Claude Allègre
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Claude Allègre | |
 |
|
| Born | March 31, 1937 Paris, France |
|---|---|
| Nationality | French |
Claude (Jean) Allègre (born 31 March 1937, Paris) is a French politician and scientist.
Contents |
[edit] Scientific work
The main scientific area of Claude Allègre is geochemistry.
Claude Allègre is officially of retirement age, but continues to perform academic work at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (Institute of Geophysics, Paris).
His important scientific work on geochemistry won him:
- the Crafoord Prize for geology in 1986, along with Gerald J. Wasserburg;
- the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London;
- the Golden Medal of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
He is a member of:
- French Academy of Sciences, elected member on 6 November 1995
- United States National Academy of Sciences (foreign associate)
In 1976, Allègre and Haroun Tazieff had an intense, public quarrel about whether inhabitants should evacuate the surroundings of the erupting volcano la Soufrière.
[edit] Political career
A 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, GMO's and stem-cell research.
[edit] Global warming and natural causes
Allègre, who is not a climatologist, thinks 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. "The cause of this climate change is unknown", he states as matter of fact. For him, there is no basis for saying, as most do, that the "science is settled."[1]
Allègre has accused proponents of anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming of being motivated by money, commenting that “the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!”[2]
20 years ago in "Clés pour la géologie", he wrote "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".
[edit] References
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
| Preceded by François Bayrou |
Minister of Education 1997-2000 |
Succeeded by Jack Lang |
