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.
The Pause lengthens yet again, and this time by three months. The double-dip la Niña is now manifesting itself in the UAH data, so that there has been no global warming for 7 years 3 months, up from 7 years on the basis of the previous monthly data.
Reports from the current Northern Hemisphere winter include plenty of low temperature records broken, frozen seas off Greece, etc., suggesting that the world is cooling. A correspondent in Missouri writes:
Nearly 800 chill hours here so far … cold forecast for the next 2 weeks. Will hit 1000 easily. The average when we moved here not quite 20 years ago was 5-600 … for the entire winter. (Chill hours refer to the total amount of time a fruit tree needs to be exposed to cold winter temperatures to allow them break dormancy so they will flower and set fruit normally.)
So that is good news for Missouri — they will now be able to grow things like peaches with a high chill hour requirement for fruiting. Confirmation of colder Northern Hemisphere winters is provided by the snow mass trend by the Finnish Meteorlogical Institute:
We have now updated the model-observations comparison page for the 2021 SAT and MSU TMT datasets. Mostly this is just ‘another dot on the graphs’ but we have made a couple of updates of note. First, we have updated the observational products to their latest versions (i.e. HadCRUT5, NOAA-STAR 4.1 etc.), though we are still using NOAA’s GlobalTemp v5 – the Interim version will be available later this year. Secondly, we have added a comparison of the observations to the new CMIP6 model ensemble.
As we’ve discussed previously, the CMIP6 ensemble contains a dozen models (out of ~50) with climate sensitivities that are outside the CMIP5 range, and beyond the very likely constraints from the observations. This suggests that comparisons to the observations should be weighted in some way. One reasonable option is to follow the work of Tokarska et al (2020) and others, and restrict the comparison to those models that have a transient climate response (TCR) that is consistent with observations. The likely range of TCR is 1.4ºC to 2.2ºC according to IPCC AR6, and so we plot both the mean and 95% spread over all all models (1 ensemble member per model) (grey) and the TCR-screened subset (pink).
CMIP6 model means and spreads since 1979 (reader friendly version).
According to the media and climate alarmists, winters like we used to have in the global cooling days of the 1970s were supposed to be disappearing due to increasing warming from rising CO2.
But that hasn’t really been happening. For example, Stefan Kämpfe at the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) plotted Germany’s mean January temperature going back to 1988:
In a paper published in the journal Geology, the scientists explain that over geological times, variations in atmospheric CO2 depended mainly on volcanic emissions, which are difficult to estimate because they are not directly related to the volume of the magmas that erupted. Indeed, some volcanoes show exceptionally large emissions of CO2 when compared to the amount that can be dissolved in their magmas. Etna is perhaps the most striking example, contributing to 10% (9000 tons/day) of the present global volcanic CO2 emission. That is three times more CO2 than a volcano like Kilauea in Hawaii emits, which erupts four times more magma.
But ratios of Nb/Ta are very constant in many rocks and are only modified by few geological processes—like the infiltration of carbonate-rich melts in earth’s mantle.
Radiocarbon dating from a prehistoric cemetery in Northern Russia reveals human stress caused by a global cooling event 8,200 years ago Early hunter gatherers developed more complex social systems and, unusually, a large cemetery when faced by climate
Radiocarbon dating from a prehistoric cemetery in Northern Russia reveals human stress caused by a global cooling event 8,200 years ago
Early hunter gatherers developed more complex social systems and, unusually, a large cemetery when faced by climate change
New insight into how our early ancestors dealt with major shifts in climate is revealed in research, published today [27 Jan] in Nature Ecology & Evolution, by an international team, led by Professor Rick Schulting from Oxford University’s School of Archaeology.
It reveals, new radiocarbon dates show the large Early Holocene cemetery of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, at Lake Onega, some 500 miles north of Moscow, previously thought to have been in use for many centuries, was, in fact, used for only one to two centuries. Moreover, this seems to be in response to a period of climate stress.
