Carbon dating is flawed? Explain.?

Answers in Genesis goes off on it for a while.

Of course, there can be problems with it, and you have to work diligently to avoid said problems. (Multiple samples of the materiel, knowing what type of location the material was found (Near a coal mine?), normalizing for environmental disasters based on location (volcanic eruptions).

Ultimately it won't get you to the exact day, but with some rigor you can be fairly certain the date is correct within the calculated error bars.

--atheist

First, for carbon-14 dating to be accurate, one must assume the rate of decay of carbon-14 has remained constant over the years. However, evidence indicates that the opposite is true. Experiments have been performed using the radioactive isotopes of uranium-238 and iron-57, and have shown that rates can and do vary. In fact, changing the environments surrounding the samples can alter decay rates. (This is True)

The Christians will cite The great flood of Noah as an intervening variable where entire forests were uprooted and/or buried. This would decrease the release of carbon into the atmosphere. But as the Great flood of Noah is a myth and long before Christian times if in fact there was any sort of flood at all. This is generally discounted. Biblical lore is not an argument against carbon 14 dating.

For C-14 dating the conditions are:

The material to be dated must be organic

The organism to be tested must have gotten its C-14 from the atmosphere

The sample has remained chemically and physically a closed system since its emplacement.

That we know what the atmospheric concentration of C-14 was when the organism lived.

Contamination of a sample can be effected by any one of these situations not being met. Any scientist worth his salt will of course have checked and rechecked his assertions many times.

Here is a fairly good discussion:

Young Earth creationists argue that there are many unresolved problems with the method and list several of them. They often also imply that it is somehow related to the age of the Earth, though if they are cautious they will not actually say so.

Some of the lists of supposed problems are actually false. They persistently cite the supposed carbon date of a dead seal in Antarctica at several thousand years when it was known from observation that the seal had died only a few years before. What they don't tell you is that it has been known since 1964 (or before) why carbon dating is not suitable for marine animals. Most of the carbon in the diet of marine animals comes from dissolved carbonates in the sea. These carbonates are washed out to sea from the rocks on land and are already "fossil" carbon and contain almost no C-14. Thus the animals look older than their counterparts on land, which derive most of their carbon from the air. C-14 is produced in the upper atmosphere from the action of solar radiation on nitrogen.

Another flat lie is that C-14 is used to date tree rings which are then used to calibrate C-14.

There is also the frequent assertion that C-14 dating is used to obtain dates for very ancient rocks. This is false. Most rocks do not contain enough carbon to begin with, and in any case C-14 dating is useful for things to an absolute maximum of about 40,000 years or less.

Rocks of any real age are dated by several different radiometric methods including two different uranium-lead methods, thorium - lead, potassium-argon, rubidium-caesium and the lead-lead isochron. There are about a dozen different methods and they are used according to initial estimates of the age of rocks and the rock chemistry.

Given the record of young Earth creationists in lying about just about everything else, nothing they say about C-14 can be taken as true. Young Earth creationism has all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory, including unsupported assertions, battening on ignorance, telling only half the facts, lies and accusing those who oppose it of being in a conspiracy.

If carbon dating is correct, then the stories of stone age nomadic goat herders are wrong.

Since the stories of stone age nomadic goat herders say that they are correct it must be the well supported, repeatable and testable Carbon dating that must be wrong.

C14 dating does need to be done carefully though. Contamination from radioactive sources (bomb tests, etc.) needs to be factored in, and also the age of the carbon that the organism ate/absorbed needs to be known. The carbon exchange between air and sea water means that sea organisms tend to get old carbon, where the C14 levels are depleted. So Carbon dating the flesh of a sea otter, that eats sea urchins and other shellfish, will give a erroneous reading.

Some dishonest creationists will use these facts to either claim carbon dating is inaccurate or to obtain 'wrong' carbon dating of material to discredit it.

Edit:

As with all radiometric dating Carbon dating works by comparing the amount of C14 (decays to C12 at a steady rate) to C12.

Hence it is irrelevant if you have a pound of a sample, or and ounce. It is the ratios that matter.

What limits carbon dating is the ability to measure the amount of C14 accurately. New carbon has a small amount of C14 to start with and it gets less over time. As measurement techniques have improved the accuracy of carbon dating has improved and the range we can use carbon dating for has extended from about 10,000 years to 20,000 years and now beyond that. But dating something 10,000 years old might have an error of +/- 200 years. Dating something 40,000 years old could have an error of +/- 2,000 years. Too old and the potential error becomes so great as to make the dating pointless.

To a certain extent to maybe, up to 50, to 100,000 years, but anything beyond that point it s just bullshit. You look at dendochronology, and other methods used to "age" things, carbon dating in comparison is very inaccurate, especially with the longer dates. Too many variables affect carbon composition and rate of accumulation decomposition. Plus equating carbon onto a yearly scale, is very inaccurate. Other are to many dependent variables that affect carbon decomposition.

I am not opposed or for carbon dating but it is flawed, even though from my understanding it is the most useful method of dating matter by modern technology. It is accurate up to several thousands of years but because of the global flood its readings are misleading, for water affects radioactive decay in ways that carbon dating is not equipped to take into consideration. Beyond about 4,000 years carbon dating becomes gradually inaccurate and the older the specimen being dated the more inaccurate the dating becomes. Thousands of years may be dated as 10's or 100's of thousands of years, 10's of thousands of years 100's of thousands to millions, etc.

Popular Science (November 1979, p. 81) reports that physicist Robert Gentry "believes that all of the dates determined by radioactive decay may be off---not only by a few years, but by orders of magnitude...man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand." [Note: if this once believed date for the age of mankind has been revised it shows that carbon dating methods are inconsistent and not always reliable] This is especially so since most scientists dismiss that a global flood really happened [they see the evidence as a series of ice ages, still water plays a factor in the geology]

"'I am staggered to believe that as little as a year ago I made the statements that I made.' So said Richard Leakey, before the elegant audience of a Royal Institute evening discourse last Friday. He had come to reveal that the conventional wisdom, which he had so recently espoused in his BBC television series The Making of Mankind, was 'probably wrong in a number of crucial areas.' In particular, he now sees man's oldest ancestor as being considerably younger than the 15-20 million years he plumped for on television."---New Scientist (March 18, 1982) p. 695

Actually, according to known Biblical chronology, the oldest living animal kinds and dinosaurs [Behemoths] swam, flew over, and walked the earth about 20,000 years ago, most modern animal kinds are about as old as 13,000 years and mankind is only just more than 6,000 years old, but the age of the earth itself is unknown and thus debatable. The age of the universe is unknown and thus debatable.

Actually, they're somewhat right in that some carbon dating results are incorrect. However, the reason they're incorrect is because the carbon dating was applied in an incorrect situation.

Carbon dating is only effect to dates approximately 50,000 years in the past; past that point, the carbon has broken down too far to be accurate.

Past that point, however, they use radiometric dating, which is accurate for a much wider (and longer) range.

When creationists talk about carbon dating being used with million year old fossils, they're actually showing their ignorance. Carbon dating only works for things up to around 60,000 years old. That's why radiometric dating methods are used for fossils instead.

You've read that carbon dating is accurate, ive read that carbon dating is flawed, why should you be right when both of us have read what we believe..

If you've actually tested fossils yourself then you win, but if you have not then you're just going on hearsay..

some claim carbon dating is flawed because it's only accurate to about 14k years, what is ignored is the other radiometric dating methods, such as uranium - uranium dating, which is accurate to nearly 3 billion years, and there are several other methods as well utilizing differing isotopes