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.
CO2 concentrations rose from 345 ppm to 398 ppm in the 29 years from 1985 to 2014. Mainstream scientists sympathetic to the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) paradigm have nonetheless reported the overall greenhouse effect forcing has been flat to declining throughout this period.
1. Cess and Udelhofen, 2003 Due to the downward trend in cloud cover, absorbed shortwave radiation increased and the overall greenhouse effect’s forcing influence declined from 1985-1999. The authors consider these trends to be driven by natural variability.
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2. Song et al., 2016The overall greenhouse effect went on “hiatus” from 1992-2014, with the combined forcing effects of water vapor, cloud, and CO2 declining by -0.04 W/m² per year (-0.4 W/m² per decade) during this interval. Again, the main reason for the declining greenhouse effect trend was the downward trend in cloud cover.
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3. Kato et al., 2018Downward longwave radiation (DLR), or the overall greenhouse effect, responds to variability in water vapor and cloud. CO2 isn’t mentioned in the paper as a factor influencing DLR. Total DLR was negative (-0.2 W/m²) during this decade, insinuating rising CO2 had no net warming climate impact. In contrast, downward shortwave forcing increased by +2.2 W/m² per decade from 1986-2000 and by +1.3 W/m² from 2005-2014. These positive shortwave absorption trends explain the warming during this period.
by J. Jessop, December 30, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch
In the final days of 2019, there is much to reflect upon events of the past year and, with the closing of the second decade of the 21st century, much to reflect upon how climate change alarmism has itself alarmingly morphed into something much more dangerous, visceral, urgent, ideologically driven and immediate as regards public perception and societal impact.
A decade during which global warming faded into obscurity (on account of the fact that there wasn’t any from 1998-2013) to be replaced almost universally by the more politically correct term of ‘climate change’, which has itself now been largely displaced in activist circles and the media by the terms ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate crisis’.
Ironically so, because, bereft of an actual climate crisis, alarmist scientists and activists have proceeded to invent one, linguistically, as in the case of the Guardian’s newly introduced style guide and by co-opting extreme weather events and their impacts into the general narrative.
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Judith Curry has written an excellent push back article to the lukewarm attempt by Wallace-Wells, among others, to dial down the alarmist hype in the light of the RCP8.5 criticisms, whilst still maintaining the necessary ‘scary’ projections of future warming.
With fewer than 2 full-days remaining, India’s capital Delhi is about to register its second-coldest month of December since records began in 1901.
According to data from India’s Meteorological Department (IMD), Delhi’s December mean maximum temperature has only-ever dipped below 20C (68F) in 1919, 1929, 1961, 1973 and 1997.
“In December this year, the mean maximum temperature until Thursday [Dec 26] was 19.85C,” said an IMD official. And, given the current forecast, “it is expected to dip to [at least] 19.15C by December 31” — the second-coldest reading after 1973’s mean max temp of 17.3C (63.1F).
Saturday, December 28 saw the season’s lowest daily temperature at the Safdarjung Observatory –Delhi’s official weather station– when a minimum of 2.4C (36.3F) was recorded.
The following day, on Sunday, the IMD issued a “code red” cold warning for Delhi, Haryana, and other neighboring states. Adding to the anomalously cold, dense fog reduced visibility and disrupted air, rail and road traffic.
Its major theme is that there’s something new going on, that the climate situation is so dire scientists have begun behaving in an extraordinary manner. 400 scientists from 20 countries have broken “with the caution traditionally associated” with their profession, he says. Having previously “shunned overt political debate,” they’ve now discovered “a moral duty” to “defy convention.”
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In his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, biology professor Paul Ehrlich declaredthat “the time of famines” had arrived. The only “hope for survival” was “drastic worldwide measures.” His book was a political treatise that advocated “brutal and heartless decisions” to solve a problem that never did materialize.
The 1972 bestseller, titled A Blueprint for Survival, similarly proclaimed that “a succession of famines, epidemics, social crises and wars” were inevitable if governments didn’t take specific, dramatic actions. Politicians and the public were urged to pay attention since “34 distinguished biologists, ecologists, doctors and economists” had attached their names to that blueprint.
Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.
People sometimes ask me why I don’t believe the endless climate/energy use predictions of impending doom and gloom for the year 2050 or 2100. The reason is, neither the climate models nor the energy use models are worth a bucket of warm spit for such predictions. Folks concentrate a lot on the obvious problems with the climate models. But the energy models are just as bad, and the climate models totally depend on the energy models for estimating future emissions. However, consider the following US Energy Information Agency (EIA) predictions of energy use from 2010, quoted from here (emphasis mine):
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The only thing that seems clear about all of those questions is that the answer is not “CO2”. Here’s another look at Greenland, this time with CO2 overlaid on the temperature:
Climate scientists love to blame every bad weather event on global warming. Yet we never hear them cite climate change for the relative absence of bad weather!
