"The technical details are spelled out in my papers and these effects are included in my numerical
calculations. They are there for anyone with the technical background to examine and verify."
http://www.calvin.edu/archive/evolution/199802/0309.html
Now, the last time I heard that phrase was on a project that Baumgarder was also invovled with only it didn't come from Baumgardner, it came from Henry Morris. In 1978-1980, Jody Dillow and I had a long a heated letter exchange over the temperature of the earth if there had been a vapor canopy. I said it would be too hot, Jody, who had just received his Th.D. from Dallas Seminary said it would be room temperature. Dillow Th.D. Dissertation was a mathematical calculation of the temperature of the earth under the vapor canopy.Dillow was in the process of turning his thesis into the book, The Waters Above. I had found a mathematical error in Dillow's thesis which made the earth be too hot, and using his approach with the correction, I published, "Can the Canopy Hold Water?" in the Creation Research Soc. Qtrly Dec. 1979.
When I went to ICR recruiting for geophysicists in the midst of the oil boom, I met Henry Morris for the first and only time. We discussed the canopy temperature and I told Henry, who was the ONLY signatory to Dillow's thesis (what do Dallas Seminary theologians know about mathematics and physics?), anyway I told Henry that Dillow had a mathematical error. Henry replied, that the math was out there for everyone to examine. I stated again, "I have looked at it and there is an error" Henry repeated that anyone could look at Jody's math. Once again I said that I had looked at it and I described the error to Henry. He once again repeated the mantra "The math is there for all to see". In frustration I said, "How many fools like me to you think there are who will actually plow through all that math. I did, and it is wrong." Henry denied that Jody made an error and I gave up.
Within about 6 months, Jody admitted the error and published it in CRSQ (I forget the reference) He also changed his mathematical approach to one that required Baumgardner's programming skills. After about a year of pestering Baumgardner he let me have the programming code. I found an error in it. Baumgardner had generated a one-dimensional radiative heat transfer solution to the temperature field. This is fine except that at each of the 14(I think this was the number) layers in the atmosphere, Baumgardner sent energy north out of the vertical column. He justified this by saying that convection and winds would transfer energy towards the pole. This is true, but he never used those energies again in the calculation. Thus each atmospheric layer had a subtraction of energy at every iteration and this energy subtracted was sent to Never, Never land out of the calculations. In other words, each layer had a direct movement of energy from that layer to outer space with no interaction with
the rest of the atmosphere. Thus the code "cheated".
In 1990, ICR's Vardiman and Rush, Proc. 2nd ICC, p. 238 admitted that a canopy would make the earth too hot for life and that while the temperature I had calculated was too high (I had used a 4 function Rockwell calculator) my conclusion was correct that the canopy was flawed.
My point with this digression about the canopy is that when people defend their work by saying about the technical details "They are there for anyone with the technical background to examine and verify." One must watch out. Few people have the technical ability and even fewer are willing to chase down young-earth creationist claims to that level of detail. Many young-earth people do not have the technical backgrounds anywhere near the areas that they are reading about in young-earth literature. As a result, they are not familiar with the details of a given field to be able to independently assess the veracity of what they read. There is a big danger here of having too much faith in the individual writer if he is writing what you want to hear. Most would never know if what they are being told is true or false. And Jim, this applies to you in this case. I like you, but you don't have the technical background to verify Baumgardner's claim so your support of him is based entirely up
on your faith in him and nothing more. How do you KNOW that his technical details are correct? You can't unless you go back to school and learn physics and a very detailed branch of physics at that. Thus, you have faith in John Baumgardner instead of the hundreds of others who say that John is wrong.