Dubious "Solved It!" Boasts Mar Science Literature

In the widely-read online science magazine Quanta we recently had a story claiming that some scientists have finally solved a problem that has long baffled them: what is called the faint young sun paradox. The story is an example of what we may call a "Solved It!" story.  Such triumphal-sounding stories tend to have the characteristics listed below:

The origin of life seems to require liquid water. Geological evidence indicates that our planet was warm enough for liquid water to have existed about 3.5 billion years ago, around the time when scientists claim the first earthly life appeared. But models of solar evolution lead scientists to conclude that the sun gave off much less heat billions of years ago, only about 70% of the heat that the sun now emits. Judging only from the sun's evolution, our planet should have been completely frozen three billion years ago. This discrepancy is known as the faint young sun paradox.

The Quanta article claiming a solution to this paradox is entitled "A Solution to the Faint-Sun Paradox Reveals a Narrow Window for Life." It touts an idea of scientist James Kasting, who claims that 4.5 billion years ago the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 10,000 times greater than today. Kasting claims that the amount of carbon dioxide has been steadily falling since the time Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. He claims that there was so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere about 3.5 billion years ago that Earth would have been warm, because of the well-known greenhouse effect by which carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to higher temperatures. 

To try to support these claims, the Quanta article uses a staple of speculative science literature: the Guess Graph.  Graphs are usually used to present in a chart form some factual data that has been measured.  A Guess Graph is when we have some chart (such as a line graph or a bar graph or a pie chart) that uses data that was never measured, but merely speculatively imagined. Guess Graphs tend to  fool us into thinking we are seeing something factual when what we are seeing is speculative never-measured data that is not factual at all.  Guess Graphs fail to include the labeling they should have, to let us know that we are looking at mere speculations, rather than measured data.  One of the most notorious examples of a Guess Graph in scientific literature is the "composition of the universe" pie chart, which makes it sound like scientists have figured out what the universe is mainly made of. They have not done any such thing, and the "dark matter" and "dark energy" listed in such a pie chart has never actually been detected.   

The Guess Graph that appears in the Quanta article is a line graph showing the concentration of carbon in Earth's atmosphere falling steadily over 4.5 billion years, from a concentration of 10,000 times its present level to the concentration it now has. The graph is supposed to increase our confidence that James Kasting and his colleagues have solved the faint young sun paradox. But when we look at the very small print below the graph, we find that the source of the graph is listed as "Catling and Kasting."  So the article is trying to show that Kasting is on the right track by showing us some Guess Graph that Kasting himself created.  As a way of providing substantiation for a claim, this is as dubious as trying to back up Joe Smith's claims that he saw 5 flying saucers closeup by showing some bar chart made by Joe Smith, a chart indicating 2 flying saucers seen in 2019, 1 flying saucer seen in 2020, and 2 flying saucers seen in 2021. 

Why should we be very doubtful that this Guess Graph is correct? There are several reasons:

• One of the papers the Quanta article links to tells us that "the atmospheric CO2 concentration of the Archean [very early] Earth is highly uncertain."  A NASA page says, "“Atmospheric and surface conditions during the first billion years of Earth’s history are poorly understood due to the scarcity of geological and geochemical evidence."
• When you do a Google image search for "evolution of earth's atmosphere," you get a large variety of graphs from scientific publications, and quite a few of them tell a very different story than told by the Guess Graph in the Quanta Magazine article.  Some of these graphs show carbon dioxide reaching a peak about three billion years ago, and then steadily declining (rather than steadily declining over the past 4.5 billion years). 
• The main evidence given in the Quanta article to back up the Kasting claim that the early Earth may have been 70% carbon dioxide is a reference to a speculative paper that presents a speculative model. You don't substantiate one speculative model by appealing to another speculative model. 
• In a 2013 article Kasting stated that the faint young sun paradox is "one of those problems that will never really be 'solved,' because the parameters for early Earth — particularly the surface temperature — will always be negotiable."
• After stating this about the faint young sun paradox: "To resolve the paradox, Kasting (1993) suggested that high concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases, either CO2 or perhaps methane, prevented the oceans from freezing over," a scientific paper stated this: "In contrast, Rosing et al. (2010) have argued that the prevalence of magnetite (iron oxide) in Archean sediments and paleosols and the absence of siderite (iron carbonate) indicate that CO2 levels in the Archean atmosphere were little greater than those of today."
• A scientific paper published in 2018 gave reasons why the claims of extremely high carbon dioxide levels in the early Earth (as imagined by Kasting) are doubtful. 

The paper I refer to is the one here, which states the following:

"While several arguments have been advanced to resolve the Faint Young Sun Paradox , none is problem-free. For instance, one might try to compensate for the diminished sunlight by assuming that Earth’s early atmosphere had a far greater concentration of greenhouse gases, such as CO₂, than at present. However this hypothesis runs into difficulties. In order to maintain the Earth’s temperature above the freezing point of water during the early Archean, the abundance of CO₂ in Earth’s primeval atmosphere should have been a thousand times its present value....While CO₂ can be removed from the atmosphere by bacteria and plants during photosynthesis and also by the weathering of rock, the enormous concentrations referred to earlier seem difficult to account for. Indeed, large amounts of CO₂ in the early atmosphere would have led to the formation of the iron carbonate based compound siderite (FeCO₃). However, analysis of billion year old paleosols challenges this picture by finding no FeCO₃. Found instead are iron silicates which support a much more moderate presence of CO₂ in the early atmosphere. Moreover, it would be difficult to make CO₂ disappear almost entirely from the Earth’s atmosphere since much of it, after reacting with rocks and being used by shell-forming organisms to form CaCO₃ shells, gets deposited on the ocean floor and makes its way back into the atmosphere via volcanic activity and plate tectonics. The presence of other greenhouse gases is equally problematic."