One such example are tornadoes in the US, where we now have several decades of carefully collated data.
With the year near an end, we know that the number of tornadoes has been above average this year, though well below 2008 and 2011. Primarily this is due to several outbreaks in February and April:
To Recap: In order to make really Bad Fires we need the big three: Fuel, oxygen, spark.Obviously getting rid of air and lightning is beyond the budget. The only one we can control is fuel. No fuel = no fire. Big fuel = Fireball apocalypse that we can;t stop even with help from Canada, California, and New Zealand.
The most important weather factor is rain, not an extra 1 degree of warmth. To turn the nation into a proper fireball, we “need” a good drought. A lack of rain is a triple whammy — it dries out the ground and the fuel — and it makes the weather hotter too. Dry years are hot years in Australia, wet years are cool years. It’s just evaporative cooling for the whole country. The sun has to dry out the soil before it can heat up the air above it. Simple yes? El Nino’s mean less rain (in Australia), that’s why they also mean “hot weather”.
So ask a climate scientist the right questions and you’ll find out what the ABC won’t say: That global warming means more rain, not less. Droughts haven’t got worse, and climate models are really, terribly, awfully pathetically bad at predicting rain.
Four reasons carbon emissions are irrelevant
1. Droughts are the same as they ever were.
In the 178 year record, there is no trend. All that CO2 has made no difference at all to the incidence of Australian droughts. Climate scientists have shown droughts have not increased in Australia. Click the link to see Melbourne and Adelaide. Same thing.
Is 3 C warming over the 21st century now the ‘best estimate’? A reframing of how we think about climate change over the 21st century, and my arguments for 1 C.
by P. Homewood, December 24, 2019 in NotaLotofPeoppleKnowThat
Many have questioned what role climate change has played in the Australian wildfires currently wreaking havoc in NSW and across the border in Queensland.
The commonly heard cry is that it is now hotter and drier than in the past.
But what does the actual data say?
First, let’s look at rainfall. All the data and graphs that follows are from the Australian BOM:
by R. Pielke JR., December 23, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch
In a remarkable essay last week titled, “We’re Getting a Clearer Picture of the Climate Future — and It’s Not as Bad as It Once Looked,” David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine wrote, “the climate news might be better than you thought. It’s certainly better than I’ve thought.”
The essay was remarkable because Wells, a self-described “alarmist,” is also the author of The Uninhabitable Earth, which describes an apocalyptic vision of the future, dominated by “elements of climate chaos.”
According to Wallace-Wells, his new-found optimism was the result of learning that much discussion of climate change is based on extreme but implausiblescenarios of the future where the world burns massive amounts of coal.
The implausibility of such scenarios is underscored by more recent assessments of global energy system trajectories of the International Energy Agency and United Nations, which suggest that carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will be relatively flat over the next several decades, even before aggressive climate policies are implemented.
Scenarios of the future have long sat at the center of discussions of climate science, impacts and adaptation and mitigation policies.
Scenarios are not intended to be forecasts of the future, but rather to serve as an alternative to forecasting. Scenarios provide a description of possible futurescontingent upon various factors, only some of which might be under the control of decision-makers.
A plot of ice core data from Greenland reveals that CO2 does not drive temperatures.
At Facebook, Gregory Wrightstone posted a chart plotting atmospheric CO2 concentration reconstructed from Dome C Ice Core versus temperature that was reconstructed from the GISP 2 Ice Core.
According to global warming scientists, there’s supposed to be tandem movement between the two magnitudes.
CO2, they say, drives global temperature.
But over the past 8000 years, the data show that temperature in reality has moved in the opposite direction of CO2 and thus of what climate alarmist scientists have told us.
If anything can be drawn from the plotted data, it is that there’s an inverse correlation: As CO2 rises, temperature drops. But of course there’s a lot more to it. CO2 is not that huge major climate driver that alarmists like having us believe it is.
The major publications have declared their bias toward catastrophic warming from CO2. Nature Climate Science says anything they publish must be “grounded in the current literature.” That’s their way of saying “The debate is over, we don’t want anyone presenting evidence to the contrary, now we’re just promoting the long-term projections that haven’t come true yet.” This makes it difficult for scientists to exchange knowledge.
Publications are now releasing two peer-reviewed papers per day confirming exactly what the UN predicts and zero papers questioning the assumptions. Many scientists complain that their papers are not accepted because they don’t have the right keywords.
Claims of a great “consensus” of experts agreeing are a) inaccurate and b) meaningless. Science is not a personality contest. For a breakdown of the claims, see “Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming.”
