Problems with Radiometric Dating?

The bigger picture is what are the scientists really saying. For instance: This is true, but relatively trivial, with the difference being a slight correction of ¹⁴C dates to slightly older ages:

we already know that the proportion of atmospheric ¹⁴C to ¹²C varies from year. ¹⁴C is made by cosmic radiation and that varies from to year on an 11 year cycle tied to sunspots.

we also already know that it has been at different levels in the past, and that it is tied to climate

we also know that massive releases of old carbon (lower ¹⁴C/¹²C) into the atmosphere from methane in the sea changes the atmospheric ratio.

scientists are studying the changes to ¹⁴C/¹²C in order to better understand what causes it and to better calibrate ¹⁴C dating methods.

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See http://www.radiocarbon.org/IntCal04_TOC.pdf

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{note: image originally from http://www.cio.phys.rug.nl/HTML-docs/Verslag/97/PE-04.htm,
image copied to a mirror site to cut down on bandwidth usage for the original site}

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That graph shows you the correlation between ¹⁴C ages and ages derived by other means, like tree rings (represented by the straight line). The gap between them is due to lower ¹⁴C/¹²C ratios in the past. This correlation is pretty amazing when you look at how linear the ¹⁴C data points are on the graph, the lack of scatter in the data.

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This correlation is even more amazing when you consider that the tree ring and other absolute dating is linear, while the actual ¹⁴C measurements are decreasing on an exponential curve with time, from which the ¹⁴C age is calculated by a (relatively) simple mathematical formula - ie the only reason that the data should correlate is because they measure the same thing.

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If a creationist is telling you this without explaining the information then they want you to reach false conclusions due to the missing information. They are in effect lying to you about what the evidence really shows. This is a common (dishonest) tactic of many creationists.

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See Radioactive carbon dating or Age Correlations and an Old Earth: Version 1 No 3 (formerly Part III) for more information on ¹⁴C dating accuracy.

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Now this is the second website (that I know of) that you have posted and basically asked "well what about THIS" -- a version of the Gish Gallop, and one of the reasons that debating by the use of just pasting stuff from websites is frowned on in the forum guidelines.

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So what do you think:

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(1) about the accuracy of science?

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(2) about the honesty of creationists?

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Enjoy.

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In other words he is still passing out falsehoods? I'm SHOCKED!

Yes, see Message 249 for another correlation, where the ¹⁴C samples came from a different environment but correlate with the ¹⁴C age in the Lake Suigetsu varves for an volcanic ash (Sakate) deposit in both areas. This is another reason creationists use OLD (pre-internet) articles - they are hard to find on the web. Science mag lets you sign up for free (IIRC) to read (some? most?) old articles, but I don't know it they go back to the '60's.Science | AAASCould not access the article with my membership but this is the full citation:Radioactive Dating and Low-Level Counting
V. R. Switsur
Science 11 August 1967 157: 726-727 [DOI: 10.1126/science.157.3789.726] (in Articles)40 years old. Is it from a creationist known for honesty? Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : added infoEdited by RAZD, : honestly.

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can you access Radioactive Dating and Low-Level Counting and email me the PDF? I want to see how it compares to the Bristlecone pine stuff I've read.

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another cool tool is pdfill PDF tools, free fromPDFill: Free PDF Editor, Free PDF Tools and Free PDF Writeryou can reorganize, combine, cut, crop, convert to image, and convert any file to pdf with the PDF print function (you can fill in those pdf form income tax forms that don't let you save your input and then print them to a PDF all filled out).meryxmas eh?

