Full-time professor at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium
apreat@gmail.com
apreat@ulb.ac.be
• Department of Earth Sciences and Environment
Res. Grp. - Biogeochemistry & Modeling of the Earth System
Sedimentology & Basin Analysis
• Alumnus, Collège des Alumni, Académie Royale de Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux Arts de Belgique (mars 2013). http://www.academieroyale.be/cgi?usr=2a8crwkksq&lg=fr&pag=858&rec=0&frm=0&par=aybabtu&id=4471&flux=8365323
• Prof. Invited, Université de Mons-Hainaut (2010-present-day)
• Prof. Coordinator and invited to the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium (Belgian College) (2009-
present day)
• Prof. partim to the DEA (third cycle) led by the University of Lille (9 universities from 1999 to 2004) - Prof. partim at the University of Paris-Sud/Orsay, European-Socrates Agreement (1995-1998)
• Prof. partim at the University of Louvain, Convention ULB-UCL (1993-2000)
• Since 2015 : Member of Comité éditorial de la Revue Géologie de la France http://geolfrance.brgm.fr
• Since 2014 : Regular author of texts for ‘la Revue Science et Pseudosciences’ http://www.pseudo-sciences.org/
• Many field works (several weeks to 2 months) (Meso- and Paleozoic carbonates, Paleo- to Neoproterozoic carbonates) in Europe, USA (Nevada), Papouasia (Holocene), North Africa (Algeria, Morrocco, Tunisia), West Africa (Gabon, DRC, Congo-Brazzaville, South Africa, Angola), Iraq... Recently : field works (3 to 5 weeks) Congo- Brazzaville 2012, 2015, 2016 (carbonate Neoproterozoic).
Degree in geological sciences at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in 1974, I went to Algeria for two years teaching mining geology at the University of Constantine. Back in Belgium I worked for two years as an expert for the EEC (European Commission), first on the prospecting of Pb and Zn in carbonate environments, then the uranium exploration in Belgium. Then Assistant at ULB, Department of Geology I got the degree of Doctor of Sciences (Geology) in 1985. My thesis, devoted to the study of the Devonian carbonate sedimentology of northern France and southern Belgium, comprised a significant portion of field work whose interpretation and synthesis conducted to the establishment of model of carbonate platforms and ramps with reefal constructions.
I then worked for Petrofina SA and shared a little more than two years in Angola as Director of the Research Laboratory of this oil company. The lab included 22 people (micropaleontology, sedimentology, petrophysics). My main activity was to interpret facies reservoirs from drillings in the Cretaceous, sometimes in the Tertiary. I carried out many studies for oil companies operating in this country.
I returned to the ULB in 1988 as First Assistant and was appointed Professor in 1990. I carried out various missions for mining companies in Belgium and oil companies abroad and continued research, particularly through projects of the Scientific Research National Funds (FNRS).
My research still concerns sedimentology, geochemistry and diagenesis of carbonate rocks which leads me to travel many countries in Europe or outside Europe, North Africa, Papua New Guinea and the USA, to conduct field missions.
Since the late 90's, I expanded my field of research in addressing the problem of mass extinctions of organisms from the Upper Devonian series across Euramerica (from North America to Poland) and I also specialized in microbiological and geochemical analyses of ancient carbonate series developing a sustained collaboration with biologists of my university. We are at the origin of a paleoecological model based on the presence of iron-bacterial microfossils, which led me to travel many countries in Europe and North Africa. This model accounts for the red pigmentation of many marble and ornamental stones used in the world. This research also has implications on the emergence of Life from the earliest stages of formation of Earth, as well as in the field of exobiology or extraterrestrial life ...
More recently I invested in the study from the Precambrian series of Gabon and Congo. These works with colleagues from BRGM (Orléans) are as much about the academic side (consequences of the appearance of oxygen in the Paleoproterozoic and study of Neoproterozoic glaciations) that the potential applications in reservoir rocks and source rocks of oil (in collaboration with oil companies).
Finally I recently established a close collaboration with the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium to study the susceptibility magnetic signal from various European Paleozoic series. All these works allowed me to gain a thorough understanding of carbonate rocks (petrology, micropaleontology, geobiology, geochemistry, sequence stratigraphy, diagenesis) as well in Precambrian (2.2 Ga and 0.6 Ga), Paleozoic (from Silurian to Carboniferous) and Mesozoic (Jurassic and Cretaceous) rocks. Recently (2010) I have established a collaboration with Iraqi Kurdistan as part of a government program to boost scientific research in this country.
