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.
I mentioned in my previous post that the latest draft climate report, published in June, had seemingly left out a rather embarrassing table from the Executive Summary, one that had previously been written into the Third Draft, published last December.
As the link to the Third Draft had disappeared from the NYT, I could not show it.
However, Michael Bastasch, writing over at WUWT, did have the link, so we can now compare the relevant sections.
The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it.
NYT Admits Its Front Page Climate Change Article Was Wrong, seehere
‘Pre-determined science’ Morano reacts to NYT’s ‘leaked’ federal climate doom report: ‘Political report masquerading as science’, see here
Earth’s most severe mass extinction, the “Great Dying,” began 251.94 million years ago at the end of the Permian period, with the loss of more than 90% of marine species. Precise rock dates published in 2014 and 2015 proved that the extinction coincided with the Siberian Traps LIP, an epic outpouring of lava and intrusions of underground magma covering an area of northern Asia the size of Europe.
But those rock dates presented science with a new puzzle: why was the mass extinction event much shorter than the eruptions? And why did the extinction happen some 300,000 years after the lava began to flow?
The Bray cycle is about 2450 years from beginning to end and the Bray Lows, which are the coldest portion of the cycle, are the most important events.
The world is currently within the Quaternary Ice Age and nearly as cold as it has ever been. The normal average temperature of the world is around 20°C, some 5°C warmer than today. To keep recent warming in perspective, it is important to understand that even if the worse predictions of the IPCC were to occur, we would only be returning to the average temperature of the last 560 million years
Earlier studies had documented little change in the western Ross coastline prior to 1995, and the new study both confirmed the earlier work and extended the analysis to the present time.
This work underscores the complexity of Antarctic climate change and glacier response.
Prof. Quansheng Ge and his group from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, collected a large number of proxies and reconstructed a 2000-year temperature series in China with a 10-year resolution, enabling them to quantitatively reveal the characteristics of temperature change in China over a common era.
Since 1600, 278,880 people have been killed by volcanic activity, with many of these deaths attributed to secondary hazards associated with the main eruption. Starvation killed 92,000 following the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia, for example, and a volcanic tsunami killed 36,000 following the 1883 Krakatoa eruption.
Research shows that volcanic activity has shown no let up since the turn of the 21st century – it just hasn’t been around population centres. Indeed, there remain a number of volcanoes poised to blow which pose a major threat to life and livelihood.
Le Venezuela se trouve à la croisée des chemins. Se dirige-t-il vers le modernisme ou va-t-il poursuivre sa révolution bolivarienne vers le socialisme qui l’a conduit à la débâcle à laquelle nous assistons aujourd’hui ?
Le pays possède tout ce qu’il faut pour connaitre la prospérité et la paix. Ses abondantes ressources d’hydrocarbures auraient pu en faire la Norvège de l’Amérique latine
So… If climate change caused the Vikings to turn their plowshares into swords, abandoning their farms to become terrorists… the climate change would have been of the warming variety. I’m not a farmer, but it seems to me that global warming would have actually enhanced the Vikings’ ability to farm up around the Arctic Circle.
by JoNova, August 7, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch
In the mid-1990s thermometers changed right across Australia — new electronic sensors were installed nearly everywhere. Known as automatic weather sensors (AWS) these are quite different to the old “liquid in glass” type.
The electronic ones can pick up very short bursts of heat—so they can measure extremes of temperatures that the old mercury or liquid thermometers would not pick up unless the spike of heat lasted for a few minutes.
It is difficult (impossible) to believe that across the whole temperature range that these two different instruments would always behave in the exact same way.
Finally, we’ve been told for years that volcanic eruptions cause COOLING … although what cooling is visible in the historical record is generally local, small, and short-lasting. But now, they say eruptions cause Northern Hemisphere winter warming? What’s up with that?
