/ Asheville is the center of the climate data universe.
Five years ago, entrepreneur and philanthropist Mack Pearsall thought he had discovered Asheville’s path to great wealth and world acclaim. Not through its beer; not because of its natural amenities.
Rather, in this time of global climate concern, the 84-year-old descendent of a pioneering North Carolina family believed Asheville could prosper by monetizing a unique yet little-known asset: Its federal archive of climate and weather data the largest such collection among all the nations on Earth curated by a local talent bank that includes several Nobel laureates and scores of climate scientists.
BPR s Matt Bush speaks with AVL Watchdog reporter Tom Fiedler
Five years ago, entrepreneur and philanthropist Mack Pearsall thought he had discovered Asheville’s path to great wealth and world acclaim. Not through its beer; not because of its natural amenities.
Rather, in this time of global climate concern, the 84-year-old descendent of a pioneering North Carolina family believed Asheville could prosper by monetizing a unique yet little-known asset: Its federal archive of climate and weather data the largest such collection among all the nations on Earth curated by a local talent bank that includes several Nobel laureates and scores of climate scientists.
NOAA
Back in 2006, when Scott Shuford was Asheville’s planning director, he reluctantly accepted a friend’s invitation to attend a meeting about the impact of climate change on local governments.
“I didn’t see how a two-degree temperature change could affect the community,” he recalled, referring to the predicted rise in earth temperatures in years to come. “But I agreed to attend, thinking it would only be about 15 minutes.
“After about an hour-and-a-half I came out of the meeting drenched in sweat.”
All the plans he had drafted up to that day suddenly seemed to have overlooked an unsettled future fraught with unanticipated challenges. Those two degrees of temperature change meant greater threats of weather extremes of torrential rains, devastating floods, and landslides, and of their opposites, extended drought and wildfire.