Carbon Dating DOESN'T work beyond 4500 years

At it again, Booboo. Please get your facts right first.Carbon dating is a tool. It ised on assum,ptions which scxientists know are not quite corrrect, and so they have calibrated it using dendrochronology (tree ring dating) and varve-dating, performed in many parts of the world. The result is that they know what corrections to apply to carbon dates.
For instance, the release of large quantities of old carbon-12 into the atmosphere by industry has made carbon dating all but useless for the last 150 years. Everything tests older than it should.
Similarly, because of changes in the proportion of C14 in the past, dates older than 3500BC are too 'young' - the objects are actually older. But the calibration means the scientists know how much older, and can make a correction to get a reliable date.
Meassuring the amount of C14 by mass-spectrometry, rather than by Geiger-counter, has made C14 dating much more accurate and sensitive, and it can be used pretty reliably back to 60,000 years ago.NB. If you want to criticise dating methods, there is still varve dating, pottery luminescence dating, tree-ring dating, various forms of uranium, actinium, etc dating, coral reef studies, and several others. They are all remarkably consistent, where their ranges overlap, - another fact you will have to explain. But please study first. Your criticisms were probably answered 50 years ago.Mike.

Hi BBC, could you please give me your references for living trees and coral reefs 4000 years old? I have just researched the subject, and the references I found said that living coral reefs started about 5000 to 10000 years ago, ie after the last ice age. But old, dead coral reefs show millions of years growth layers, and cannot possibly be squeezed into a YEC scenario. The only way out is to shut youir ears and eyes, and ignore the evidence.As far as I know, from extensive reading, the oldest Sequoia pines are about 1200 years old, but tree ring dating goes back about 12000 years. Varve dating goes back about 18000 years. Tree ring and varve dating have been used to check out radiocarbon dating, and as a result scientists know exactly how to correct the error in radiocarbon dating for specimens older than 3000 years.Radiocarbon dating cannot be used on samples less than 200 years old, because of all the old C12 that has been released into the atmosphere by industry. There are some periods in the past where it is inconsistent, because the correction curve has wiggles in it, but the scientists know all this, and can give confidence intervals accordingly.Libby meassured the radioactivity of C14 in his dating methods. These days a mass spectrometer is used, with far greater accuracy, and so radiocarbon dating can be used on much smaller samples, and much further back than Libby anticipated.YECs love to point out the possible errors in counting varves, tree rings, etc, but ignore the fact that the research has been repeated by different scientists all over the earth, with the same result.The same results have been found counting snow layers in Antarctica and sedimentation layers at the bottom of the ocean, and, what's more, these different fields all come up with evidence for Milankovich cycles! These climatic cycles were first discovered in research on the movement of glaciers during the ice ages, and are caused by variations in the sun's radiation falling on earth due to the pecularities of the earth's orbit and inclination. Some of these cycles are many thousands of years long, and could not exist in a 10000 year old earth history.So all the evidence is stacked up against a young earth, mountains of it, from every area of research. And the evidence from all these different areas is consistent.Mike

Hey, BBC, I just checked up on Libby. According to my book 'Before Civilization' by Colin Renfrew, one of the first dates to emerge from Libby's laboratory was for the painted caves in Lascaux, 13500+/-900BC. Where did you get your quote about C14 dating not working with any scientific accuracy beyond 4000 years? Been reading creationist bullshit again?
Libby's check of the soundness of radiocarbon dating used reference dates going back to 2950+/-200BC, nearly 5000 years ago.
Mike.