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is it big? hasn't come through yet

done. try again. the addy on my website seems to be chopping off the last letter -- it's .com not .co

The article cited refers to work by H.E. Suess, but the words quoted are by V. R. SWITSUR. Here is what Switsur says about radiocarbon in his report on the symposium (I've highlighted the text quoted by Don Patton):

quote:

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The study of radioactive dating and methods of low-level counting were the subjects of a symposium, organized by the International Atomic Energy Authority in conjunction with the Joint Commission for Applied Radioactivity (ICSU) and held at the Palais des Congres, Monte Carlo (2-10 March 1967). Four distinct, but related, areas of interest were discussed: geochemistry and cosmochemistry of radiocarbon and other isotopes and their application to dating problems; the study of meteorites; methods of dating by primeval isotopes; and a discussion of techniques of measurement and low-level counting.

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Pioneer work by W. F. Libby culminated in the use of radiocarbon for absolute dating. He recounted in his opening review paper the many problems involved in developing this technique and asserted that, at several crucial stages, luck played an important part in making this first dating system viable. He related much information that could be useful to one constructing a new radiocarbon dating laboratory.

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Several reports were made on investigations of the fundamentals of radiocarbon dating. Now that the techniques are much more precise, knowledge of the temporal variations of the concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is of increasing importance in order that absolute dates may be calculated from activity measurements made in the laboratory. It is well established that the ages obtained on the assumption of constant, initial concentrations of radiocarbon in the specimens can differ by several hundreds of years from historical and dendrochronological dates for certain periods over the past 6000 years. H. E. Suess presented the latest determinations of the fluctuation of radiocarbon concentration over the earlier half of this period, as adduced from the current activity of dendrochronologically dated growth rings of the Californian bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata). These data can be used to construct a calibration curve for radiocarbon dates. The carbon-14 concentration increases rather steadily during this time and an attempt to follow the trend further back in time was made in work described by M. Stuiver. He analyzed measurements of the rate of sedimentation in lakes, widely separated geographically, for synchronous events. Such events could be due to past, worldwide climatic changes or to changes of concentration of radiocarbon, as reflected in the calculated dates. These results confirm the change in carbon-14 concentration that occurred before 2500 years ago and indicate that the concentration increases at least during the past 10,000 years. This result is at variance with other correlations, such as the Swedish varve chronology which indicates that the carbon-14 concentration should, at about 8000 years ago, be similar to a value obtained in the 19th century A.D.

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The real reference for H.E.Suess would be the proceedings of the symposium, not this article, and he also quotes from M. Stuiver who is NOT credited. Sloppy, careless and irrelevant.I'll bet you can google the citation and ONLY get creationist sites.This is a typical creationist lie - a wrong reference.google results:
IwHome.com is for sale | HugeDomains
The resource cannot be found.
Scientific Age of the Earth
http://www.detectingdesign.com/...s/Tree%20Ring%20Dating.pptQED.Creationists don't care for the truth: they don't know how to handle it.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : added google resultsEdited by RAZD, : .Edited by RAZD, : quote all the relevant text

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sounds good, but they are after the science article ... vol 157 was published 11 AUGUST 1967

The Radiocarbon Record in Tree-rings of the Last 8000 Years., Seuss, H.E. Radiocarbon 22(2):200-209.Edited by RAZD, : wow

Welcome to the fray, eial. Actually it can be proven to be very reliable. This is done by three different methods:

• one is to repeat dating tests with several different tests from the same sample and seeing how "clustered" the results are. Repeat these tests with a different age samples. When these results are within a few percentage points of each other for each of the different age samples this shows that the method does not have variable results, so these results are reliably replicated.
• second is to repeat dating tests using several different methods on the same sample and seeing how "clustered" these results are. Repeat these tests with a different age samples. When these results are within a few percentage points of each other this shows that each of the methods do not have different results, nor do they give different ages for different age samples, so these results are reliably replicated.
• third is to compare the ages derived from this testing with other methods for measuring age that don't rely on radioactive decay.