Researchers in Japan, Sweden, and the US have unearthed evidence that low volcanic temperatures led to the fourth mass extinction, enabling dinosaurs to flourish during the Jurassic period.
Large volcanic eruptions create climatic fluctuations, ushering in evolutionary changes. Yet it is the volcanic temperature of the eruption that determines whether the climate cools or warms.
Since the emergence of early animals, five mass extinctions have taken place. The fourth mass extinction occurred at the end of the Triassic Period – roughly 201 million years ago. This mass extinction saw many marine and land animals go extinct, especially large-body, crocodilian-line reptiles known as pseudosuchia. Approximately 60-70% of animal species disappeared. As a result, small bodied dinosaurs were able to grow and prosper.
Scientists think the fourth mass extinction was triggered by the eruptions in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province – one of the largest regions of volcanic rock. But the correlation between the eruption and mass extinction has not yet been clarified.
Using analysis of sedimentary organic molecules and a heating experiment, current professor emeritus at Tohoku University, Kunio Kaiho and his team demonstrated how low temperature magma slowly heated sedimentary rocks, causing high sulfur dioxide (SO2) and low carbon dioxide emissions (CO2).
Since 2019,there have been over 350 peer-reviewed scientific papers published showing no warming in the modern era and/or much warmer temperatures than today when CO2 levels ranged from 180 to 280 ppm (Holocene, Pleistocene).
Below is the link to the updated (now including 2021) database of non-hockey temperature records from locations across the world.
These hundreds of papers suggest a) Earth was multiple degrees warmer than today throughout much of the last 11,700 years (Holocene), and b) there has been nothing unusual about temperature changes in the modern era.
The first 8 papers on the 2021 list are shown below as samples.
OAA published its global climate report for year end 2021 highlighting that its global temperature anomaly measurements showed 2021 being the sixth highest of its recorded measurements. NOAA’s global annual measurement for 2021 was 0.84 degrees C.
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NOAA chose to emphasize that the annual 2021 temperature anomaly was in the top ten of its recorded years as follows:
“The year culminated as the sixth warmest year on record for the globe with a temperature that was 0.84°C (1.51°F) above the 20th century average. The years 2013–2021 all rank among the ten warmest years on record.”
What NOAA failed to highlight was that the year-end 2021 global temperature anomaly measurement marked the continuing decline of its global temperature anomaly measurements that have now fallen for the last 6 years since peak year 2016 as shown in their graph below. These declining measurement outcomes make a complete mockery of recent climate alarmists scientifically unsupported politically contrived “climate emergency” propaganda claims.
After 1750 and the onset of the industrial revolution, the anthropogenic fossil component and the non-fossil component in the total atmospheric CO2 concentration, C(t), began to increase. Despite the lack of knowledge of these two components, claims that all or most of the increase in C(t)since 1800 has been due to the anthropogenic fossil component have continued since they began in 1960 with “Keeling Curve: Increase in CO2from burning fossil fuel.” Data and plots of annual anthropogenic fossil CO2 emissions and concentrations, C(t), published by the Energy Information Administration, are expanded in this paper. Additions include annual mean values in 1750 through 2018 of the 14C specific activity, concentrations of the two components, and their changes from values in 1750. The specific activity of 14C in the atmosphere gets reduced by a dilution effect when fossil CO2, which is devoid of 14C, enters the atmosphere. We have used the results of this effect to quantify the two components. All results covering the period from 1750 through 2018 are listed in a table and plotted in figures. These results negate claims that the increase in C(t) since 1800 has been dominated by the increase of the anthropogenic fossil component. We determined that in 2018, atmospheric anthropogenic fossil CO2 represented 23% of the total emissions since 1750 with the remaining 77% in the exchange reservoirs. Our results show that the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming.