Today, 30% of the globe’s CO2 emissions come from China. In 10 years, China’s emissions alone will match the rest of world’s emissions combined. China continues to build hundreds of coal plants today. So why are the rest of us spending $600 billion every year on CO2 emissions mitigation?
China overtook the United States as the world’s largest CO2 emitter in 2008 (Liu et al., 2019).
L’avenir de l’éolien terrestre des pays européens s’inscrit dans le cadre de la politique climatique de l’UE.
La concrétisation d’une politique énergétique européenne commune a du mal à voir le jour en raison, notamment, de la diversité des approches et des intérêts des Etats-membres.
Ceci n’a pas empêché la Commission européenne de présenter, en 2011, sa feuille de route pour l’énergie (Roadmap 2050), affichant ainsi sa volonté de “décarboner” de l’économie. A l’origine, cet objectif était soumis à la condition que d’autres régions du monde prennent également l’initiative d’un tel effort. Depuis lors, l’UE se dit prête, le cas échéant, à s’engager seule dans cette aventure. En fait, elle s’est focalisée sur une réduction drastique des émissions des gaz à effet de serre (GES), à tout prix, sans se préoccuper de considérations économiques et sociales.
Le secteur électrique a été ciblé en premier lieu alors qu’il ne représente que 22% de la consommation totale d’énergie de l’UE.
La nouvelle Commission souhaite être encore plus ambitieuse que la précédente, portant la diminution des émissions de GES à 50/55% au lieu de 40% à l’horizon 2030 par rapport à 1990, négligeant ainsi les difficultés de certains Etats-membres, dont l’Allemagne, d’atteindre ne fût-ce que le niveau des 40% précités.
by F. Menton, December 18, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch
A few weeks ago (November 22), in a post titled “Who Is Winning The Climate Wars?”, I undertook to begin documenting the ever-growing chasm between the unhinged rhetoric of climate campaigners and the reality out there in the world.
Let’s collect a few data points over the past several weeks.
You probably know that the UN held its annual big climate conference this year in Madrid during the first two weeks of December.
That event provided the occasion for many campaigners to ramp up the volume of their claims, trying once again to stampede government representatives into agreeing to impoverish their people.
A few examples:
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The fact is that outside of some wildly guilty European countries and the loons in the U.S. Democratic Party’s far Left, fewer and fewer people pay any attention whatsoever to the absurd climate apocalypse rhetoric.
by Jack Hellner, December 18, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch
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Here is a small sample of predictions on the climate that almost all of the media regurgitate with no questions asked:
2019-The UN says we only have a few years left because of warming.
2008-On ABC, Good Morning America. By 2015, New York City would be underwater, milk would be $13 per gallon and gasoline would be $9 per gallon, very little of Miami would be left. (they were so close)
2005-After Katrina we were told hurricanes would be more frequent and severe than ever. Instead, we had a ten-year lull in serious hurricanes hitting the U.S.
1989- The UN says we only have a few years left because of warming.
1970-First Earth Day. Billions would die soon because of global cooling and an ice age.
1922-AP and Washington Post-Coastal cities would soon be underwater because the ice caps have melted due to global warming.
Here is a small sample of questions for politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, educators, Time person’s of the year, and people who pretend to be journalists peddling the indoctrination and pushing the agenda.
It was a hot start to 1896 and by January 14, newspapers were reporting people were dying from a range of complications brought on by the extreme temperatures.
By the third week of the year, 12 infants had died from heat-related illnesses in Goulburn, NSW, alone, a report on JoNova about the heatwave revealed.
People were fleeing the cities on trains to seek refuge in the mountainous regions of the country, and one child escaping the heat ‘died at the moment the train arrived’.
Hospitals were at breaking point, and the death toll was rising.
How a 24 DAY heatwave in January 1896 saw temperatures hit 49 degrees and killed 437 people t is as if history is being erased. For all that we hear about recent record-breaking climate extremes, records that are equally extreme, and sometimes even more so, are ignored. In January 1896 a savage blast like a furnace stretched across Australia from east to west and lasted for weeks. The death toll reached 437 people in the eastern states. Newspaper reports showed that in Bourke the heat approached 120°F (48.9°C) on three days (1)(2)(3). The maximumun at or above 102 degrees F (38.9°C) for 24 days straight. By Tuesday Jan 14, people were reported falling dead in the streets. Unable to sleep, people in Brewarrina walked the streets at night for hours, the thermometer recording 109F at midnight. Overnight, the temperature did not fall below 103°F. On Jan 18 in Wilcannia, five deaths were recorded in one day, the hospitals were overcrowded and reports said that more deaths are hourly expected. By January 24, in Bourke, many businesses had shut down (almost everything bar the hotels). Panic stricken Australians were fleeing to the hills in climate refugee trains. As reported at the time, the government felt the situation was so serious that to save lives and ease the suffering of its citizens they added cheaper train services:
Within the last few years, over 50 papers have been added to our compilation of scientific studies that find the climate’s sensitivity to doubled CO2 (280 ppm to 560 ppm) ranges from <0 to 1°C. When no quantification is provided, words like “negligible” are used to describe CO2’s effect on the climate. The list has now reached 106 scientific papers.