Another doubtful example of a "Solved It!" story in the news was a story that appeard a few days on the Vice web site (www.vice.com).  The story had this two-sentence headline:

"A Billion Years of Time Are Mysteriously Missing. Scientists Think They Know Why."

This was followed by this subtitle, suggesting a "now they've finally solved it" story line:

"The Great Unconformity has baffled geologists for a century. New research points to glaciers being the culprit."

We read this explanation of the Great Unconformity:

"Sometimes, the absence of geological records is just as telling as their presence. The Great Unconformity, a missing chunk of time that appears in rocks across the world, is the ultimate example of this phenomenon. This giant lapse in Earth’s memory exceeds one billion years in some places, resulting in 550 million-year-old rocks sitting atop ancient layers that date back 1.7 billion years, with no trace of the many lost epochs in between."

You've probably never heard of this Great Unconformity. The impression we've got from geologists is that geological strata show a nice continuous record in which you can trace back time gradually, like someone backwardly flipping the pages of a big diary, without any big gaps.  Clearly this Great Unconformity is a big embarrassment to geologists, who seem to have pretty much swept it under the rug, and have mentioned it so infrequently that the average person has never heard of such a thing. 

The vice.com story mentions a very dubious idea of how all of these eons disappeared from the fossil record: "the glaciers did it." It's another dubious "solved it!" boast. The vice.com story refers to a scientific paper that refers to " the oft-held perception that continental ice sheets cannot deeply erode the upper crust," while trying to argue that continental ice sheets did deeply erode the upper crust. 

Hard-To-Explain Observational Reality	Dubious Professor Explanation of This
Sun's heat was 70% less billions of years ago, but Earth was apparently warm at that time	Billions of years ago there was 10,000 times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which kept Earth warm
Every organism has in its body thousands of very complex inventions: thousands of types of functional protein molecules, each having amino acids arranged in just the right way to be functional	It was all just lucky copying errors in DNA
Galaxies don't rotate as they should, given how much regular matter we observe	For every matter particle, there are many dark matter particles, all invisible (please ignore the fact that such particles do not exist in the Standard Model of physics)
The expansion of the universe is accelerating	Most of the universe's mass-energy must be some mysterious dark energy (please ignore the fact that dark energy particles have no place in the Standard Model of physics)
The universe's earliest expansion rate seems to have incredibly fine-tuned, with the expansion rate exactly matching a "critical density" to one part in a billion trillion quadrillion	This was merely caused by a  wondrous instantaneous cosmic transmogrification, produced by a never-discovered "inflaton field" (please ignore the fact that such a field has no place in the Standard Model of physics)
Old-World monkeys closely resemble New-World monkeys, too closely to explain by convergent evolution	Monkeys rafted across the Atlantic ocean millions of years ago
All or almost all of the animal phyla appeared rather suddenly in the Cambrian Explosion	It was just higher oxygen levels that caused such a huge flood of information-rich innovation. Haven't you heard of the vast creative intelligence of oxygen molecules?
The type of cells used by mammals (eukaryotic cells) are vastly more complicated than the simplest types of cells (prokaryotic cells), with the difference being like the difference between a billionaire's mansion and a little wooden shack	Endosymbiosis: eukaryotic cells originated in a wondrous sudden leap when one cell kind of gobbled up lots of other cells, with its offspring inheriting the ingestion,  kind of like some monkey species turning into a tiger-bird-monkey species because the monkey ate a tiger and a bird.
Contrary to the predictions of quantum field theory, interstellar space is almost empty, rather than being extremely dense and heavy because of a super-abundance of virtual particles	It was just “lucky cancellations” caused by very high physics numbers that coincidentally canceled each other out in a fantastically improbable coincidence
Thousands of years ago, humans suddenly developed a host of intellectual capabilities far beyond those of any other species, such as language abilities and philosophical reasoning	Meat-eating is the reason – we needed wise, communicative  minds so we could  hunt animals. It takes a subtle literate reasoner to club an animal on the head.
For decades massive numbers of people have reported floating out of their bodies and observing them from below, while at the same time having heightened cognition	It's just vast numbers of people coincidentally having a similar hallucination, kind of like millions of people all having a hallucination of seeing a pink elephant.
When a person suffering from severe seizures has half of his brain removed to stop the seizures, there is a good preservation of memories and intelligence	Maybe your brain makes backup copies of each memory (one on the left side, and another on the right side), and maybe your brain is “super-plastic” so that the remaining half does all the work of the removed half, like some computer that keeps working well  when sawed in two
Defying odds far greater than a quadrillion-to-one, our universe has just the right fundamental constants allowing it to be habitable for life	The multiverse did it -- didn't you know we can explain our universe by referring to imaginary other universes?
A billion years are missing in geological strata	The glaciers ate up all the missing strata
We cannot find much of any evidence of the vast number of transitional fossils that should exist if there occurred the gradual evolutionary progressions assumed by the dogma of common descent	Maybe the glaciers ate up all the missing fossils