An article just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B describes two remarkably different hydrothermal vent fields discovered in the southern Gulf of California. Despite being relatively close together, these vents host very different animal communities. This finding contradicts a common scientific assumption that neighboring vents will share similar animal communities. Instead, the new paper suggests that local geology and the chemistry of the vent fluids are important factors affecting vent communities
by Graham Lloyd, August 4, 2017 in Marc Morano,ClimateDepot
Recorded temperatures at the Bureau of Meteorology’s Thredbo Top automatic weather station have dropped below -10C in the past week, after action was taken to make the facility “fit for purpose”.
A record of the Thredbo Top station for 3am on Wednesday shows a temperature reading of -10.6C. This compares with the BoM’s monthly highlights for June and July, both showing a low of -9.6C.
The BoM said it had taken immediate action to replace the Thredbo station after concerns were raised that very low temperatures were not making it onto the official record.
Detailed pattern correlation of Earth’s temperature changes during the past 450 kyrs reveals observations about several cyclic climate patterns. The past four glacial cycles are increasing in duration from 89 kyrs to 119 kyrs. Within these glacial cycles, two warm periods occur about 200 kyrs apart and have strikingly similar temperature characteristics.
During the last 450 kyrs, the five major warm onsets with rapidly increasing temperatures are triggered by increases in the eccentricity, obliquity, and precession of Earth’s orbit. The nearly concurrent increase in these three astronomical forces appears a necessary component for a major warm onset. Obliquity is the dominate control for ending these major warm periods and entering a cooling phase.
As noted in my article four years ago, Japan has a program for producing natural gas from methane hydrates located near its coast, and predicts it will be successful by 2019.
Most people believe that Japan’s objective is highly optimistic, but it does shed light on the efforts currently underway to develop the technology for extracting natural gas from methane hydrates.
“Settled” Climate Science apparently needs a lot more hands on deck to help explain to us how doomed we are if we don’t spend taxpayer’s money on climate stuff.
We provide a new confirmation for the link between solar activity and climate cycles by wavelet analysis showing a remarkably good agreement of the power of the ~190 – year period for temperatures and solar activity over 9000 years (see Fig.4. lower panel). As (Fig.2 and Table 2 ) show, the periods of ~1000 and ~460 years are also apparently common in records of temperatures and cosmogenic nuclides.
Not surprisingly, when all was said and done, the authors report that “increasing [the] CO2 concentration to 3000 ppm at 35°C did not cause changes in any of the measured responses.” They did note, however, that the heart rates of the subjects were slightly reduced under elevated CO2 conditions (Figure 1, top left panel), although these reductions were not statistically significant.
Since 1988, a mere 100 companies have been responsible for 71 percent of the entire world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
This data comes from an inaugural report published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an environmental non-profit. Charting the rapid expansion of the fossil fuel industry in the last 28 years, they have now released some truly staggering numbers on the world’s major carbon polluters.
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for July, 2017 was +0.28 deg. C, up a little from the June, 2017 value of +0.21 deg. C
J’ai eu l’immense honneur et le plaisir de côtoyer à de multiples reprises le Professeur Istvàn Marko.
C’était vraiment une personnalité exceptionnelle, tant sur le plan humain que scientifique. Sa disparition inopinée laisse un vide profond, et un grand désarroi parmi ceux qui l’ont connu
L’hommage de Drieu Godefridi à István Markó, esprit libre et grand scientifique qui s’est attaché à donner ses titres de noblesse à la science du climat.
Today ‘warm’ is strongly connected with ‘climate change’, if not with ‘dangerous climate change’. In the minds of people ‘cold’ should be more stable. But, paleo data show that it is‘cold’ that is unstable. While ‘warm’ always shows a high stability in climatic conditions.
Weathering of Earth by glaciers may have warmed the planet over eons by aiding the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A new study shows the cumulative effect may have created negative feedback that prevented runaway glaciation.
The purpose of this study is to present robust evidence that the sun is working with water vapour to control the Earth’s climate and to show that the influence of CO2 on atmospheric temperature is so small as to be negligible.
