Jean-Pascal van Ypersele

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele de Strihou (born 1957) is a Belgian academic climatologist. He is a professor of Environmental Sciences at the UCLouvain (Belgium). As a previous vice-chair of the IPCC, Van Yp (as he is called by his peers) is one of the forerunners of climate change mitigation through strong decrease of fossil fuel consumption. "The debate has shifted from a scientific one 40 years ago to a very political one today, involving economic interests, geopolitics, different priorities given to environment or development, and a clash between short-term and long-term visions." (2015). Van Ypersele was born in Brussels in 1957. Astronomy was his youth passion. Aged ten, he built his first telescopes with gutter scrap and lenses that he got from opticians in Brussels. Twelve years old, he was an assiduous reader of Sky & Telescope. In 1971 he became secretary of the amateur Cercle Astronomique de Bruxelles club, which put him into contact with professional astronomists. On 30 June 1973 he was part of an international team of astronomists that travelled to Kenya to observe the longest solar eclipse of the 20th century. Master in physics at the UCLouvain Internship on climate and desertification in Nairobi at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Master thesis on the effect of CO2 on the climate As a university student, van Ypersele had an important social involvement member of Inter-Environnement, he was influenced by the concepts of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm co-founder of an Amnesty International branch in Louvain-la-Neuve member of Mouvement des Jeunes pour la Paix activist against apartheid in South Africa and right extremism organised a meeting between UCLouvain students and Claude Cheysson, European Commissioner for Development cooperation Van Ypersele carried out a PhD research in climatology. At the initiative of professor André Berger the Institut d’Astronomie et de Géophysique Georges Lemaître of the UCLouvain had started to study the impacts of changes in concentration of greenhouse gasses on the evolution of the Earth's climate.