[gore3000]

From the Scientific American article you dismissed out of hand apparently without reading:

I read that garbage and my objection to it has not been refuted - life could not exist in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years if they were covered with ice. The article is therefore nonsense.

As to models, they cannot prove what we do not know because they cannot be tested and cannot take account of influencess which are unknown. Models are only useful as shortcuts for what we already know. Even then they need to be tested in real life.

[CobaltBlue]

life could not exist in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years if they were covered with ice. The article is therefore nonsense

Bacteria live under the ice in the Antarctic. You know that, right?

[Ichneumon]

[From the Scientific American article you dismissed out of hand apparently without reading:]

I read that garbage

Then how did you manage to miss the *six* different times they mentioned that the evidence had led people, "decades ago", to consider worldwide glaciation in the late preCambrian?

If you had actually read the article, why did you go on to say "If it was correct there would be tremendous amounts of evidence for it and such a claim would have been made decades ago", as if you were totally unaware that such a claim *had* been made decades ago?

and my objection to it has not been refuted

Yes it has, several times. The fact that you refuse to accept those refutations does not change the fact that refutations have indeed been made.

- life could not exist in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years if they were covered with ice.

You keep forgetting to provide your evidence for your claim.

In any case, if you knew anything about climatology, you'd have realized that the oceans would be unlikely to be *totally* frozen over for any length of time -- there would likely be small patches of unfrozen ocean surface even at the temperature ranges mentioned in the article.

But finally, the article itself explains why your claim is unfounded. Are you *sure* you read it?

The article is therefore nonsense.

Or perhaps you're overlooking a number of things.

As to models, they cannot prove what we do not know because they cannot be tested and cannot take account of influencess which are unknown. Models are only useful as shortcuts for what we already know.

You are extremely mistaken. Models allow us to make predictions, which can be tested against known and yet-to-be-discovered evidence (often the models can even tell us what to look for or where to look for it), which then verifies the model and gives us confidence in its results.