Certainly not cover to cover...but I have taken various college level science courses and do REALLY read various science articles from time to time that interest me. Am I disqualified from having an opinion?
No, I mean journal articles. The places where the real discussion takes place. Where you get to read all of the nitty gritty. If you had, you'd know the difference between this article, and a journal article. There's a sense to me of casualness, which is just wrong if you are trying to be rigorous and actually convince someone of your position. Vade had a good line from the paper:
"This earnest effort to understand this "contamination problem" therefore generated scores of peer-reviewed papers in the standard radiocarbon literature during the last 20 years.2 Most of these papers acknowledge that most of the 14C in the samples studied appear to be intrinsic to the samples themselves, and they usually offer no explanation for its origin. The reality of significant levels of 14C in a wide variety of fossil sources from throughout the geological record has thus been established in the secular scientific literature by scientists who assume the standard geological time scale is valid and have no special desire for this result!"
"Most?" "Scores"? The problem is that I'm not a freaking psychic, nor do I have access to obscure pieces of literature. Give me the references to the scores, and I'll look em up myself.
Also, what the heck is that graph supposed to mean, anyway? What is the unlabeled y axis? I'm assuming that it means number of samples, but I'm not a freaking psychic, TELL ME! Also, a critical number they leave out is just how many samples they measured. Is it a small percentage? All? A small fraction? What are their errors? They don't list a single error in the whole paper.
Lastly is the question of background, which Vade and Stultis mentioned. What is the background C14/C12 for the various rocks that are measured? Even underground, things are not locked in a perfect stasis, at some point, there is seepage, heating, effects that over time can affect a sample. They don't cover ANY of this. Every experiment I've every read discusses error analysis and background conditions. This doesn't. Bad, bad science.
Unless there is an actual paper somewhere that this is a mere summary of (which is possible), this is bad, bad science.
Am I disqualified from having an opinion?
As someone wrote to me on this august forum when I arrived here almost 3 years ago:
Liberals have opinions.
Conservatives have informed opinions.