Betting the Farm on a Drought by Seamus McGraw

Author:Seamus McGraw [McGraw, Seamus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

Notes from the Ivory Clock Tower

THERE’S SOMETHING SOOTHING ABOUT THE MEASURED, Teutonic, toymaker cadence of Dr. Klaus Keller’s voice. It’s calm but jovial. Listening to him as he holds forth in his office in the Deike Building at Pennsylvania State University, I can easily imagine him in another setting altogether, maybe a warm, candlelit, late-medieval workshop in some northern European city, all decked out in a leather apron, gigantic hand-polished magnifying glasses making his eyes look like saucers, peering down at a rough-hewn wooden tabletop, carefully molding each of a thousand intricate gears into one of those elaborate mechanical clocks that act out scenes from our collective psyche precisely on the hour from the bell tower of some grand public building.

In a way, that’s exactly what he is doing. A noted scientist in his own right, Keller is now the university’s point man on a five-year project involving thinkers from across the globe working to develop a way to fit together all the conflicting and often uncertain details that we know about the changing climate, to balance them against the vast amounts of information that we don’t know with any degree of certainty, to factor in our fears and our hopes, and in the end, hopefully, develop a system to analyze the risks we face and weigh our actions.

His job, as he sees it, is to help create an intricate mechanical system that—once set in motion—would help us identify “the least stupid” responses to the challenges presented by our changing climate. To be sure, Keller’s team is not the only group working to develop a method for evaluating the risks and responses to climate change. Similar efforts are taking place all across the world. And you can see their influence in initiatives like New York City’s $20 billion plan to armor the city against rising sea levels in the wake of the damage it sustained from Hurricane Sandy.1

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