My research led me to publish about 180 papers in international and national journals and presented more than 170 conference papers. I am a holder of eight courses at the ULB (5 mandatory and 3 optional), excursions and field stages, I taught at the third cycle in several French universities and led or co-managed a score of 20 Doctoral (PhD) and Post-doctoral theses and has been the promotor of more than 50 Masters theses.
Global mean sea level (GMSL) has increased by about 8–9 inches since 1880, with about 3 inches occurring since 1993. As discussed in Part VI, scientists expect that GMSL will continue to rise well beyond the 21st century because of global warming that has already occurred and warming that is yet to occur.
The recent NOAA Report Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States has stated that even the relatively small increases in sea level over the last several decades have been associated greater storm impacts at many places along the U.S. coast. Further, the frequency of intermittent flooding associated with unusually high tides has increased rapidly in response to increases in local sea level, becoming a recurrent and disruptive problem.
by H.. Svensmark, June1 , 2016 in Principia.Sci.International
The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.
If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.
The New York Times recently published an article penned by Erica Goode on the controversial Harvey et al paper, where 14 scientists (sophomorically) attacked polar bear researcher Susan Crockford and climate science skeptics.
Sloppy biased journalism
So it is no surprise that Erica Goode at the New York Times sided up with the 14 scientists of the Harvey publication to attack the so-called climate “denialists” in her most recent article. Unfortunately Goode made the fatal journalistic error of failing to keep a healthy distance from the alarmist side and as a result was blinded from seeing the glaring mountain of scientific research showing polar bears are in fact doing fine.
Dr. Willie Soon is an independent solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been studying the Sun and its influence on the Earth’s climate for more than a quarter of a century. A short while ago, he had a conversation with Mr. Grégoire Canlorbe, an independent journalist who is also vice president of the French Parti National-Libéral (“National-Liberal Party,” conservative, nationalist, and free-marketist). Here Dr. Soon speaks for himself.
Canlorbe: You say polar bears are far less endangered by global warming than by environmentalists dreading ice melt. Could you expand?
There are still some kinks to be worked out. The process to generate hydrogen from coal produces a monstrous amount of CO2 – far more CO2 per unit of useful energy than simply burning the coal would produce. But with hydrogen production, unlike hydrocarbon combustion, all the CO2 is produced in one place. This creates an opportunity for carbon sequestration, when technologies to sequester carbon on such an impressive scale are developed.
Back in late April, European wine growers were hit by the most damaging frost since 1991. That frost affected vines as far south as Tuscany. More recently it is the western Corn Belt that has been affected by late Spring frost (…)
Scientists have long known that steep mountain ranges can draw carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere — as erosion exposes new rock, it also starts a chemical reaction between minerals on hill slopes and CO2 in the air, ‘weathering’ the rock and using CO2 to produce carbonate minerals like calcite.
(Bloomberg) — For all the buzz around wind, solar and electric cars, energy company executives had plenty to say Tuesday about the continuing role of fossil fuels and nuclear power at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Future of Energy Summit.
Mining mogul Bob Murray offered a passionate defense of coal, asserting that we’d all “die in the dark” without it. Ethan Zindler, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst, supplied the counter argument, saying U.S. coal-plant economics simply don’t work anymore. Here’s what executives from BP Plc to Tellurian Inc. said about the future of fossil fuels in a world pushing to fight climate change.
Just to demonstrate that the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) maintains an open mind about things, I thought I would share an recent AAPG Explorerarticle on the notion of establishing a formal geological epoch in honor of human beings…
(…)
I genuinely believe that these folks simply can’t grasp the concept of resolution. This is a pervasive problem in the climate “science” community and will continued to feed claims of “unprecedented” changes in [fill in the blank] until we have about 1,000 years of high resolution instrumental data.
Our resident solar physicist, Dr. Leif Svalgaard commented and provided a link to something reported by his colleagues, something that likely would not have been possible without the fantastic solar observations of NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observeratory (SDO).
