Ski resorts fight global warming

Chris

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May 30, 2008
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SALT LAKE CITY — 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.

While the world's leading scientific organizations agree the debate was settled long ago, the former Realtor who took office when Jon Huntsman resigned to become U.S. ambassador to China maintains that it wasn't.

"He's said to me that the jury is out in his mind whether it's man-caused and he thinks and believes that the public jury is still out," said Herbert's environmental adviser, Democrat Ted Wilson.

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."

The Associated Press: Ski resorts fight global warming; Utah gov unsure
 
Right...After eating chicken with the last two record breaking snow seasons, these "experts" blame the Great Climatic Googly Moogly for the fact that the early season is a tad thin this time around.

BTW...Both Keystone and Loveland Basin opened earlier than "normal" this season, because unseasonably cold temps allowed them to get a head start on snowmaking.
 
Right...After eating chicken with the last two record breaking snow seasons, these "experts" blame the Great Climatic Googly Moogly for the fact that the early season is a tad thin this time around.

BTW...Both Keystone and Loveland Basin opened earlier than "normal" this season, because unseasonably cold temps allowed them to get a head start on snowmaking.

Another Flat Earther speaks!
 
BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. — Ski officials at one of the nation's most-visited resorts are calling on Congress to finish work on a climate-change bill.

Summit County officials joined representatives from the Breckenridge Ski Resort for a slopeside announcement Wednesday calling on the U.S. Senate to pass a climate change bill.

The House has voted to create a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions. The measure is still pending in the Senate.

The announcement came as Environment Colorado released a report arguing that Colorado experienced rapid growth in emissions from 1990 to 2007.

Colorado officials say global warming threatens the state's ski industry because of a pine beetle infestation and the potential for shorter ski seasons.

The Associated Press: Colo. local leaders urge action on climate change
 
Few businesses feel as threatened by global warming as the ski industry.

And few resorts are poised to go to the same lengths -- and expense -- to combat it as Kirkwood and the hardy folks who make their homes in the snowy, windswept Kirkwood Meadows near South Lake Tahoe.

According to the National Ski Areas Association, the ski season has been shrinking by about one day a year, despite dramatic improvements in snow-making. One study found that by century's end, the Sierra snowpack could be just 20 percent of what it is today, with snow falling later in the season and piling up only in the highest reaches. In the face of those predictions, resorts around the world have plunged into the fight against global warming. To cut down on their own contribution to greenhouse gases, they've built windmill turbines, invested millions in renewable energy credits and granted discounts to skiers who carpool or drive hybrids to the slopes to ski.

Self defense: Calif. ski resort takes action on global warming | McClatchy
 
lvs.jpg


ManBearPig, did you attend the ManMade Global Warming Convention in Vegas last December?
 
CHACALTAYA, Bolivia — Once home to the highest ski resort in the world and now reduced to a rocky mountainside, Bolivia's Chacaltaya range bears powerful witness to the precipitous melting of glaciers.

The rusting remains of a ski lift now dominate what was once the highest ski-run in the world perched on the Chacaltaya glacier at some 5,300 meters (17,390 feet) high.

Only a snowy ice cap of some 50 square meters (538 square feet) remains of the magnificent Chacaltaya glacier which spread over 1,600 square meters in the 1950s.

"That's all there's left: a little piece of ice that is disappearing and will last no more than a year," said Alfredo Martinez, a veteran guide and founder of the Bolivian Andean Club.

Glancing at old black and white photographs, he recalled better times for his beloved Andean glacier, when ski competitions saw Argentine and Chilean athletes make the two-hour trip from the capital La Paz on a narrow and winding road.

Martinez remembered the very last race, three years ago, on Chacaltaya's steep incline that delighted extreme sports enthusiasts.

But today, "it's a dead glacier," said Edson Ramirez, glaciologist at the Institute of Hydraulics and Hydrology in La Paz.

AFP: Warming brings early demise to Bolivian glacier
 
I guess we can say that the recent cooling trend could not affect that mountain in Bolivia; oh well.
 
Right...After eating chicken with the last two record breaking snow seasons, these "experts" blame the Great Climatic Googly Moogly for the fact that the early season is a tad thin this time around.

BTW...Both Keystone and Loveland Basin opened earlier than "normal" this season, because unseasonably cold temps allowed them to get a head start on snowmaking.

Another Flat Earther speaks!
Even a few of the ski hills in the midwest have opened almost 3 weeks early.

Yes, I'm sure reality will do it's best to make the media's hysterical predictions look good.

It's also a known fact that the ski industry is moving farther away from natural snow and towards more reliable artificial snow making. Every time the temp drops to freezing at night, they fire up the snow guns and make it because it is a more consistent quality and reliably scheduled on their terms. So whether or not mother nature cooperates in snow production or not, the snow will be on the slopes till the temperature will no longer support it.

Oh.... BTW, the snow over the last 2 years has been recordbreaking in the upper midwest through WI and MI and parts of MN. I guess we're getting that excess.
 
Again... and this is mankind's fault how? The science claiming it's man's fault is proven false. Therefore what do you expect us to do about melting glaciers? Make snow for em?

We have almost DOUBLED the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and every year we add billions of tons more.

What do I expect us to do?

Nothing.

I expect we will do absolutely nothing, until it's too late.
 

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