Sound Authors Radio

Welcome, and thanks for tuning in to “Sound Authors” with host, Dr. Kent. It’s up for candid conversations about everything from cuisine to culture and from nature to nurture. Now here’s your host, Dr. Kent.

Welcome to the show. Today is Friday, it’s almost the weekend. Looking out the window and it’s a beautiful sunny day. I have a nice deep voice today because I have a little cold, but it’s bossy on the radio, it’s great. My guests today are Robert Williscroft, author of “Chicken Little: Debunking ‘Experts’ Lies”; Marjorie Chon who is going to talk to us about some government issues; Susan Jones, a health expert; and, the beautiful and lovely singer Anais Mitchell who is currently on tour. Welcome to the show, my first guest, Robert Williscroft.

Thank you very much for having me.

Robert Williscroft served 23 years in the Navy in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as many, many other things. His credentials are very long. Tell me a little bit about yourself before we get into your book.

Well, you named part of it. I was a submarine officer and after that I went in to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration where I spent, among other things, three years up in the Arctic Ice Pack doing research and one full year at the Geographic South Pole doing atmospheric research.

Wow! What was it like down at the South Pole? I actually have a couple of friends who worked down there for a little while.

Well, in a word, cold.

Cold. Now, did you go down to the very South?

Yes, I spent 13 months right at the geographic South Pole.

Wow! Did you freeze anything off?

Interesting question. No, actually our biggest problem in terms of daily living–and this is an interesting little surprise–in order to make water, you have to melt snow. And in order to move the water from building to building down there, it goes through pipes that are wrapped with heat tape that keeps the water liquid. Because it’s difficult to get water, people tend to spare on water so the water sits in the pipes and it gets hot. So we didn’t have any cold water at the South Pole.

Isn’t that interesting?

We had to put it through coolers to cool it down so we could we drink it.

You’re living in luxury.

I wouldn’t call it luxury, but it was comfortable.

You also served as a CEO of a very large editorial service and founded your own publishing company?

Yes, I did that after I retired. I’ve been a stockbroker and, currently, I’m spending most of my time writing and doing some consulting work.

So what inspired you to write your book, “The Chicken Little Agenda: Debunking ‘Experts’ Lies”?

After I had retired, I found myself constantly wondering how people were misinterpreting or being misinformed about things that seems perfectly natural and normal to me. As a result, I started writing a newspaper column in the Pacific Northwest that was carried in several of the regional newspapers up there. The column was popular, and people came to me and said, “You know, you should put this into a book and give us some insight into these things.” So I did and updated it and brought it in to the modern world, and the end result was “The Chicken Little Agenda.”

You talk about global warming in there which is a really hot button topic and it wasn’t talked about, until the last few years, too much. And because of Al Gore getting the Nobel Peace Prize and all that, it’s on all people’s minds when they’re vo
ting in the next election. I myself, I took a course in college–long time ago not so long ago–which was called “The Climate Change” and that was very interesting because we talked about the buffer zones and the tundra and all that stuff. I think Al Gore did simplify things, but tell me a little bit about your criticism of him.

Well, let me take a minute and just give a little bit of background on global warming and climate change in general. When I was down at the South Pole, and this was back in the early 1980s, we were beginning to get a handle on what was going on. It was a global climate and we’re taking measurements across the globe to try and pin these things down. At that time, it had become very clear, and there’s no doubt about this whatsoever, that human beings were putting a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Prevailing theory and the models based upon those theories, indicated that the higher the carbon dioxide content was, the more heat the atmosphere would retain. It seemed reasonable, it seemed logical, we all bought into it. I don’t think there was anybody who didn’t have knowledge of the subject.

We moved forward from there and the predictions that came out of those theories had a tendency to be pretty startling if you pushed the envelope, and this was what Al Gore and his people jumped on and took a closer look at. What they didn’t do, and I’m not prepared to tell you why they didn’t do it, is to take a look at what the current research was showing us.

The first monkey wrench that went into the works came about when we began to find out from ice cores that while there is a correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide, what we had thought was that carbon dioxide would go up and then temperature would go up. What we found out is that temperature went up and then carbon dioxide went up, which meant that carbon dioxide wasn’t the driving factor, it had to be something else. As everybody began to look into it and we began to spread the information further out into the field, and we got some people beyond climatology and beyond amateur science into it – namely astronomers and astrophysicists, what we found out is that the major driving factor turns out to be the sun rather than human inputs. Human input certainly affects it, but it turns out the affect of human input is way down below the noise level. The major driving factor is the 11-year Schwab cycle–the sunspot cycle–and in a nutshell, what happens is this. As the sunspot activity increases, the solar wind–the charge particles coming from the sun–increase and as they pass the earth, they’re captured by the earth’s magnetic field and they form a shield around the earth that stops incoming cosmic radiation. What we’ve learned, actually just in the last year or so, incoming cosmic radiation into our atmosphere causes cloud formation and the cloud formation shields from incoming sunshine and warmth. So when you have a shielding of the cosmic radiation you end up with less cloud formation and so you have greater atmospheric heat. That’s the real basic cause of this current warming cycle. It’s going to change starting about 2016 and about 2020 we’re going to actually be seeing a cooling that will be the most dramatic cooling that we’ve had in about two or three hundred years.

