Problems with Potassium-Argon dating are well known. Argon doesn't always boil which is the assumption that is made. 16 different recent volcanic flows were dated as millions of years old.
Here is a link showing similar problems with the Rubidium-Strontium dating method. Where one set of rocks are dated much older than they are known to be.
Whether such problems have been identified in all radiometric dating methods, I do not know. But it certainly casts significant doubt on it.
Oh, horse manure.
Translation: Some dishonest creationists purposely submitted improperly prepared samples for K/Ar dating, then hooted about how "inaccurate" K/Ar dating is because they got back the expected messy results.
This is like trying to discredit a speedometer's accuracy by spinning your wheels on an icy road then chortling, "hey, this thing's busted, it's reading 20mph but the car's not moving!"
Just last night I made a post explaining the details of this to someone on another thread:
In layman’s terms, these volcanic rocks that we know were formed in 1986—less than 20 years ago—were “scientifically” dated to between 290,000 and 3.4 million years old!
No, in layman's terms Austin the creationist is either a fool or a charlatan (perhaps both).
"In layman's terms", here's what he did wrong (I'll leave it to you to decide whether he did so out of dishonesty or incompetence):
1. He chose an analysis lab which CLEARLY STATES that its analysis equipment is not sensitive enough to correctly measure samples less than two million years old. Read that again until it sinks in.
2. Austin then took the first set of measured results, WHICH INDICATED LESS THAN TWO MILLION YEARS OLD, and rather than doing what an honest scientist would have done (which is say, "ah, these results are below the lower bounds of the testing equipment, thus they're just reporting equipment noise"), instead Austin ran around in circles and tried to ridicule K/AR dating for giving him out-of-bounds results that made perfect sense.
3. As for the 2.8 +/- 0.6 Mya sub-sample, Austin sort of "forgets" to inform the reader that almost without exception lava rock contains what are known as "inclusions", which are bits of older crystalline mineral mixed in with the fresh lava flow. A volcanic eruption is a violent and hardly "clean" event and pulverized (but unmelted) minerals are incorporated into the lava as it flows up and outward from the volcano. These inclusions will produce K/Ar dates older than the date of the lava flow because they are, indeed, *older* than the lava flow. A real scientist (unlike, say, Austin) will take a great deal of care to extract inclusions from his sample before sending it to a lab to determine the date when the lava itself flowed, and/or hand-pick a "clean" lava sample which has relatively few inclusions compared to the flow as a whole. That's because they *want* to get as valid a date as possible for the lava flow. Now, guess what Austin didn't do? Gee, now guess *why* he didn't do it? Can you say, "*trying* to get an apparently invalid date so as to have a cheap, dishonest excuse to allege that there's something 'wrong' with K/Ar dating"?
As the old saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out" and Austin (unlike the honest scientists who *want* to produce valid dates) had no interest in getting a clean result -- the more "garbage" the result, the more he could claim a creationist "success". So he *submitted* garbage as his sample (i.e., a sample with inclusions, to a lab unable to date anything younger than roughly two million years).
As Henry Barwood notes, "Bad measurements, like bad science, reflect only on the measurer (Austin), not on the measurement (the procedure)."
For more details, see: Young-Earth Creationist 'Dating' of a Mt. St. Helens Dacite: The Failure of Austin and Swenson to Recognize Obviously Ancient Minerals. More at: Skeptics Visit the "Museum of Creation and Earth History" .
Here is a link showing similar problems with the Rubidium-Strontium dating method. Where one set of rocks are dated much older than they are known to be.
Exact same issue (lava rock with inclusions) submitted by the exact same creationist "researcher" (Steven A. Austin). He appears to be a one-trick pony.
Whether such problems have been identified in all radiometric dating methods, I do not know.
"Such problems"? Yeah, if you submit "dirty" samples for testing, you get "dirty" results. So what else is new? Honest scientists clean their samples first. Creationist "scientists" don't, then try to discredit the testing methods when they get bogus results. Go figure.
But it certainly casts significant doubt on it.
The only thing it "certainly casts significant doubt on" is the honesty/competence of "creation scientists".