Claude Allegre
- Category : Science-Physics
- Type : MGE
- Profile : 1/3 - Investigating / Martyr
- Definition : Split - Small (16,20,44,59)
- Incarnation Cross : RAX Tension 1
Categories
- Birth Year: 1937
- Birthday: 31. March
- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Category: Science-Physics
- Profile: 1-3
- Type: Emotional Manifesting Generator
- Inc.Cross: Tension 1
- Definition: Double Split - Small (16,20,44,59)
- Variables: BRR-MRR
- 4764 Abstraction
- 2145 The Money Line
- 1222 Openness
- 2750 Preservation
- 1156 Curiosity
- 2461 Awareness
Biography
Claude (Jean) Allègre (born 31 March 1937, Paris) is a French politician and scientist.
Scientific work
The main scientific area of Claude Allègre is geochemistry.
Claude Allègre is formally retired, but is an emeritus professor at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (Institute of Geophysics in Paris).
In 1976, Allègre and volcanologist Haroun Tazieff had an intense, public quarrel about whether inhabitants should evacuate the surroundings of the erupting volcano la Soufrière in Guadeloupe. Allègre held that inhabitants should be evacuated, while Tazieff held that the Soufrière was harmless because all analyses pointed to a purely phreatic eruption with no sign of fresh magma. The authorities decided to evacuate. The eruption did not result in any major damage. The controversy dragged on for many years after the end of the eruption, and ended up in court.
Allègre is an ISI highly cited researcher.
Allègre co-authored an Introduction to geochemistry in 1974. Since the 1980s he mainly published books in popular science and politics.
Political career
A former member of the French Socialist Party, Allègre is better known to the general public for his past political responsibilities, which include serving as Minister of Education of France in the Jospin cabinet from 4 June 1997 to March 2000, when he was replaced by Jack Lang. His outpourings of critiques against teaching personnel, as well as his reforms, made him increasingly unpopular in the teaching world.
In the run-up to the 2007 French presidential election, he endorsed Lionel Jospin, then Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for the Socialist nomination, and finally sided with the ex-Socialist Jean-Pierre Chevènement, against Ségolène Royal. When Chevènement decided not to run, he publicly, and controversially, declined to support Royal's bid for the presidency, citing differences over nuclear energy, GMOs and stem-cell research. He later became close to conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Controversies
Global warming
Allègre believes that the causes of climate change are unknown.
In an article entitled "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in l'Express, a French weekly periodic, Allègre cited evidence that Antarctica's gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro's retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, can come from natural causes. He said that "he cause of this climate change is unknown".
Allègre has accused those agreeing with the mainstream scientific view of global warming of being motivated by money, saying that “the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!”
In 1987, Allègre wrote that "By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century".
In 2009, when it was suggested that Claude Allègre might be offered a position as minister in President Nicolas Sarkozy's government, TV presenter Nicolas Hulot stated:
"He doesn't think the same as the 2,500 scientists of the IPCC, who are warning the world about a disaster; that's his right. But if he were to be recruited in government, it would become policy, and it would be a bras d'honneur to those scientists. would be a tragic signal, six months before the Copenhagen Conference, and something incomprehensible coming from France, which has been a leading country for years in the fight against climate change!"
In a 2010 petition, more than 500 French researchers asked Science Minister Valérie Pécresse to dismiss Allègre’s book L’imposture climatique, claiming the book was "full of factual mistakes, distortions of data, and plain lies". Swedish paleontologist Håkan Grudd called the changes that Allègre made in hand-redrawing a graph of his, misleading and unethical. Allègre described the petition as "useless and stupid".
Asbestos
In 1996, Allègre opposed the removal of carcinogenic asbestos from the Jussieu university campus in Paris, describing it as harmless and dismissing concerns about it as a form of "psychosis created by leftists". The campus' asbestos is deemed to have killed 22 people and caused serious health problems in 130 others.