Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (IASB-BIRA) /Earth atmosphere
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I am a mathematician. My professional field is atmospheric science. For about twenty years, I have contributed to elaborate theoretical models and numeric software allowing researchers to interpret and forecast physico-chemical phenomena taking place in the Earth atmosphere and to highlight factors controlling them, including human-driven ones. Initially motivated by the threat that increasing emissions of certain gases used in industry and agriculture represented for stratospheric ozone, my work led me to take the measure of other depredations inflicted by man upon his environment, in particular urban pollution and human-induced climate warming via growing emissions of “greenhouse” gases. I have later worked in the archival, documentation and re-distribution of observational data. Today, I collaborate with colleagues to set up atmospheric and climate change European services intended to provide the public, politicians, monitoring agencies and researchers with scientific data carrying information on the state of the atmosphere and the climate evolution. I also take part to a project aiming at identifying, in collaboration with local communities, which tools and data climate sciences can usefully provide to mitigate this evolution and shield populations against some of its harmful effects.
On another front, I rally the fight against the economic system based on the accumulation of capital for the profit of a minority, which hijacks the collective welth, creates misery, thwarts efforts to manage the environment in a rational way and threatens the less well-off with the dangers of climate imbalance (drought, floodings, increasingly violent storms, starvation, epidemics, migration, war).
I take part to the existing waste recycling system and limit as much as possible my daily energy consumption, facing as everybody the obstacle of an organisation of work and social life based on productivity and unbridled exploitation and consumption which, by nature, contradict the respectful preservation of our natural environment.
I am however convinced that the only solution is to switch to clean energy globally. Measures likely to contain environmental disasters and limit their impact on human societies are of an international scale and of a political, economic, social and cultural as much as a technical nature.
Originally posted 2018-04-26 16:52:48.