Globally, the deviation of the global mean temperature of the satellite-based measurements from the mean of period 1991-2020 rose slightly in December to 0.21 degrees Celsius. The mean temperature increase since satellite measurements began was 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade. The year 2021 was an average year compared to 2010 to 2020, with 0.134 degrees deviation from the thirty-year average. Six years since 2010 were warmer and 5 years were colder.
This is also true for Germany. But the German weather service gives a different impression
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How the German DWD Weather Service turned cooling into warming in 2021
In its press release on Germany’s weather in 2021, the German Weather Service writes: “The mean temperature [Germany] in 2021 was 9.1 degrees Celsius (°C), 0.9 degrees above the value of the internationally valid reference period 1961 to 1990. 2021 was thus the eleventh year in a row that was too warm.”
Why does the DWD use the internationally no longer valid 1961-1990 reference period? It writes itself elsewhere: “To record the climate and its changes, mean values are formed over a period of 30 years…With the end of the year 2020, the reference period for current climatological assessments was replaced by the 1991 to 2020 period.”
Fudging with the reference period
The DWD thus followed the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)recommendation. But in the press release, the DWD still prefers to use the old, outdated period. The 1991 to 202 0reference period differs from the one of 1961 to 1990 by 1.1 degrees. So the DWD should have written : “2021 was 9.1 degrees, 1.3 degrees cooler than 2020 and even -0.2 degrees Celsius below the average from 1991 to 2020. Since 1991 there have only been 9 years colder than 2021.”
But 0.9 degrees more and the eleventh year in a row that is too warm (compared to the colder period of 1961-1990) of course fits much better with the zeitgeist.
We have updated our “Extremely Low CO2 Climate Sensitivity” scientific paper list with new papers added from 2021 and some newly discovered papers from the past.
As of 2016 this list had only 50 papers on it (as indicated by the web address). In less than 6 years the list has grown to 137 (as of today).
The HITRAN database of gaseous absorption spectra enables the absorption of earth radiation at its current temperature of 288K to be accurately determined for each individual atmospheric constituent and also for the combined absorption of the atmosphere as a whole. From this data it is concluded that H2O is responsible for 29.4K of the 33K warming, with CO2 contributing 3.3K and CH4 and N2O combined just 0.3K. Climate sensitivity to future increases in CO2 concentration is calculated to be 0.50K, including the positive feedback effects of H2O, while climate sensitivities to CH4 and N2O are almost undetectable at 0.06K and 0.08K respectively. This result strongly suggests that increasing levels of CO2 will not lead to significant changes in earth temperature and that increases in CH4 and N2O will have very little discernable impact.
In this monthly lookback through the archives, two things are abundantly clear for every month we have checked:
1) Weather was every bit as extreme in the past
2) The weather can vary enormously from one year to another. This can not be better exemplified than the series for December, which has offered up very mild months to very cold ones, very dry ones to very wet, and very snowy ones to very little snow.
In my last post, entitled Advection, I was discussing the online MODTRAN Infrared Light In The Atmosphere model. A commenter pointed out that in the past I’d wondered about why the MODTRAN results showed that a doubling of CO2 caused a clear-sky top-of-atmosphere (TOA) decrease in upwelling longwave (LW) radiation of less than the canonical value of 3.7 watts per square meter (W/m2) per doubling of CO2. Here’s that data.
The researchers found that children do bring home what they’ve learned at school and communicate it to their parents, engaging in ways that spur parents to reconsider their views. This is partly due to the trust that exists between parents and children, making it easier to talk about an emotionally-charged issue such as climate change. Over the years, both the control and experimental groups developed more concern about climate change, but the change was most pronounced in families where children were taught the curriculum
After every tragic meteorological event there will inevitably be the alarmist cries that climate change was a substantial influence. The recent late-season tornado outbreak of Dec 10-11 is no exception. Usually most of these are appeals to emotion with no data to support the relationship between extreme weather and climate change. However, this tweet from Michael Mann pointed to a 2019 peer-reviewed study titled “Increasingly Powerful Tornadoes in the United States” by Elsner et al.1
In a recent paper, scientists expressed their surprise that the Arctic had started warming already back in the early 20th century, 100 years ago. This, along with the obligatory CO2 climate warming lip service, is described in a Cambridge University press release.
