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.
by Hermann Harde, March 30, 2017 in Inter.J.Atm.Sciences
Including solar and cloud effects as well as all relevant feedback processes our simulations give an equilibrium climate sensitivity of = 0.7°C (temperature increase at doubled CO2) and a solar sensitivity of = 0.17°C (at 0.1% increase of the total solar irradiance). Then CO2 contributes 40% and the Sun 60% to global warming over the last century.
Physical, mathematical and observational grounds are employed to show that there is no physically meaningful global temperature for the Earth in the context of the issue of global warming. While it is always possible to construct statistics for any given set of local temperature data, an infinite range of such statistics is mathematically permissible if physical principles provide no explicit basis for choosing among them. Distinct and equally valid statistical rules can and do show opposite trends when applied to the results of computations from physical models and real data in the atmosphere. A given temperature field can be interpreted as both “warming” and “cooling” simultaneously, making the concept of warming in the context of the issue of global warming physically ill-posed.
Future global climate projections have been put on more solid empirical ground, thanks to new measurements of the production rates of atmospheric aerosol particles by CERN’s Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets (CLOUD) experiment
In stark contrast to the sharp decline in Arctic sea ice, there has been a steady increase in ice extent around Antarctica during the last three decades, especially in the Weddell and Ross seas. In general, climate models do not to capture this trend and a lack of information about sea ice coverage in the pre-satellite period limits our ability to quantify the sensitivity of sea ice to climate change and robustly validate climate models
Le jury pensait, bien sûr, désigner plus tôt le vainqueur de septembre 2017 de la propagande climatique. Il demande pardon aux lecteurs pour avoir à ce point aiguisé leur impatience, mais dispose toutefois d’une circonstance fortement atténuante : à quel irrépressible élan a-t-il fallu faire face !
Quelle fougue des compétiteurs, nouveaux comme anciens, a déferlé ce mois-ci, rendant le choix final tout simplement impossible !
Satellite measurements of Antarctic sea ice do not go back even 40 years. That’s not very much, especially when we consider that many natural climate cycles have periods of 60 years and more.
Luckily we have the field of climate reconstruction. Using historical documents and sediment cores, the development of ice cover can be estimated. In November, 2016, Tom Edinburg and Jonathan Day examined shipping log books from the time of Antarctic explorers and published on ice extent in The Cryosphere (…)
A recently highlighted paper published by atmospheric scientists Scafetta et al., (2017) featured a graph (above) documenting post-2000 trends in the published estimates of the Earth’s climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentrations (from 280 parts per million to 560 ppm).
This is interesting. It appears that a “pause” has developed in global sea levels. For two years, since July 2015, there has been no sustained increase in global sea level, in fact, it appears to have actually fallen a bit. This graph, provided by NASA’s Global Climate Change website, tells the story:
Temperature and Water Level (MSL) are two hot topic measurements being widely bandied about and vast sums of money are being invested in research to determine whether, on a global scale, these physical quantities — Global Average Temperature and Global Mean Sea Level — are changing, and if changing, at what magnitude and at what rate. The Global Averages of these ever-changing, continuous variables are being said to be calculated to extremely precise levels — hundredths of a degree for temperature and millimeters for Global Sea Level — and minute changes on those scales are claimed to be significant and important.
Dans quelle mesure les émissions anthropiques qui s’élèvent à 9 Giga Tonnes par an (dont 1,5 dues au changement d’utilisation des sols) perturbent le cycle du carbone contribuant à l’augmentation de la concentration de CO2 dans l’atmosphère?
Les émissions américaines de CO2 liées à l’énergie ont baissé de 1,7% en 2016. Elles ont toutefois encore atteint près de 5,2 milliards de tonnes l’an dernier, ce qui fait toujours des États-Unis le 2e émetteur mondial après la Chine.
Paper Reviewed: McCulloch, M.T., D’Olivo, J.P., Falter, J., Holcomb, M. and Trotter, J.A. 2017. Coral calcification in a changing world and the interactive dynamics of pH and DIC upregulation. Nature Communications8: 15686, DOI:10.1038/ncomms15686
(…) The implications of the above findings are enormous, for they reveal that “pHcf upregulation occurs largely independent of changes in seawater carbonate chemistry, and hence ocean acidification,” demonstrating “the ability of the coral to ‘control’ what is arguably one of its most fundamental physiological processes, the growth of its skeleton within which it lives.
