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.
Less than a year has passed since lava stopped sputtering from Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula following the first major volcanic outburst from this region in almost 800 years. But now the island is once again bleeding molten rock. The start of a new eruption so soon after unrest in 2021 seems to underscore that this once quiescent peninsula has awoken from its long slumber.
“This could herald the start of decades of occasional eruptions,” says Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist at Lancaster University.
The new eruption, which started at 1:18 p.m. local time on August 3, sent scarlet ribbons streaming from the base of a small mountain into the uninhabited Meradalir Valley. Located far from populations, the volcanic burbles likely pose little danger to the public, at least in the near term. And this relative safety allows scientists and tourists alike to marvel at the geologic majesty and get excited for a possible onslaught of new scientific knowledge.
After all, each volcanic eruption here provides a “window into the abyss,” McGarvie says. The 2021 event yielded revelations about the personality of the peninsula’s exuberant eruptions—from their physical behaviors to their quirky chemistries. This new eruption promises even more insights as the nascent volcano forges the world’s youngest land.
It’s still unclear how prolific or lengthy the eruption will be; this information will only come to light with more time and continued monitoring. But this week’s show of fireworks strongly hints the peninsula will become one of the most volcanically active parts of the planet for several generations.
Clearly the world has warmed somewhat since 1951, but contrary to what the climate bedwetters claim, the trend in typhoons has been downward – suggesting that a warmer climate leads to less Pacific storms in terms of typhoons formed. This is the opposite of what climate “experts” said would happen.
Next we look at the number of typhoons formed in the Pacific from January to July, going back to 1951:
According to the AIMS annual report, the northern and central regions of the 2,300 km GBR ecosystem have the most coral since the surveys began 36 years ago.
As CNN notes, an AIMS survey of 87 sections of the GBR found that between August 2021 and May 2022, average hard coral cover in the upper region and central areas of the reef increased by around one-third.
AIMS CEO Dr. Paul Hardisty told CNN that the report shows the GBR can “recover from mass bleaching and outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish that feed on coral.”
One could be forgiven for missing this good news since CNN spent just a few paragraphs discussing the GBR’s expansion.
More than two-thirds of CNN’s story talked about the threat posed to the GBR from recent bleaching events purportedly driven by climate change.
CNN’s story largely ignored the fact that most of the GBR’s coral colonies impacted by bleaching had recovered, as the AIMS report documents.
In a press release from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) commenting on the AIMS report its director, Benny Peiser, Ph.D., said, “This is just the latest example of empirical data making a mockery of the catastrophists. For how much longer do they think they can get away with it?”
The GWPF recently released a study discussing the positive health of coral reefs in general, by Peter Ridd, Ph.D., a long-time researcher on the GBR and coral reefs.
The latest data on the coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef, produced by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, should be a cause for celebration.
Church bells should be ringing and children given a day off from school. AIMS says two of the three main regions of the reef are at record-breaking high levels. [bold, links added]
The other region is at record-equaling levels (once uncertainty margins are taken into account).
AIMS, which has been releasing data on the reef every year since 1985, does not give the aggregate of coral cover for the entire reef; it stopped doing that in 2017.
So I have done it for AIMS, and the reef as a whole is at record high levels.
This result is proof that many scientific institutions have been misleading the public about the state of the reef.
They claimed we had four devastating and unprecedented bleaching events since 2016.
So much bleaching, death, and destruction has supposedly never happened before and is because of climate change – and now we have a record-high coral cover.
by P. Homewood, Aug 4 , 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
Official data released today reveals that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is in excellent health, with coral cover reaching record levels for the second consecutive year.
The increase will be surprising to members of the public, who are regularly hit with scare stories about coral bleaching and false tales about a reef in long-term decline.
A new note, published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, explains that the data shows clearly how a handful of coral bleaching events that have affected the reef since 2016 have had very limited impact on overall coral cover.
Continuously increasing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels is supposed to be causing warming all over the globe right now, so we should be seeing it in most of the trends.
But often we don’t. The globe, in fact, has cooled somewhat since the El Nino of 2015/16. The media refuse to report that.
One example of no warming is the midsummer mean for Tokyo and its rural Hachijojima island in the Pacific.