Natural oceanic currents
The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century—decades earlier than records suggest—due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.
An international group of researchers reconstructed the recent history of oceanwarming at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean in a region called the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard.
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The researchers used geochemical and ecological data from ocean sediments to reconstruct the change in water column properties over the past 800 years. They precisely dated sediments using a combination of methods and looked for diagnostic signs of Atlantification, like change in temperature and salinity.
“When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr. Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity—it really sticks out.”
“The reason for this rapid Atlantification of at the gate of the Arctic Ocean is intriguing,” said Muschitiello. “We compared our results with the ocean circulation at lower latitudes and found there is a strong correlation with the slowdown of dense water formation in the Labrador Sea. In a future warming scenario, the deep circulation in this subpolar region is expected to further decrease because of the thawing of the Greenland ice sheet. Our results imply that we might expect further Arctic Atlantification in the future because of climate change.”
The researchers say that their results also expose a possible flaw in climate models, because they do not reproduce this early Atlantification at the beginning of the last century.
A 2020 study (Geirsdóttir et al.) indicated peak Holocene warmth at least “∼3–4 °C above modern in Iceland” prevailed throughout much of the last 8000 years in this region of the northern North Atlantic.
On November 3, 2021, the renowned scientific journal Climate published a paper on solar influence on climate.
The paper by the renowned solar researcher Dr. Frank Stefani from the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf is entitled: “Solar and Anthropogenic Influences on Climate: A Regression Analysis and Tentative Predictions” and concludes that the influence of CO2 on the development of global temperatures from 1860 until today was only about half as large as the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assumed.
As a reminder, the IPCC concludes that 98% of the warming ( 1.07 degrees out of 1.09 degrees) is human-induced. According to Stefani’s analysis, the solar influence accounts for 30-70%.
Stefani examined the course of the geomagnetic aa – index, which reflects the strength of the earth’s magnetic field. This index has been measured in Cambridge and Melbourne since 1844 and reflects the influence of solar activity. In earlier publications, Stefani had already been able to prove that the 11-year solar cycle is triggered by the gravitational forces of Venus, Earth and Jupiter, which are in orbital resonance every 11.07 years (here, here and here).
Since the Sun – influenced by all the planets (especially Jupiter and Saturn) – also moves around the center of gravity of the solar system, solar cycles arise that have become known in temperature history as the 193-year Suess-de Vries cycle and the 90-year Gleissberg cycle.
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for November 2021 was +0.08 deg. C, down substantially from the October 2021 value of +0.37 deg. C.
Perhaps the last bear leaving Cape Churchill for the sea ice, 4 December 2021.
Moreover, considering that 2021 fall ice formation for the Arctic in general is well ahead of 2016 (and every year since, except 2018), it’s hard to see why human-caused global warming caused by ever-increasing CO2 emissions explains the slow freeze-up of Hudson Bay. Timing of Hudson Bay freeze-up has always been highly variable from one year to the next (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017: Fig. 3, copied below). The average freeze-up date in the 1980s was 16 November ± 5 days, while from 2005-2015 this had shifted about a week to 24 November ± 8 days (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017:230). This year freeze-up was later than usual but last year and the three years before that the ice froze as early as it did in the 1980s. Cue the zombie apocalypse.
Until recently, human CO2 emissions were responsible for ~10% of the variance in year-to-year CO2 growth rate. But a new analysis says human CO2 emissions have been slightly declining for the last decade. So 0% responsible, apparently.
CO2 emissions derived from human activity (fossil fuel combustion and land use changes) only account for about +0.1 to 0.3 PgC/yr of the annual change in CO2 concentration. This is about “10% of the variance (σ²) of the CO2 growth rate” (Wang et al., 2013).
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
