Our Overriding Challenge

George Stone, an instructor of natural science at the Milwaukee Area Technical College and longtime climate scientist, presented at the Door County Environmental Council’s program on Sept. 11 at the Baileys Harbor Town Hall.

He called it “Global Climate Change; overriding challenge of the 21st century.”

“This environmental challenge, this environmental issue is so interrelated and interconnected to the world’s economy through energy policy, it’s an extremely tough problem,” Stone said to an audience filling the Baileys Harbor Town Hall.

He started with a history of global warming science – which he said began in 1827 when Joseph Fourier explained the greenhouse effect for the first time. He moved on through the science’s history and on to the point in time he said environmentalism became partisan in the 1980s.

That’s when Stone said we stopped being global leaders on environmental issues, which now causes many developing countries to not consider the environment as they grow.

“When we do nothing, these huge developing countries… they can point to the United States as one of the major contributors to [global warming] in particular, which is a global problem, and say ‘the United States isn’t doing anything so why should we?’” Stone said.

Then, it was on to the science. Stone described the greenhouse effect – how sun rays bounce back to the Earth when they’re trapped by greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – and how the recent increase in greenhouse gasses and global temperatures is caused by humans.

Historical data points to a natural fluctuation of 180-300 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We’ve already kicked that level up to 400.

“This has nothing to do with natural cycles,” he said. “We’re doing it to ourselves and it’s happening at a rate 200 times faster than the natural rate of carbon dioxide change.”

Not slowing those emissions means changing the climate drastically, he said, which affects every other facet of human life, like water quality, agriculture, disease, political stability, the economy and natural disasters.

So now we have to deal with it – either by dramatically slowing our greenhouse gas emissions or addressing the individual effects of global warming. The time for political pandering over the issue is over.

“An informed, rational and responsible citizenry is essential to the survival of democracy,” he said. “This foundation of a free society is being undermined by a pervasive propaganda campaign to discredit scholarship and reason and to elevate uninformed opinion and partisan parroting to a level of equal validity and credibility in public discourse. The paramount imperative is that we be advocates of reason.”