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.
For those still blindly banging the ‘97%’ drum, here is a in-no-way-comprehensive list of the SCIENTISTS who publicly disagree with the current consensus on climate change –namely the IPCC’s catastrophic conclusions.
There are currently 85 names on the list. Though it is embryonic and dynamic.
Suggestions for omissions and/or additions can be added to the comment section below and, if validated, will serve to update the list.
SCIENTISTS ARGUING THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS PRIMARILY CAUSED BY NATURAL PROCESSES
— scientists that have called the observed warming attributable to natural causes, i.e. the high solar activity witnessed over the last few decades.
Cet article est le résultat d’une recherche multi-disciplinaire entre géologues et biologistes. Une synthèse de cette recherche vient d’être publiée en décembre 2018 sur le site de Geologica Belgica. Un article déjà publié dans SCE peut également être consulté.
Contrairement à ce que l’on peut penser, une question simple nécessite parfois des années de recherches avec des équipes diverses et des moyens sophistiqués. La question simple concerne ici la géologie et plus particulièrement la couleur des roches sédimentaires.
The ‘urban heat island’ arises because air temperatures measured in urban cities can be different to those of the rural city surroundings. Thermometers were and still are more often found in cities than surroundings. City temperatures have a synthetic, man-made component that needs to be subtracted to match the surrounding rural temperatures, which are the items of interest for climate studies.
Failure to subtract the UHI effect will lead to false results for temperature trends such as those used to claim global warming. The question arises whether rural and urban temperatures have adequate accuracy to provide reasonable results after the subtraction. This essay argues that historic Australian rural temperature records are unfit for this purpose; that global temperature records are likely to be similarly inadequate; and that as a consequence, all past estimates of UHI derived from land surface temperatures by thermometry are invalid or questionable.
In short, all past estimates of UHI magnitude before the satellite era are incorrect for reasons given. The actual rates of global temperature changes over the past century are likely to be wrong by a significant amount, of similar magnitude to the global warming claimed at about 1°C per century.
More recent estimates are being made with temperatures from instruments on satellites, which help the future path to better understanding.
La COP24 est enfin terminée et, comme à chaque fois, sans aucun résultat concret pour la diminution des émissions de CO2 malgré les cris d’alarmes des ONG environnementales, du Secrétaire général des Nations Unies et des foules de citoyens. Et pourtant dans un an, on va de nouveau nous bassiner les oreilles avec la 25ème COP tandis qu’on observera encore une fois l’augmentation des émissions. Comme à chaque fois, par l’entremise des media, on nous rappelle que notre planète va devenir un enfer comme Vénus, que le niveau de la mer va nous engloutir et que la biodiversité va disparaître.
Rappelons tout d’abord ce fait : aujourd’hui l’Union Européenne ne représente que 11 % des émissions mondiales de CO2, la Chine 28 %, les États-Unis 15 %, l’Inde 7 %, la France 1 % et la Belgique 0,4 %.
The significance of this new GWPF report by Prof Ray Bates of the Meteorology and Climate Centre at University College Dublin cannot really be overstated:
London, 20 December: One of Europe’s most eminent climate scientists has documented the main scientific reasons why the recent UN climate summit failed to welcome the IPCC’s report on global warming of 1.5°C.
In a paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation Professor Ray Bates of University College Dublin explains the main reasons for the significant controversy about the latest IPCC report within the international community.
The IPCC’s Special Report on a Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5) was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in advance of the recent COP24 meeting in Katowice, Poland, but was not adopted by the meeting due to objections by a number of governments.
by P. Homewood, December 18, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
The Department for Transport publishes a long-awaited aviation strategy today that pledges to deliver “greater capacity at UK airports”.
It raises the prospect of airports other than Heathrow growing and accepting more flights if tough environmental and noise restrictions are met.
The strategy also outlines plans for the biggest overhaul of Britain’s airspace in more than 50 years to create new flight paths into the biggest airports. GPS-style technology will allow aircraft to fly along more accurate paths below 30,000ft instead of being led by ground beacons, which space planes out over a wide arc several miles across.