La découverte a été effectuée par des scientifiques français du CNRS, dans ce groupe qui vivait sur l’île de Petrels, en terre Adélie. Hormis les deux bébés manchots survivants, ils n’ont retrouvé que des corps d’animaux affamés et des oeufs non-éclos. Ces chercheurs, soutenus par le Fonds mondial pour la nature (WWF), observaient depuis 2010 cette colonie. Selon eux, l’étendue inhabituelle de la banquise a contraint les parents à aller plus loin chercher leur nourriture. Leur progéniture ont succombé à la faim.
Le prix du baril de pétrole, qui était de 1 dollar en 1972, est monté à près de 150 dollars en 2013, avec des projections qui le voyaient aller jusqu’à 300 dollars. Et le voilà retombé aujourd’hui aux alentours de 50 dollars. Pour expliquer une évolution aussi spectaculaire, il faut comprendre que le pétrole a été à un moment un prix politique, mais que la loi du marché a pris sa revanche
L’OPEP (Organisation des Pays Exportateurs de Pétrole), dénommée OPEC en anglais (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), est une organisation intergouvernementale fondée à l’issue de la conférence de Bagdad le 14 septembre 1960 par le Venezuela, l’Irak, l’Arabie saoudite, le Koweït et l’Iran.
Washington State University researchers have determined that the Pacific Northwest was home to one of the Earth’s largest known volcanic eruptions, a millennia-long spewing of sulfuric gas that blocked out the sun and cooled the planet.
Georgiou, et al. 2015 have reported that coral reefs in the Australian Great Barrier Reef, near Heron Island, are insensitive to ocean pH changes. The location of Heron Island, about 257 miles (414 km) north of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, is shown in figure 1 using Google maps
There are two important points which readers must be aware of from the first mention of Sea Level Rise (SLR):
SLR is a real concern to coastal cities, low-lying islands and coastal and near-coastal densely-populated areas. It can be real problem. See Part 1 of this series.
SLR is not a threat to much else — not now, not in a hundred years — probably not in a thousand years — maybe, not ever. While it is a valid concern for some coastal cities and low-lying coastal areas, in a global sense, it is a fake problem.
A Russian team, however, has been active establishing a chronology of deuterium from snow-cores and -pits near the Vostok station (A.A. Ekaykin, et al., 2014). A summary (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/22532) with digital data became available in May, 2017. The data include annual measurements from 1654 to 2010, providing an overlap with the ice-core record that enables an assessment of present conditions from the perspective of ice-core record.
Le 21 septembre dernier, En Marche, parti politique du président Emmanuel Macron, publiait sur son site une page pleine de chiffres se voulant effrayants sur les risques liés au réchauffement climatique. Or, nous allons constater que les chiffres présentés sont soit faux, soit présentés de façon totalement fallacieuse. Vous me direz que ce genre de publication n’est pas nouveau. Certes. Mais là, cela vient directement du parti du président en exercice, et donc il convient d’essayer d’y répondre, sachant que de telles publications sont rarement dénuées d’arrières pensées politiques.
It was late evening, April 19, 1995, that the crestfallen figure of McArthur Wheeler could be found slumped over a Pittsburgh Police Department’s interrogation room table. Forlorn and understandably distressed by his predicament, he could be heard muttering dumbfounded astonishment at his arrest. “I don’t understand it,” he would repeat, “I wore the juice, I wore the juice!” (. . .)
A year ago I wrote an article at WUWT analyzing the recent upward trend in summer Arctic sea ice extent. Despite challenges of statistical irrelevancy, the trend has continued another year. Arctic ice experts, that have repeatedly predicted the demise of summer ice, don’t have an explanation for a 10-year trend that contradicts their predictions, beyond statistical variability or unexplained natural variability.
Debate and controversy concerning the issue of climate change generally results in the hindering and obstruction of social and governmental action on this issue. This paper analyses the scientific background, i.e. the reference list of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report ‘‘The Physical Science Basis’’ and an alternative climate change report of a US think tank institute ‘‘Climate Change Reconsidered II. Physical Science’’.