Radioactive decay and the sun

[Minimalist]

Depends.

[TheDarkestOfAngels]

The evidence for evolution is far more than just "the Earth has been around for billions of years". The fossil record isn't going to vanish overnight because the Sun affects radioactive decay.

Secondly, the article does not mention how much the decay rate drops by. To make the jump from a simple announcement of a possible (i.e. unconfirmed) discovery to a suggestion that it would have a massive effect on our dating methods, without any data to back the assertion up, is unscientific.

To sort of add on to what Adrian is saying, it seems to be unknown just how much or even exactly what kind of effect the sun has on radioactive decay. I personally doubt it's off by billions of years (it's not just radiometric dating that gives us these figures) or how widespread the effect is - for example, if the sun affects radioactive decay only down to a certain depth or if it affects the entire planet (it may be the latter because the cause may be due to neutreno emissions).
For all we know right now, the effect may even merely be within the normal margin of error.

A more interesitng question, in my opinion, is how this may answer another longstanding question regarding radioactive decay and the internal heating of all of the terrestrial planets in the inner solar system. We still don't know if there's internal heating in Mars, for example (small planets like mars may be too cool to penetrate the crust or form a magnetic field, but the planet may not be completely dead.
So this may or may not affect figures on how fast planets can cool off, or it may not.

[Tiberius]

I understand that. However creationists will now argue, 'Radioactive decay varies, therefore we cant trust it, therefore Genesis 1 is true!'
Creationists will use this article (when it gets placed on answersingenesis.com) to 'prove' evolution is false.
I dont believe the world is thousands of years old, but creationists are desperate for some sought of evidence to prove evolution wrong, this could be what they were looking for.

Creationists have a long history of taking scientific discoveries and bastardizing them so they appear to support creationism. In the long run, radioactive decay varying is merely a drop in the pond of the already bad arguments they used.

As DarkestOfAngels said, radiometric dating isn't 100% accurate in the first place. We can't tell the age of things down to the millisecond; the best we can do is usually a range of several thousand years, sometimes millions. What we really want to know before this can even be discussed properly is how large of an effect the sun has on the range.

No creationist can aruge with the geological column, they will just make crap up and convince people what they say is true.

Creationists have always argued against the geological column. They mostly claim it was made by a flood, which makes no sense due to the scale and different layers in the column.