It seems a small sunspot has been observed, that has the opposite polarity of cycle 24 sunspots.
More than 70 recent scientific publications show that there is absolutely nothing unusual about the magnitude and rapidity of today’s sea level changes. These academically peer-reviewed papers show that sea levels were on average 2 meters higher earlier in the Holocene than they are today.
The New Zealand government has made the surprise announcement that it will not grant any new permits for offshore oil and gas exploration.
The Labor government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the move would not be retrospective. The country’s 22 existing offshore exploration permits along with any discoveries made in them could still lead to the granting of production licenses of up to 40 years duration.
The chart above was produced by NOAA at their ‘Climate at a Glance’ web page. In the upper right corner of the chart, NOAA shows its calculated per decade trend of -0.02°F for a period that spans 1996-2018.
After posting this chart and an accompanying article, it just seemed that something was likely wrong with the trend calculation produced by NOAA’s web site.
Super salty water beneath ice could serve as a terrestrial analogue for a habitat for life on other planets.
An analysis of radar data led scientists to an unexpected discovery of two lakes located beneath 550 to 750 meters of ice underneath the Devon Ice Cap, one of the largest ice caps in the Canadian Arctic. They are thought to be the first isolated hypersaline subglacial lakes in the world.
Yesterday’s “The Day After Tomorrow” climate explainer’s excuse for cold winters is back – research suggests that the North Atlantic current is weaker than anytime for the last 1000 years (…)
Right now, the sun is a cueball, as seen below in this image today from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and has been without sunspots for 10 days. So far in 2018, 61% of days have been without sunspots (…)
Presenting this week (Monday 9 April 2018) at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna, an international team, led by British Antarctic Survey, describes how analysis of 79 ice cores collected from across Antarctica reveals a 10% increase in snowfall over the last 200 years. This is equivalent to 272 giga tonnes of water – double the volume of the Dead Sea.
Lead author and ice core scientist Dr Liz Thomas from British Antarctic Survey explains: (…)
Canada’s stable-to-increasing polar bear population extends its range slightly further south of the 55th parallel (York et al., 2016).
According to published geological evidence from the 1950s, remnants of wine grape vineyards have been unearthed in regions as far north as the polar-bear-inhabiting 55th parallel during the Medieval Warm Period (~800s to 1300s AD).
Monitoring temperature and creating regional and global temperature data sets is a tricky business. There are many factors that can induce spurious trends in the data; and there are multiple protocols to follow to ensure their proper construction. Consequently, many people (including scientists) have found themselves wondering which of all the temperature data sets is the most accurate for use in determining the impact of rising greenhouses gases on atmospheric temperature? Thanks to the recently published work of Christy et al. (2018), we now have a pretty good idea as to the answer.
Climate models play a central role in the attribution of global warming or climate change to human causes. The standard argument takes the following form: “We can get the model to do X, using human causes, but not without them, so human causes must be the cause of X.” A little digging reveals that this is actually a circular argument, because the models are set up in such a way that human causes are the only way to get change.
The finding is that humans are the cause of global warming and climate change is actually the assumption going in. This is circular reasoning personified, namely conclude what you first assume.
Polar bear specialists made global population numbers the focus of the world’s attention when they predicted a dramatic decline and possible extinction of the species.
But now that the numbers have increased slightly rather than declined, the same scientists say global numbers are meaningless: the public should give those figures no credence and anyone who cites global population numbers should be mocked.
LONDON (Reuters) – Emissions regulated under Europe’s carbon market rose for the first time in seven years in 2017 due to stronger industrial output, data published on Tuesday by the European Commission and examined by carbon analysts at Thomson Reuters showed (…)
CLAIM: “There isn’t any warming. All they’ve got is computer model predictions, folks. There isn’t yet any empirical evidence for their claim that greenhouse gases even cause temperatures to increase. There isn’t any empirical data for that.”
By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
(German text translated by P Gosselin)
Newspapers like to write about heat and melt records in the Arctic, which supposedly had never happened before. That really sparks fear among the citizens. However an examination of the facts regularly brings amazing things to light, for example weather records from a German station on Spitzbergen during World War 2 for the period of 1944-1945.
In the journal International Journal of Climatology Rajmund Przybylak and his colleagues evaluated the data. Summary: Back then it was similarly warm as it is today
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