Tokyo
Looking at the July mean temperature trend for Tokyo itself, using data from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), and not the adjusted datasets from NASA, we have the following:
This looping video shows an umbrella cloud generated by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on Jan. 15, 2022. The GOES-17 satellite captured the series of images that also show crescent-shaped shock waves and lightning strikes.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens using GOES imagery courtesy of NOAA and NESDIS
The huge amount of water vapor hurled into the atmosphere, as detected by NASA’s Microwave Limb Sounder, could end up temporarily warming Earth’s surface.
When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. He led a new study examining the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.
The linear warming trend since January, 1979 still stands at +0.13 C/decade (+0.11 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).
Various regional LT departures from the 30-year (1991-2020) average for the last 19 months are:
Taylor Swift might be today’s pop princess, but Yard’s research found that Miss Swift is the biggest celebrity CO2 polluter of this year so far.
Racking up a total of 170 flights on her private jet since January, Taylor has amassed a vast 22,923 minutes in the air – 15.9 days. Quite a large amount considering that she is not currently touring.
Taylor’s average flight time is just 80 minutes and an average of 139.36 miles per flight. Her total flight emissions for the year come in at 8,293.54 tonnes or 1,184.8 times more than the average person’s total annual emissions. Taylor’s shortest recorded flight of 2022 was just 36 minutes, flying from Missouri to Nashville.
If wetter is warmer and drier is colder, the modern Saharan climate suggests we are not in a warm period.
It is common knowledge that warmer temperatures are associated with wetter, greener climates, and cooler temperatures are linked to droughts, browning, crop failures, etc.
For example, in the continental US there is a “robust association between pan-CONUS drought events and cold tropical Pacific conditions” (Baek et al., 2019). Again, cooling sea surface temperatures are the “principal driver” of drought across the US.
About a decade ago there was a heated and unresolved debate on whether infrared back radiation from greenhouse gases is heating the oceans. Because infrared penetrates less than a millimeter into the ocean’s surface, many skeptics argued it is impossible to blame rising CO2 for ocean warming. However, several prominent skeptic scientists, people who I have great respect for, also weighed in arguing it was silly and useless to argue infrared heat can’t warm the ocean.
After analyzing the physics detailed in this video, I’m convinced it is solar energy that drives the observed ocean heating, and any infrared ocean heating is insignificant at best. If this analysis holds, it is another significant strike against the prevailing CO2 driven global warming theory
To ensure lay people are brought up to speed, here’s a quick summary of where consensus climate science stands today.
Official NOAA temperature stations produce corrupted data due to purposeful placement in man-made hot spots
Nationwide study follows up widespread corruption and heat biases found at NOAA stations in 2009, and the heat-bias distortion problem is even worse now
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (July 27, 2022) – A new study, Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed, finds approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and uncorrupted placement by its own published standards.
The report, published by The Heartland Institute, was compiled via satellite and in-person survey visits to NOAA weather stations that contribute to the “official” land temperature data in the United States. The research shows that 96% of these stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization – producing heat-bias because of their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects. Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards (see section 3.1 at this link), and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States.
“With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.” said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, the director of the study. “Data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations.”
NOAA’s “Requirements and Standards for [National Weather Service] Climate Observations” instructs that temperature data instruments must be “over level terrain (earth or sod) typical of the area around the station and at least 100 feet from any extensive concrete or paved surface.” And that “all attempts will be made to avoid areas where rough terrain or air drainage are proven to result in non-representative temperature data.” This new report shows that instruction is regularly violated.
by P. Homewood, July 30, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
So far July 2022 has been the driest July in England since 1911. Up to 26 July there has been only 15.8mm of rain averaged across England; this is only 24% of the amount we would expect in an average July.
At this stage in the month we would expect to have seen well over three-quarters of the month’s rain to have already fallen in an average July.
The situation for the UK is a little better. As it stands, July 2022 is still the eighth driest July since 1836. With only 37.7mm of rain having fallen so far it is the driest July since 1984. Scotland has been closer to average in the north and west, but drier conditions have prevailed for south and east Scotland. Overall Scotland (71%), Wales (39%) and Northern Ireland (43%) have been dry, but the most extreme conditions are in East Anglia and southeast England.
Mark McCarthy, Head of the Met Office National Climate Information Centre, said: “It is not just July that has been dry. Since the start of the year, all months apart from February have been drier than average in the UK too. The result of this is that the winter, spring and summer of 2022 have all seen less than the UK average seasonal rainfall.