So, what is your opinion about the science that Al Gore uses? Is his science correct and then he’s just interpreting it someway, or what’s your take on that?

A lot of people, me included, would probably say that he’s not using an awful lot of science. He’s using conjecture; he’s taking some charts that are, in and of themselves, neither accurate nor inaccurate, they just are presentations of information, and then he’s taking that information and completely misinterpreting it.

So, the next stage… A question I hav
e for you, actually in my family, we often discuss the global warming, believe it or not, and you know one issue that often comes up is, you know, well Al Gore, even though this might not be science, he has really put a lot of attention on the environment again. What’s your take on that?

Well, the last time we had real attention put on the environment was, back in the 1960’s, I’m trying to think of the name of the author I know, it just escaped me – Rachel Carson. But, the end result of that whole push back in the 60’s was worldwide. We eliminated the use of DDT, and the consequence of that has turned out to be absolutely disastrous. The things that replaced with DDT have much greater environmental impact, and we’ve increased the incidents of malaria, and just literally hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people have died as a consequence of those actions that we took because we simply didn’t understand the consequences of what we were doing.

The kinds of things that Al Gore and his minions are asking us to do now, and in many cases demanding that we do, potentially have the same kind of effect, if not biological, certainly economic effect on our entire Western civilization. If we had to do it to survive, then OK we do it, but it turns out we don’t have to do it to survive, in fact, it isn’t even a factor. So, it leads one to begin to ask, “Well, if it isn’t a factor, these guys aren’t stupid. They’re able to read the data like anybody else is; then what is their agenda?” And of course, that leads to a lot of opinions, and lots of finger pointing

So, to get away from some of that finger pointing, and into other kinds of finger pointing, can you tell me a little bit about, you know, I’m personally very interested in this last, what six years? You know, there are a lot of spoofs in this, but there’s this terror alert system. You talk in your book also about terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons and things like that. Give me a little about that.

OK, one of the things that we have been really put on alert for, and I believe this has been done by people who have fundamentally good intentions is, “Oh my Gosh, the Soviets had a bunch of nuclear weapons that they lost control of. We’ve got some nuclear warheads, or the components of nuclear warheads that are out there, and probably open up for sell to the highest bidder, and what are the chances of some of these things falling into some of the really bad guys hands, and their turning around and using it against us in a very physical way with a nuclear explosion somewhere in the United States?”

Well, one of the jobs that I had, in detail, while I was a submarine officer, was the man in charge on our submarine of all of the nuclear missiles, and nuclear warheads. So, I was able to gain a very in depth knowledge of these devices and how they work. In a nutshell, the devices of the kind, that could be used, in principle, all contain a gas, a radioactive gas called tritium. And this tritium is necessary to get the thermonuclear explosion. Tritium is a very, you could say, a very sneaky gas. It can work its way out of the containers that it’s held in, and needs to be replaced periodically in order for the nuclear weapon to function. All of these devices that the Soviets had, that were available for terrorists, perhaps, to get their hands on, require tritium, and tritium is absolutely unavailable. It’s only the largest institutions, and governments, themselves, of the highest order, that can distill this stuff out, and actually make it. So, there just is no possibility, it’s utterly remote, and we ought to be spending our time doing, what I’m sure most of our Homeland Security people are doing, which is looking for people who have shoe bombs, and that sort of thing.

Right. Do you have a…. What do you think of this election may la
y here? They are inundating us earlier than ever before. What’s your opinion on that?

It is fascinating, isn’t it? One of the interesting things to me, as a bit of a student of history is that, for the first time in any party, in the Republican Party, we had three individual winners of the first three, not necessarily primaries, but the first three determinations, so that we ended up with three candidates each with, as they’re using the term now, a gold medal, which is really quite unusual. On the Democrat side, I find it utterly fascinating, that we have the first really viable female candidate, and on the other side, the first really viable black candidate, and to have those two in opposition to each other makes for a fascinating show.

Absolutely, and then I’m glued to the radio and the television, and whatever else. So, give a nutshell on your book, where can we find it? All of that and what your next plans are. Are you writing a new one?

Yes, I have just finished another book. It is a children’s book. The first in the series, called the “Star Man Jones” series. What I am doing, and I’m working together with Dr. Frank Drake, who is from the Carl Sagan institute for the Study of Life in the Universe, and the SETI institute. And we’ve created a book that through the medium of an exciting adventure story of a space man and a dog and boy, teaches the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics and so forth, sort of effortlessly, to young children as they’re reading and absorbing the story. So, that’s the current project.

Fun.

I’m sorry?

Fun.

Now, the Chicken Little agenda is available almost anywhere those books can be purchased, certainly from Amazon, and the other online outlets. You can go to ChickenLittleAgenda.com; that’sChickenLittleAgenda.com and read all about the book and you can, there are links there for placing orders as well.

Well, it’s sure been a pleasure speaking with you. These are some great interesting theories that we rarely hear about, and I appreciate hearing also about the hot water on the South Pole.

[laughing] That was something wasn’t it. Well, you’re very welcome, and thank you for having me as a guest.

Absolutely.