t explain how the bristlecone pine data in North America would agree with the oak data set from Europe. Then we add all of the other consilient data from ice layers, lake varves, speleothems, and corals. All of these observations were produced through completely different mechanisms from places across the globe, and they all agree. YEC’s can’t explain why this is.
Again, I agree with John. Your referenced CMI article has three very thin footnotes, none of which even relate to the claim…
Recent research on seasonal effects on tree rings in other trees in the same genus, the plantation pine Pinus radiata , has revealed that up to five rings per year can be produced and extra rings are often indistinguishable, even under the microscope, from annual rings.
…let alone how this is applicable to Bristlecone Pines or Oak chronologies.
Not only does dendrochronology actually provide a reliable annual count, but also contains valuable information concerning climate variation, significant fires, volcanos, and of course, cross correlations. Scientists are not just interested in the number of years, but what the conditions were over that time. YEC, of course, could not care less about such detailed information, they just want to negate the timespan.
This was published this year and I hope to access a copy:
Who hasn’t seen for themselves rings through a cut tree? This is another example of where YEC rebuke their very own eyes with the incantation “uniformitarianism”, and make the evidence disappear into a vaporous oblivion.
Don’t expect anyone to wade through all the irrelevancies to arrive at whatever nugget you think answers the question. That’s just inconsiderate.
No, just that they all disagree with your claim about the bible’s chronology by a quite considerable margin. They all seem to be connected with preceding cultures in the same areas too, going way back. All that is presumably post-flood in your mind, and all presumably condensed down to a very few generations.
And of course there’s no evidence of a worldwide flood, ever. Creationists can’t even agree on where the flood layers are. It’s flat earth science at its finest.
Which is irrelevant to what I wrote, but thanks for sharing anyway.
“Founding fathers”. You’re right about that. Very few female scientists for most of human history. So I guess we should also say that science only exists because of the Y chromosome, eh?