New paper accepted: Rejection of Holliday et al.'s Alleged Refutation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

Another paper that rejects Holliday et al.'s (2023; HEA) Gish gallop has been accepted for publication in Earth Science Reviews, the journal that published HEA.

Because of the word limit imposed by ESR on our rebuttal, we could publish only a summary paper that points out only the major errors in each section of Holliday et al. (2023). This is why the extended details were published elsewhere; we chose Airburst and Cratering Impacts (see the previous blog post). So the longer paper in ACI should be seen as an extension of the summary paper in ESR.

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Rejection of Holliday et al.'s Alleged Refutation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

Martin B. Sweatman, James L. Powell, Allen West.

Abstract

We reject the claim of Holliday et al. (2023; hereafter HEA) that they have “comprehensively refuted” the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH). Scores of peer-reviewed articles in dozens of peer-reviewed journals from hundreds of researchers, many of whom were not members of the core research team of Firestone et al. (2007), have corroborated the YDIH and replicated the key evidence dozens of times (Powell, 2022; Sweatman, 2021). Refuting a hypothesis that is so well established should require compelling new evidence and a plausible alternative process. HEA offer neither but, instead, question the peer-reviewed evidence supporting the hypothesis. Many of their arguments are faulty and were already rebutted in earlier reviews. The remaining differences in interpretation are part and parcel of science and do not lend themselves to the refutation—that is, the falsification—of an active hypothesis. Words alone cannot do that, not even the 96,000 words of HEA. Only evidence can.