Here is a graph of one such correlation between radiometric dating and actual age: If you type mass_f = mass_i*(1/2)ⁿ
then it displays mass_f = mass_i*(1/2)ⁿWith parent daughter systems you can estimate the amount that has decayed by the amount of daughter mass to the remaining parent mass.With radiocarbon we can estimate the amount from the amount in the atmosphere today as a first approximation. We can also find correlations that tell us the actual age of objects and then use that to calculate the actual amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere at different times, and once that correlation is known we can then calculate more accurate ages from samples. This graph shows the results of precisely that process: This extends the correlation from the first graph out to the practical limit for radiocarbon dating (~45k years), where the green line is the part shown above.See Age Correlations for more examples of correlations between different methods of measuring age, and for different ways to validate the reliability of radioactive dating. What you can look at is evidence that it has not changed. This comes from stars, where you can see the same radioactive decay for the same isotopes as we see today, yet the light is millions of years old ...... and this comes from simple events here on earth: uranium halos can only be made by hundreds of millions of years of uranium decay with a constant decay rate - changing the decay rate would change the alpha particle energy and change the radius of the halo, so the existence of uranium halos is evidence that decay rates have not changed for hundreds of millions of years. Prehistoric natural reactors show exactly the same process of nuclear reaction that we see in modern reactors, again demonstrating that decay rates have not changed since they occurred, 2000 million years ago.Enjoy.ps - since you are new, some posting tips:type [qs]quotes are easy[/qs] and it becomes: or type [quote]quotes are easy[/quote] and it becomes:

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Welcome to the fray armylngst, This would be a great new topic. My answer would be ... none. No radioactive materials, because they had not formed yet in the bellies of stars by fusion of the Helium that predominated in the early universe.Go to Proposed New Topics to post new topics.Enjoy.

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Thanks eial, Correct for single living trees that have been discovered and where core samples have been taken to measure their age.You also have problems of missing rings, which leads to false young age if not corrected. Dendrochronologists know what to look for and how to eliminate these false and missing rings from the overall data.They also can piece together tree rings from one tree with those of another, because the tree rings also preserve information about climate - wider rings from longer warmer summers, thinner rings from cool short summers, and because the pattern of climate from one year to the next is rather random than static, these patterns in the rings can be matched from one sample to another.There are also three continuous tree ring chronologies currently known in the world, one for the Bristlecone Pine in Arizona, and two for the Post Oak, one in Germany and one in Ireland. These three totally independent chronologies each extend to over 8,000 years, and when they are matched up for climate information they have a net error of some 37 years over that time. That's a 0.5% error.The carbon-14 data also preserves climate data, as the amount of C-14 produced in the atmosphere depends on it's own "climate" - variation in sun activity that produces the cosmic rays that cause Nitrogen atoms to be converted into C-14 atoms (one of the reasons it varies, rather than has a constant equilibrium value), and we can match the "C-14 climate" info from C-14 to each of tree rings along with the tree ring climate. That's a lot of correlation in just a few pieces of evidence.See Age Correlations and an Old Earth: Version 1 No 3 (formerly Part III) for more information on this and other calibration systems. And further on it comes back to the straight correlation line, showing that C-14 does indeed vary with age, and that when corrected to actual dates from the C-14 ages that the artifacts are older. There is no "parent-daughter" system in C-14: it works because the carbon-14 is being constantly renewed by cosmic radiation converting nitrogen atoms into new C-14. What is measured is the ratio of C-14 to C-12, and as long as the sample got it's carbon from the atmosphere (or from plants that got it from the atmosphere (or from animals that got it from plants that got it from the atmosphere (or ... etc))) and as long as we know (or reasonably estimate) the proportion in the atmosphere at the time the organism lived we can calculate the age based on the ratio {(C-14)/(C-12)}_now/{(C-14)/(C-12)}_then (you will notice that this is dimensionless, so we don't need accurate mass of the original, only an accurate ratio of C-14 to C-12. See Age Correlations and an Old Earth: Version 1 No 3 (formerly Part III). Because once we have correlated a radiometric dating method and validated its accuracy, then we can use it to date things where we can't count the rings/layers/ages.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : subtitle

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