“England has seen the lowest levels during these periods and, rainfall totals for the first six months of the year are around 25% below their long-term average, with the driest regions in the east and southeast.
The Alfred Wegner Institute does not see an extreme situation with sea ice in the Arctic (June 2022). The institute’s page states:
The Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) is participating again this year with the AWI Consortium Model, a dynamic coupled sea ice ocean model, and calculated a September sea ice extent of 4.75 million square kilometers in its June forecast. This value is about 4% above the median value of all submitted models but in the middle of the predictions given for dynamic models.
Dr. Frank Kauker, a physicist in the Sea Ice Physics Section at AWI, assesses the first prediction as follows: “The first forecast of a year from the beginning of June is usually still characterized by a rather large uncertainty (this year 0.43 million square kilometers). Nevertheless, at the moment there is nothing to indicate an extreme situation in September.
The ice cover in September will be with a great probability in the range of the last years, i.e. between 4 and 5 million square kilometers. The next forecast in early July will reduce the uncertainty somewhat, as it will become clear in June how many melt ponds will have formed, which will then decisively determine the melt rates of the ice during the rest of the year due to their lower solar irradiance return.”
A new study, Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed, finds approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and uncorrupted placement by its own published standards. [bold, links added]
The report, published by The Heartland Institute, was compiled via satellite and in-person survey visits to NOAA weather stations that contribute to the “official” land temperature data in the United States.
The research shows that 96% of these stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization – producing heat bias because of their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects.
Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards (see section 3.1 at this link) and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States.
“With a 96 percent warm bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.,” said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, the director of the study.
by J. Wood, July 27, 2022 in Climate ChangeDispatch
With more than three million acres already burned or burning, 2022 is shaping up to be another devastating year for wildfires in the U.S.
America’s forests need to be managed more actively, a task the Biden administration took up earlier this year when it announced a 10-year strategy to reduce excess fire fuels, like downed trees and underbrush, on up to 20 million acres of national forest and 30 million acres of other lands. [bold, links added]
This plan is a step in the right direction, but it’s unlikely to come to fruition if the administration doesn’t first tackle two major obstacles to forest restoration: environmental red tape and litigation.
Projects to clear out fire fuel often face substantial delays. New research from the think tank where I work, the Property and Environment Research Center, found that it takes an average of 3.6 years for efforts to clear downed, unhealthy, and too densely grown trees to move from the required environmental review to on-the-ground work.
For prescribed burns, the delay is even longer, 4.7 years. And these are the averages. Many urgently needed projects take much longer.
While many bureaucratic, technical, and fiscal obstacles affect these delays, red tape and lawsuits are substantial contributors.
by P. Homewood, July 27, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
New IPCC attribution statistics are distorting observational evidence
London, 27 July – A new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation finds that the IPCC’s recent shift in methodology has led to misleading claims about changes in weather extremes.
The review, from physicist Dr Ralph Alexander, finds that IPCC claims that many of these weather extremes are increasing significantly are largely unsupported by observational evidence.
According to Dr Alexander:
“On almost every kind of extreme weather, with the possible exemption of heatwaves, the evidence for significant changes is scant. But the latest IPCC report has introduced novel ‘attribution’ statistics and now insists that things are getting worse. It’s yet another case of scientists trying to scare the public into compliance.”
Dr Alexander’s paper looks at:
– droughts
– floods
– hurricanes
– tornadoes
– wildfires
– hot and cold extremes
– coral bleaching.
He concludes that:
“The mistaken belief that weather extremes are worsening because of climate change is more a perception, fostered by media coverage, than reality. The IPCC’s new statistical method is playing an unworthy part in bringing this sorry state of affairs to pass.”
GWPF invited the Royal Society and the Met Office to review this paper, and to submit a response to be published as an appendix to it. No reply was received.
by P. Homewood, July 27, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
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To compare this year with 1976 is really quite mendacious, as the latter was much, much drier. And as the BBC’s own chart shows, there have been eight other years since then with similar rainfall levels to this year. Indeed, in England, as opposed to England & Wales, both 1996 and 2010 had drier starts to the year).
In other words, this year is not an exceptional event, merely something you expect to see every few years or so.