A scientific paper entitled “An Overview of Scientific Debate of Global Warming and Climate Change” has recently come out of the University of Karachi, Pakistan. The paper’s author, Prof. Shamshad Akhtar delves into earth’s natural temperature variations of the past 1000 years, and concludes that any modern warming trend has been hijacked by political & environmental agendas, and that the science (tackled below) has been long-ignored and at times deliberately manipulated.
The published paper –available in full HERE— sets out its intent:
Climate change is NOT a new phenomenon. The palaeo-climatic studies reveal that during the Pleistocene and Holocene periods several warm and cold periods occurred, resulting in changes of sea level and in climatic processes like the rise and fall of global average temperature and rainfall.
by P. Homewood, December 17, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
Coal consumption is set to rise in the coming years as growing demand for electricity in developing countries outpaces a shift to cleaner sources of electricity in industrialised nations.
While use of the most polluting fossil fuel had a historic dip in 2019, the International Energy Agency anticipates steady increases in the next five years. That means the world will face a significant challenge in meeting pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.
Annual coal report
“There are few signs of change,” the agency wrote in its annual coal report released in Paris on Tuesday. “Despite all the policy changes and announcements, our forecast is very similar to those we have made over the past few years.”
While this year is on track for biggest decline ever for coal power, that is mostly due to high growth in hydroelectricity and relatively low electricity demand in India and China, said Carlos Fernandez Alvarez, senior energy analyst at the Paris-based IEA.
Despite the drop, global coal consumption is likely to rise over the coming years, driven by demand in India, China and Southeast Asia. Power generation from coal rose almost 2% in 2018 to reach an all-time high, remaining the world’s largest source of electricity.
Four reconstructions from the central and western High Arctic reveal July temperatures were about 1-2°C warmer than today during most of the 1st millennium and Medieval period (Tamo and Gajewski, 2019).
A few years ago, a chironomid reconstruction of Boothia Peninsula in the Canadian Arctic (Fortin and Gajewski, 2016) revealed not only were today’s temperatures the coldest of the last 7000 years, but the last 150 years “do not indicate a warming during this time.”
by Samuel Furfari, 16 décembre 2019 in ConnaissanceDesEnergies
La COP25 vient de se terminer avec, comme chaque année, une avancée minime dans la bureaucratie que créé les Nations unies. Dans le même temps, l’Union européenne affirme son intention d’atteindre la neutralité carbone en 2050, c’est-à-dire de vivre dans un équilibre entre les émissions de carbone et l’absorption desdites émissions par des puits de carbone. De l’aveu même du Parlement européen(1), aucun puits de carbone artificiel n’est toutefois en mesure d’éliminer à ce jour le carbone de l’atmosphère à l’échelle nécessaire…
Ce qui est annoncé au niveau européen – sans l’accord de la Pologne qui défend son charbon – est donc en pratique un abandon des énergies fossiles. Notons ici que les hommes politiques ne s’embarrassent pas de la nuance entre neutralité carbone et décarbonation (ne plus émettre de CO2).
by P. Homewood, December 16, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
A marathon UN summit wrapped up Sunday with little to show, squeezing hard-earned compromises from countries over a global warming battle plan that fell well short of what science says is needed to tackle the climate crisis.
The COP25 deal “expresses the urgent need” for new carbon cutting commitments to close the gap between current emissions and the Paris treaty goal of capping temperature at below two degrees, host country Spain said in a statement.
“Today the citizens of the world are asking for us to move ahead faster and better, in financing, adaptation, mitigation,” Carolina Schmidt, Chilean environment minister and President of COP25, told the closing plenary.
Following a year of deadly extreme weather and weekly strikes by millions of young people demanding action, negotiations in Madrid were under pressure to send a clear signal that governments were willing to double down.
The summit — moved at the last minute from Chile due to unrest — at times teetered on the brink of collapse as rich polluters, emerging powerhouses and climate-vulnerable nations groped for common ground in the face of competing national interests.
“Based on the adopted text, there is a glimmer of hope that the heart of the Paris Agreement is still beating,” said Mohamed Adow, Director of Power Shift, referring the treaty inked in the French capital.
“But its pulse is very weak.”