It will mean a considerable increase to the 600 or so dedicated flight paths that are in operation today
Jochem Marotzke, director of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPIM), wondered whether CO2 savings could really have a direct influence on the temperature in the near future. In a new paper (Marotzke 2018), the Hamburg-based climate researcher simulates the temperature profile of the 2030s predicted by climate models and uses once again a conventional emission profile (Scenario RCP 4.5), and once a politically reduced emission scenario.
Conclusion: Most likely, there would probably be no difference as natural climate variability prevails over these time scales. The paper was published in WIRE’s Climate Change and can be downloaded free of charge as a pdf:
Scientists have described a fossil plant species that suggests flowers bloomed in the Early Jurassic, more than 174 million years ago, according to new research in the open-access journal eLife.
Before now, angiosperms (flowering plants) were thought to have a history of no more than 130 million years. The discovery of the novel flower species, which the study authors named Nanjinganthus dendrostyla, throws widely accepted theories of plant evolution into question, by suggesting that they existed around 50 million years earlier. Nanjinganthus also has a variety of ‘unexpected’ characteristics according to almost all of these theories.
Over the last 40 years global-mean surface air temperature – ‘global temperature’ for short – has gained an extraordinary role in the science, politics and public discourse of climate change. What was once a number crudely calculated through averaging together a few dozen reasonably well-spaced meteorological time series, has become reified as an objective entitythat simultaneously measures Earth System behaviour, reveals the future, regulates geopolitical negotiations and disciplines the human imagination. Apart perhaps from GDP rarely can so constructed an abstract entity have gained such power over the human world.
You may recall the BBC’s news story a couple of months ago, claiming that African penguin populations were declining because of climate change.
The report from South Africa, which then followed, made no mention of climate change at all but instead laid the blame fairly and squarely on overfishing.
Wavelet analyses of modern global temperature anomalies provides an excellent visualization tool of temperature signal characteristics and patterns over the past 150 years. Scafetta recognized key temperature oscillations of about 9, 20 and 60-years using power spectra of global surface temperature anomalies. There has been much discussion about the 60-year quasi-oscillation both in WUWT and publications.
Detrending the temperature time series and removing the 60-year underlying trend enables insights into the interplay of interannual and decadal scales. Wavelet analyses reveals these periodic signals have distinguished patterns and characteristics that repeat over time suggesting natural external and internal influences. Interannual wavelet patterns that consist of 9-year and 3 to 5-year quasi-oscillations are repeated and dominate over 70% of the instrumental record. The 3 to 5-year discontinuous breakouts are coincident to El Niño and La Niña events of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). A period of quiescence from 1925 to 1960 is devoid of most wavelet signals suggesting different or transitional climate processes.
The L. A. Times published an article addressing a panel discussion at the latest U.N. climate alarmist confab in Poland touting protests by attendees regarding the need for continued use of fossil fuels.
Almost immediately after it was introduced to the public, the lead author of Marcott et al. (2013) squelched the narrative that said the hockey-stick-shaped reconstruction he and his colleagues produced is a robust representation of modern global-scale temperature changes.
In an interview with Marcott published by RealClimate.org, it was acknowledged that the “uptick” does not represent a global-scale reconstruction, as it is based on only a few proxy records and lacks statistical significance.
…
Despite this admitted lack of supporting evidence for the 20th century’s “uptick”, the Marcott et al. (2013) “hockey stick”-shaped graph has nonetheless been unskeptically cited by other authors nearly 700 times.
On December 14, 2008, former presidential candidate Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years. As reported on WUWT, Gore made the prediction to a German TV audience at the COP15 Climate Conference:
In this post, we’re going to present graphs that show the annual lowest TMIN and highest TMAX Near-Land Surface Air Temperatures (not in anomaly form) for ten (10) Countries in an effort to add some perspective to global warming. The list of countries, which follows, includes the countries with the highest populations.
