The Earth Should Have Frozen

According to stellar evolution theory, the earth should have frozen solid four billion years ago, because the young sun could not have put out the heat it does in its middle age.  Called the “faint young sun paradox,” this problem has puzzled scientists for decades.  A new study has failed to solved the puzzle.
    Science Now described work by a team at the University of Copenhagen.  They studied minerals in rocks in Greenland thought to be 3.8 billion years old – among the oldest claimed on Earth – for hints of carbon dioxide levels:

Too much CO2, and magnetite can’t form, whereas the opposite is true for siderite.  Based on the ratio of the minerals, the team reports in tomorrow’s issue of Nature¹ that CO2 levels during the Archean could have been no higher than about 1000 parts per million—about three times the current level of 387 ppm and not high enough to compensate for the weak sun.

These “very surprising” results were no comfort to theorists who had hoped that Earth could have avoided a big freeze via greenhouse gases.  Now they are toying with other ideas: less land and bigger oceans, which might have allowed water to absorb more warmth; or early life that reduced the kinds of atmospheric gases that help clouds form, allowing more sunlight to reach the surface.  Their favorite suggestion was that Earth’s albedo (reflectivity) was lower back then, eliminating the need for greenhouse gases to compensate.  Isn’t it amazing, though, how the albedo’s changes were tuned to the sun’s output to keep the temperature stable?

The Earth�s surface environment over the approximately 4 billion years (Gyr) recorded in geologic formations appears to have been maintained within a relatively narrow range in which liquid water was stable.  This is surprising because the factors that determine surface temperature have evolved owing to temporal variations of the Sun’s irradiance, the Earth’s albedo and cloud cover, and concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases over geologic time.  It is not readily apparent to what extent this apparent thermostasis can be attributed to physico-chemical feedback mechanisms, metabolic interventions from living organisms, or combinations of unrelated secular changes.

The paper by Rosing et al boasted that there is “No climate paradox under the faint early Sun,” but then admitted to quite a few other uncertainties:

• There is little consensus on when the first continents emerged, or the rate of growth since continental nucleation.
• There is no simple relationship between the mass of continental material extracted from the mantle and the surface area of exposed land….
• We have chosen to use the present-day area/volume relationship (Fig. 2a), which probably overestimates the continental area, and in consequence, the albedo for the early Earth.
• Because the timing and rate of growth of the Earth’s continents is a matter of debate, we have included a scenario in which the surface area occupied by continents is constant over geologic time as one end-member in our model (see Methods).

In other words, the temperature compensation works if one makes many ad hoc, arbitrary assumptions about factors or combinations of factors nobody knows anything about.
    Others think there is still a need for some greenhouse-induced global warming back then; “Temperatures during the Archean were at least as high as they are today, despite the weaker sun,” claimed James Kasting [Penn State], according to the Science Now article.  Rosing shrugged his shoulders and said, “I think that our paper is just one link in a long chain of further refinements of our understanding of the early Earth and of the dynamics of our planet” – a lot of words meaning clueless. 

1.  Rosing, Bird, Sleep, Bjerrum, “No climate paradox under the faint early Sun,” Nature 464, 744-747 (1 April 2010) | doi:10.1038/nature08955.

Evolutionary scientists can be such braggarts.  They say they know this, and they know that, but you look at their assumptions and methods, and there is no basis for confidence about any of it.  The only thing that is rock solid in their mushy opinions is unwavering allegiance to Darwin and the billions of years he needed.  Even when it causes insurmountable challenges from other branches of investigation, like stellar evolution, they just chalk it up to future work – a “long chain of further refinements of our understanding.”  Did you see much “understanding” in these articles?  How about letting some others exhibit their understanding without the requirement of allegiance to Darwin.  Look, to have a chain of understanding, you’ve got to have some links – solid links.  A chain of spaghetti-O’s won’t hold much.  This primordial spaghetti-O chain of reasoning needs to be fortified with iron.  It’s so insipid, it’s enough to make a young son faint.