Response to C-14 datation on Coal, oil, and natural gas.

As usual you only get the part of the story which agrees with preconceived naturalistic viewpoints from web sites and forums such as this. I've attached the question and their misleading answer below:
Question: A sample that is more than fifty thousand years old shouldn't have any measurable C-14. Coal, oil, and natural gas are supposed to be millions of years old; yet creationists say that some of them contain measurable amounts of C-14, enough to give them C-14 ages in the tens of thousands of years. How do you explain this? Answer: Very simply. Radiocarbon dating doesn't work well on objects much older than twenty thousand years, because such objects have so little C-14 left that their beta radiation is swamped out by the background radiation of cosmic rays and potassium-40 (K-40) decay. Younger objects can easily be dated, because they still emit plenty of beta radiation, enough to be measured after the background radiation has been subtracted out of the total beta radiation. However, in either case, the background beta radiation has to be compensated for, and, in the older objects, the amount of C-14 they have left is less than the margin of error in measuring background radiation. As Hurley points out: Without rather special developmental work, it is not generally practicable to measure ages in excess of about twenty thousand years, because the radioactivity of the carbon becomes so slight that it is difficult to get an accurate measurement above background radiation. (p. 108) Cosmic rays form beta radiation all the time; this is the radiation that turns N-14 to C-14 in the first place. K-40 decay also forms plenty of beta radiation. Stearns, Carroll, and Clark point out that ". . . this isotope [K-40] accounts for a large part of the normal background radiation that can be detected on the earth's surface" (p. 84). This radiation cannot be totally eliminated from the laboratory, so one could probably get a "radiocarbon" date of fifty thousand years from a pure carbon-free piece of tin. However, you now know why this fact doesn't at all invalidate radiocarbon dates of objects younger than twenty thousand years and is certainly no evidence for the notion that coals and oils might be no older than fifty thousand years.

This answer is blatantly false. Radiocarbon labs routinely report results in the 30,000 50,000 year range and compensate for what they call "background" contamination. To state that the method only reports ages back to 20,000 years is a blatant misrepresentation and the author must know this. Just google radiocarbon dates for ancient artifacts yourself and you will find this to be the case. Remember the method is not measuring and "age" just an amount of radiocarbon left. The detectable amount (equipment detection limit) actually goes all the way down to 0.001% of modern levels (corresponding to about 100,000 years if samples started out with the same amount of radiocarbon as things today - which they would not have before and shortly after the flood) The fact remains that dinosaur tissue, coal, and other artifacts have radiocarbon remaining well within the detection limit of 20,000 - 50,000 years routinely reported and accepted for other artifacts. The author of this rebuttal discredited himself by ignoring this fact. Please get a copy of Thousands not Millions for a much more complete discussion of this issue. Also not the Straw Man argument earlier. No-one at ICR or other credible creation organization used mollusk dating as an example of why radiocarbon dating is wrong and they have not for over 30 years. To make this statement is a complete misrepresentation of the knowledge of scientists in this area and shows the lack of knowledge and deceptiveness of the author. Hope this helps, Bruce Malone