And, as always with my posts, as part of the text, there are hyperlinks to the data that were used to prepare the graphs. Just click on the links if you’re looking for the data.
INITIAL NOTES
First of all, TMIN is described by Berkeley Earth as the “Mean of Daily Low Temperatures”, while TMAX is described as the “Mean of Daily High Temperatures”. Berkeley Earth provides monthly TMIN and TMAX data until partway through 2013. The start month for these individual-country datasets at Berkeley Earth depends on data availability from the individual country. Sometimes they start in the early 1800s, maybe even the mid-to-late 1700s for countries to be included in future posts (like the United Kingdom), and other times they start in the mid-to-late 1800s, so I’ve chosen 1900 as the start year for this post. The year 1900 is the end year of the IPCC’s new definition of “pre-industrial” times, so starting the graphs in 1900 is also appropriate in that respect.
Three minutes is not a lot of time, so let me be brief. I’ll start with something that might shock you. There is no evidence that CO2 has a large effect on climate. The two arguments used by the IPCC to so called “prove” that humans are the main cause of global warming, and which implies that climate sensitivity is high, are that: a) 20th century warming is unprecedented, and b) there is nothing else to explain the warming.
These arguments are faulty. Why you ask?
We know from the climate-gate e-mails that the hockey stick was an example of shady science. The medieval warm period and little ice ages were in fact global and real. And, although the IPCC will not admit so, we know that the sun has a large effect on climate, and on the 20th century warming in particular.
In the first slide we see one of the most important graphs that the IPCC is simply ignoring. Published already in 2008, you can see a very clear correlation between sea level change rate from tide gauges, and solar activity. This proves beyond any doubt that the sun has a large effect on climate. But it is ignored.
La COP est une conférence internationale qui depuis 24 ans tient chaque année la réunion de la dernière chance pour sauver la planète. Vous croyez peut-être que la planète avait été sauvée lors de la COP21 à Paris. Erreur. Tout reste à faire. C’est ce qui justifie la COP24, qui se tient cette année en Pologne. Le secrétariat de la COP24 publie en ligne la liste de ses participants, sur près de 1100 pages.
Plus de 21 000 participants. Sans compter les 1500 journalistes accrédités, qui sont rémunérés par leurs médias, pas par les contribuables. Ces 21 000 participants sont pour 14000 des délégués des gouvernements, et pour 6000 des représentants d’ONGs prétendument intéressées et compétentes. (Le solde est composé de membres d’organisations du système des Nations-Unies).
Le coût de la fête est élevé. Les seuls frais de déplacement et de séjour pour cette COP de 15 jours s’élèvent sans doute (sur la base de 10000 € par participant) à plus de 200 millions d’euros. On pourrait y ajouter le coût du temps passé par les participants. S’ils y passent en moyenne une semaine, cela fait 21000 semaines, soit environ 500 personnes-années. A 50000 euros/an, 25 millions d’euros, qui s’ajoutent aux frais de déplacement. C’est de quoi doubler le niveau de vie annuel de 2 ou 3 millions d’enfants au Malawi.
Dans un article récent de juin 2018[1], le biologiste Yinon Bar-On et ses collaborateurs ont estimé la biomasse totale de la biosphère actuelle (Bar-On et al. 2018). Pour cela, ils ont simplement estimé les nombres de bactéries, protozoaires, plantes et animaux dans tous les écosystèmes de la planète. En connaissant le poids moyen de chaque organisme, les auteurs ont ensuite réalisé des sommes. Ils arrivent au chiffre final de 550 gigatonnes (Gt) de carbone. Ce chiffre est-il élevé ? Avec quoi peut-on le comparer? Est-il précis ? Quels sont les organismes les plus importants dans la biosphère ? Quelles sont les conséquences pour le cycle du carbone, et donc pour la concentration de CO2 atmosphérique ? Voici toute une série de questions que l’on doit se poser. Nous allons voir que les résultats de Yinon Bar-On sont assez étonnants et qu’ils induisent des conséquences majeures pour le cycle du carbone dans la biosphère.
