Robert W. Felix

Is Felix a climatologist, a volcanologist or an oceanographer? Er, none of the above. His biography describes him as a "former architect". His website is so bonkers that I thought at first it was a spoof. Sadly, he appears to have believed what he says. Robert W. Felix was a crank extraordinaire promoting his own brand of Earth changes, which acted as a framework that he could shoehorn various other types of crankery into. All of his "theories" revolved around pole shifts and cosmic rays.

Ice Age Now
Felix believed the reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles is imminent and that their reversal causes environmental cataclysms which lead into ice ages. One of his two websites was Ice Age Now, which was where he peddled this facet of his theory of everything. Ice Age Now is mostly dedicated to global warming denial, survivalism (better stock up on dry goods and fuel), conspiracy theories (he believed the government is covering up evidence of the coming ice age), and abiotic oil crankery. The sidebar is a long laundry list of denialist PRATTs, which makes it like Skeptical Science without the rebuttals. The "news" section seems to exist mostly to document any time at which a snowflake falls anywhere in the world (proof of the coming ice age!) and parrot whatever the latest denialist idiocy is, usually something from Piers Corbyn or Tim Ball. He also hawked his thoroughly "researched" books here.

George Monbiot specifically debunked one of his claims, that 555 of 625 of the Earth's mountain glaciers are advancing.

Evolutionary Leaps
Evolutionary Leaps was Felix's other site where he pushed a deranged (but somewhat original, at least) pseudoscientific version of evolution. He basically took Stephen Jay Gould's ideas about punctuated equilibrium and shoehorned his Earth changes crankery into it. According to Felix, the pole shifts that cause ice ages are responsible for mass extinctions with one element of these events being fiery carbon nanodiamonds raining from the skies. That's where the abiotic oil crankery played into his grand "theory." WorldNutDaily columnist Jerome Corsi occasionally makes guest posts on the subject. Felix claimed evolution is driven by cosmic rays and other radiation in addition to these pole shifts. To do this, he drew on a number of old crank tomes (mostly Immanuel Velikovsky and some creationists) and fabricated "facts" and mixed it with generously cherry-picked and quote mined research done by actual evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists.

Quotes on Felix
With the publication of his chapter "Fatal Flaw," author Robert W. Felix joins such luminaries as Charles Darwin, Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Maya Angelou, Aldous Huxley and Walt Whitman. I remember thinking when I first read this in your book (about carbon raining from the sky) that I'm reading a book written by a nut job. But as I do more independent research, I keep finding supporting evidence for your claims.