BYU Geology Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Bart Kowallis, was recently asked about the reliability of carbon 14 dating. Here is my transcript of the exchange:

Question: I have read a BYU Professor has proved the carbon dating process is inaccurate and false. Is this true?

Answer: No, that’s not true. Carbon dating has its errors and its complications but we have ways of checking carbon 14 ages against other ages. For example, we have tree ring ages now that go back about 10,000 years which we can check carbon 14 over that period of time. We have ice cores which go back hundreds of thousands of years now and we can check the carbon 14 against some of that. So, “no”, we haven’t thrown carbon 14 away. It’s a great method for dating young things geologicially (by young that’s in the last 60,000 years or so), but we don’t use it for dating the age of the earth.