Spanish ski resorts struggle with lack of snow

Terra Daily via AFP: Spanish ski resorts are watching business melt away as a lack of snow and unusually warm weather force them to close or operate just some of their pistes. "We have not been able to open at all this year. We are talking about the worst thing that could happen," said Agustin Ramirez, the manager of the Valdesqui resort near Madrid as he stood in front of a closed ticket booth.

The 40-year-old resort located some 60 kilometres (40 miles) from the Spanish capital has 27 pistes of different levels of difficulty that normally draw around 1,500 customers on a weekday -- and up to 3,500 on weekends. But on a recent visit its parking lot with its sweeping views of the peaks of the surrounding Madrid mountains was empty except for three staff vehicles and the pistes were covered in brown grass.

Of Spain's 32 ski resorts, eight including Valdesqui were closed for skiing on Friday due to the lack of snow and mild temperatures, according to the website of the Spanish Tourist Association of Ski and Mountain Resorts. None of the 24 resorts that were operating had all of their trails open -- and those that did operate pistes relied on expensive man-made snow to draw skiers....

Not quite fair, but this is part of the ski resort of Pradollano in Sierra Nevada, in August 2010, Andalusia, Spain. Shot by Jebulon, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Snow drought forces Colorado to face frightening new climate-change reality

David O. Williams in the Colorado Independent: Just a year after record snowfall throughout much of the Rocky Mountain West, the region is locked in a snow drought not seen since Jimmy Carter surrendered the White House to Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s.

“We have had some very unusual weather so far this season,” Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz said Friday. “For the first time in 30 years, a lack of snow has not allowed us to open the back bowls in Vail as of January 6, 2012, and, for the first time since the late 1800s, it did not snow at all in Tahoe in December.”

Vail saw eight inches of new snow on Saturday, but it still wasn’t enough to open the vast majority of the mountain. Ski industry woes aside, state water watchers and firefighters are nervously eyeing the miniscule mountain snowpack, which supplies so much of the water used by Front Range cities. As of Dec. 30, snowpack in the Colorado River basin was 44 percent of last year’s record level and just 63 percent of the annual average.

“[The drought] will make the beetle epidemic even more severe,” said state Sen. Gail Schwartz, a Snowmass Democrat who’s introducing a bill in the legislative session starting Wednesday that’s aimed at reducing the fire danger from a mountain pine bark beetle epidemic that has killed millions of acres of Colorado lodgepole pines. “What doesn’t burn down will blow down.”

But just as it lacked scientific validity to point to Vail’s record 525 inches of snowfall last season as proof that climate change is a hoax (which many conservatives gleefully did), ski industry experts say it’s wrong to totally blame the current drought (just 88 inches so far at Vail) on human-caused heating of the planet.

“You can’t take weather, which is what we’re experiencing, and make deductions about climate, which is the long-term trend,” said Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, which is suffering through an equally dry season. “But you don’t need to, really. All you need to do is look up the GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) NASA global temperature anomaly maps of the world and look at December. It’s insane, and each decade gets hotter.”...

A picture by Blakeops of the Loveland Ski Area in Colorado in a snowier season

Ski property faces meltdown as global warming chills the market

Graham Norwood in the Guardian (UK): There may be a global freeze on at the moment but Britons who own and let flats and chalets at ski resorts could face a threat to their investments – thanks to a long-term shortage of snow. Recent weeks have seen huge snowfalls in the UK, on mainland Europe and across North America, but research by Unesco's environment programme suggests long-term global warming will push the snowline up worldwide in years to come.

European ski resorts range from very low-lying ones, such as Lillehammer in Norway which is just 180 metres above sea level, to a few approaching 4,000 metres at Chamonix in the French Alps. In North America resorts are generally higher, ranging from 1,500 to 4,000 metres, especially in the most mountainous areas like Colorado.

If scientists are correct, Austria might see the most spectacular change; its snowline will rise a startling 300 metres by 2050. Sooner than that, the French Snow Research Centre says a 1.8C rise in temperature will shorten France's snow cover above 1,500 metres from 170 days to 135. Switzerland's Association of Winter Sports Resorts says its annual season has been cut by 12 days, just since 1995.

There are no authoritative figures on the international ownership of ski homes but between 2004 and 2007, around 70% of all flats and chalets sold in one large resort in the French Alps were bought by Britons, and dozens of British estate agents market ski properties in Europe and North America. Now they – and the developers behind the resorts – are trying to avoid this lucrative market being consigned to history. "Many ski towns have been trying to ensure that they're 'year round' to attract visitors in the summer as well as the winter," says Andrew Hawkins of Chesterton Humberts estate agency….

Ski resorts fight global warming; Utah gov unsure

Brock Vergakis, Associated Press: Ski resorts across the country are using the Thanksgiving weekend to jump start their winter seasons, but with every passing year comes a frightening realization: If global temperatures continue to rise, fewer and fewer resorts will be able to open for the traditional beginning of ski season. Warmer temperatures at night are making it more difficult to make snow and the snow that falls naturally is melting earlier in the spring.

In few places is this a bigger concern than the American West, where skiing is one of the most lucrative segments of the tourism industry and often the only reason many people visit cash-strapped states like Utah during winter. But even as world leaders descend on Copenhagen next month to figure out a way to reduce carbon emissions blamed in global warming, the industry is still grappling with leaders in some of their own ski-crazy states who refuse to concede that humans have any impact on climate change.

Chief among them is Republican Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, who says he will host what he calls the first "legitimate debate" about man's role in climate change in the spring.…Herbert's reluctance to acknowledge that greenhouse gases contribute to global warming quietly frustrates Utah ski resorts that depend on state marketing money, but it openly infuriates industry officials elsewhere who liken it to having a debate about whether the world is flat.

"That's just kind of raging ignorance," said Auden Schendler, executive director of sustainability for Aspen (Colo.) Skiing Co. "We're not environmentalists, we're business people. We have studied the hell out of the climate science. To have a neighboring governor not believe it ... It's absurd."

A climate study by the Aspen Global Change Institute is forecasting that if global emissions continue to rise, Aspen will warm 14 degrees by the end of this century, giving it a similar climate to that of Amarillo, Texas….

The Snowbird ski resort in Northern Utah, shot by Apollomelos