Asheville at Center of Climate Change Research

The presence of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville will increasingly make our mountains a significant player in adapting to and dealing with global climate change.

For example, this coming Monday & Tuesday some of the heavy hitters in scientific research into global warming will be in Asheville for a conference hosted by the Data Center. Asheville is also home to 10 of the scientists awarded a Nobel Prize for their work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (some 2,000 total scientists worked with the panel and shared the prize).

The North Carolina Arboretum just outside Asheville has a new climate monitoring station, the first such installation in a national network that will chart long-term trends.

And a new communitywide group that calls itself the Hub Alliance wants to promote a new economy for Buncombe County, building on existing strengths in technology, creativity, health care and other sectors. It plans on accomplishing this not by denying the reality of climate change but by studying it as closely as possible for new models of sustainable economic development.

Ole hippy Asheville ... on the cutting edge.