…
Figure 1. Biomasse totale de la biosphère, en gigatonnes (Gt). Bar-On et al. (2018)
I was preparing a post using Berkeley Earth Near-Surface Land Air Temperature data that included the highest-annual TMAX temperatures (not anomalies) for China…you know, the country with the highest population here on our wonder-filled planet Earth. The graph was for the period of 1900 to 2012 (FYI, 2012 is the last full year of the local TMAX and TMIN data from Berkeley Earth). Berkeley Earth’s China data can be found here, with the China TMAX data here. For a more-detailed explanation, referring to Figure 1, I was extracting the highest peak values for every year of the TMAX Data for China, but I hadn’t yet plotted the graph in Figure 1, so I had no idea what I was about to see.
Figure 1 The results are presented in Figure 2, and they were a little surprising, to say the least.
I keep reading about all kinds of crazy schemes to reduce US CO2 emissions. Now, I don’t think that CO2 is the secret knob that controls the climate. I think that the earth has a host of emergent thermoregulatory mechanisms that act to keep the temperature within narrow limits (e.g. 0.6°C temperature change over the entire 20th Century). I don’t believe the claims that the modern changes in CO2 will affect the temperature.
But solely for the purposes of this post, let’s assume that the alarmists are correct. And for purposes of discussion only, let’s assume that the Earth’s temperature is free to go up and down any amount. Let’s assume that CO2 is, in fact, the secret control knob that controls the temperature of the earth. And let’s further assume that the pundits are right that the “climate sensitivity” is three degrees of warming for every doubling of CO2.
And finally, let’s assume that in 2018 the US magically stopped emitting any CO2 at all.
With all of those assumptions as prologue, here’s the question of interest.
Other things being equal, if the US stopped emitting CO2 entirely in 2018, and stayed at zero CO2 emissions indefinitely, how much cooler would that make the planet in the year 2050?
Five degrees cooler? Two degrees? One degree?
…
Figure 1. Historical CO2 emissions. Data from CDIAC and BP Statistical Review of World Energy
Patricia Adams is an economist and the executive director of Probe International, a Toronto based NGO that has been involved in the Chinese environmental movement since its beginnings in the mid-1980s.
She is confirming much of what I have said in recent years. The only thing I would take issue with his her description of there being a U-Turn. In my view, China never had the slightest intention of being serious about cutting emissions.
La conférence sur le climat de Katowice bat son plein et diverses initiatives visant à réduire les émissions de dioxyde de carbone sont à l’ordre du jour : manger moins de viande, se chauffer moins, prendre moins l’avion. Dans ce dernier cas, bien sûr, la conférence confine elle-même à l’absurde.
Il aurait été facile de transformer la conférence en une réunion sur Internet avec retransmission en direct et commentaires en ligne. Mais il aurait manqué quelque chose à ce long et merveilleux voyage d’affaires avec ses réceptions, ses indemnités journalières et ses réunions d’avant Noël entre sauveteurs du climat. Cette fois-ci, plus de 22 000 participants se sont rendus en Pologne, la plupart confortablement en avion. Les délégations les plus nombreuses à la Conférence sur le climat venaient d’Afrique.
La Guinée envoie 406 délégués cette année, la République démocratique du Congo y est présente avec 237 participants et la Côte d’Ivoire envoie 191 ressortissants en Pologne. La liste des participants est disponible sur la page d’accueil de la conférence en format pdf et compte 1084 pages.
The media, alarmist scientists and many leading policymakers often tell the public “the Arctic is rapidly melting”. And if a poll were done today, a vast majority of the people in Japan and elsewhere would say this is true. Unfortunately they have become the victims of “fake news”.
Luckily we have some hard data from the Arctic. And if one looks at them, it is true that sea ice has seen a declining trend – if we go back 40 years.
Yet, if we look at the past 12 years, we see that the trend for minimum has stopped, and one could argue even reversed:
…
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
