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The “Pacemaker of the Ice Ages” paper by Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton (1976) convinced the secular scientific community of the validity of the modern version of Milankovitch climate forcing. Power spectrum analyses performed on (presumed) climatically significant variables from two Indian Ocean sediment cores showed dominant spectral peaks at frequencies corresponding to orbital cycles within the Milankovitch hypothesis. However, this paper, the first in a series of papers, demonstrates that much of the Hays et al. paper, as originally presented, is invalid (even within a uniformitarian framework) and that it arguably should be retracted. First, Hays et al. omitted nearly one-third of all the available data from the E49-18 core on the grounds that much of the core top was missing, a claim since disputed by other uniformitarian scientists. Second, one of the key dates used by Hays et al. to establish timescales for the cores, an assumed age of 700,000 years for the Brunhes-Matuyama (B-M) magnetic reversal boundary, is significantly lower than the currently accepted age of 780,000 years. This new age assignment is extraordinarily problematic for the paper, as discussed below. Finally, the data sets used in the analysis have “evolved” over the years, raising the question, which versions of the data are the “real” ones?
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