And if you go back through the full Met Office record to 1836, we can see again that there is nothing at all unusual about this year.( Indeed, all of the really dry years occurred in 1976 and before:
Today we look at the polar ice caps, which the global warming wingnuts claim is the canary in the coal mine and predicted earlier they’d melt and collapse. For example, Al Gore warned the Arctic ice would disappear by 2014.
While CO2 has gone up, Arctic sea ice has RISEN over past decade
But we have a big surprise. First we examine the Arctic sea ice extent so far this summer. Has it melted away like Al Gore said it would?
If you visited the oceans more than 500 million years ago, you’d find yourself in an alien world. Beings with quilted folds of soft tissue sat on the seabed like rugs, and life forms that looked like fronded plants but were actually animals made anchor on the ocean floor. But one organism might be somewhat familiar: a stalked, cuplike creature with waving tentacles resembling those of a jellyfish. The newly described fossil of this organism, named Auroralumina attenboroughiiafter naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough, is between 556 million and 562 million years old and may be the oldest example of an evolutionary group still living today.
When co-author and University of Oxford paleobiologist Frances Dunn saw a cast of the fossil, she says, “It was instantly clear that this was really special and really rare.” With other fossils from the Ediacaran period, between 635 million and 541 million years ago, her first impression often is “What is this? How can I relate this to anything that’s alive today?” But with this specimen, she thought, “I know what this is.”
Classical scientific wisdom places the origin of modern animals about 539 million years ago during what’s called the Cambrian explosion. At this time, creatures with specialized tissues, organs, guts, and symmetrical left and right sides—all traits we recognize in the animals of today—began popping up.
Here’s the problem. There is no sense in which the climate is an “emergency” within the ordinary meaning of that word in the English language. Predictions by climate models of a few degrees of temperature rise over the next century are the opposite of an “emergency.” Indeed, the statutes granting various “emergency” powers to the Executive all deal with the question of time periods too short to give the Congress time to enact legislation appropriate to the situation at hand. That circumstance is the opposite of what we have with the climate.
But if you are on the left, or a climate activist, this situation is just too important to wait for Congressional action that may never come. An “emergency” must be declared, to last for — how long? A hundred years? During which time, the bureaucrats can issue whatever orders they want, and spend whatever funds they want, all in the name of saving the planet. None of which will or can have any effect on the 85% (and growing) of world carbon emissions that come from outside the U.S. and which the U.S. government cannot affect in any way.
It’s all a huge insult to the intelligence of the American people. I doubt that the courts will be fooled, most particularly the Supreme Court.
A warmth-demanding plant can provide us with solid evidence of a much warmer than today Mid-Holocene climate.
Growth of the tropical aquatic plant ceases when air temperatures fall below 10°C.
A new study says that from about 8000 to 5000 years ago it was warm enough in winter that could grow at the 40°N latitude in northern China. Today its warmth threshold growth limit is ~34°N.
Scientists can therefore deduce the Mid-Holocene winter temperatures needed to have been “7.7°C higher than today” at that time.
The mainstream are heat-chasers. They report only on stories that fit the AGW Party agenda. This cherry-picking leads to a painfully misinformed public when it comes to the climate–which is exactly where they want us.
It usually stands, however, that if the MSM goes silent on a particular locale then it’s probably because that particular locale isn’t ‘behaving’ as they would like.
ase in point today: we have the Arctic and Greenland refusing to play ball.
Earth’s most-northern reaches are actually experiencing persistent and long-lasting COOLING, which is far more telling than a brief burst of heat in, for example, Western Europe, which, 1) is forecast to be over before it’s even really begun, and 2) can be tied to entirely natural forcings–namely low solar activity and a violently ‘buckling’ jet stream flow (more on that below).
by P. Homewood, July 24, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
People on social media have been comparing the high temperatures in much of the UK with the heatwave of 1976, suggesting that the severity of the current hot weather is being exaggerated.
So, what does the evidence show?
How hot was the summer of 1976?
The peak that year was 35.9C. That has been beaten by the current temperatures, with 40.3C recorded so far.
The heatwave of 1976 started in June and lasted for two months. There was a lack of rainfall and a significant drought, with the government enforcing water rationing.
The heatwave was rare for that decade. The average maximum temperature in July in the 1970s was 18.7C. In the 2010s, it was more than 20C.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
