Climate Change Expert at DCEC Summer Program

The Door County Environmental Council’s annual free summer program will be held Wednesday, Sept. 11, at 7 pm at Baileys Harbor Town Hall, featuring natural science Professor George Allan Stone, who will talk about climate change, glacial ice loss and how the Great Lakes are affected by these natural and human-caused transitions.

“The world is waiting for our leadership to return on conservation issues that were lost in the last three decades! We can’t wait for top/down inspiration, that will never happen. It has to come from the bottom/up,” says Stone, instructor of natural science at the Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC).

Stone recently returned from a three-week cruise on a former Russian spy vessel now engaged in researching the islands of Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula. During that cruise he and colleagues were able to spend time on many of the small islands to see the icebergs forming by calving as the glaciers move toward the sea, the action increased by global warming.

Stone has organized and presented sessions at several national and international conferences on climate change. In 2008, he participated in two seven-day excursions in Iceland and Norway, where he viewed the accelerating meltdown of icecaps and outlet glaciers.

Dr. Stone has led the charge in many ambitious energy initiatives at MATC, including co-chairing the annual Wisconsin Renewable Energy Summit, which drew 2,500 people last March.

His writing career began with a book called, A Legend of Wolf Song, which was about free expression in the form of a howling wolf – a combination of natural history and political fable. A second book, Blizzard, plunged him into science fiction with a cautionary tale about a weather warfare experiment gone horribly awry. Combined, the two novels were published in 20 editions in 11 countries. Stone did three national book tours and landed a contract to write four more books.

The self-described “nature freak” earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami and a doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His first teaching job was in the School of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Oklahoma, where he was a tenured associate professor and director of graduate studies. The National Science Foundation awarded him a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge. He later was a visiting investigator at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C.

Dr. Stone was offered a full-time position at MATC eight years ago, and since then he has developed several new courses, including Climate Change Fundamentals and an online class called Weather Fundamentals. He and colleagues also developed a course called Energy in Nature, Technology and Society, aimed at giving students a basic understanding of energy and how it affects the planet, the economy and their careers.