Why snow machines are cold comfort as the Alps warm

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/snow-climate-change-effect-on-skiing

Charlie English
Nov. 7, 2014

The hotel receptionist calls this mid-September low season the “calm before the madness”. Wandering through Davos on a biting autumn morning, “calm” feels like an understatement. The winter sports museum is closed, the ski rental shops are empty or shuttered, and in the carriages of the Parsennbahn funicular, which hums quietly up to Davos’s largest ski area, the few tourists have room to wander around.

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A month from now, however, the annual transformation of the Todalp will begin. Snow will bury the rocks and fill the hollows on the upper slopes and paint these grey-browns a fetching white. The landscape will be changed into what Thomas Mann called “the towering marble statuary of the high Alps in full snow”, in his novel The Magic Mountain. Once again, Davos-Klosters will make sense as a place where royals, presidents and the super-rich come to play. The snow won’t simply prettify the landscape, it will also increase its value: skiers will pay hundreds of pounds for a six-day lift pass, while the wealthiest winter visitors will spend several thousands to stay for a week in the town’s more expensive hotels.

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Climate change is not something many ski resorts want to talk about. Marketing executives who respond positively to my initial inquiry become elusive when the c-word is mentioned. In a multibillion dollar business where snow reputations are crucial, it is easy to see why. Grimm and Petignat are keen to point out that climate change has barely affected Davos-Klosters, one of the highest and most snow-sure resorts in the Alps. There is no question, however, that warming has begun to hit the world of winter sports, and a 2007 poll found that the industry believes artificial snow is its best defence. Capacity around the world has massively expanded since then: manmade snow production in Switzerland grew from less than 10% of piste area in 2000 to 36% in 2010, while Austria reached 62% at the end of the same period. In the north-eastern US, according to Elizabeth Burakowski, a researcher at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, around 98% of resorts now rely on artificial snow. Without it they can no longer be certain of opening during the crucial Christmas and New Year period when they earn 20% of their revenue.

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The easiest way to express the rate of decline of natural snow, he says, is in terms of altitude. Assuming a rising temperature trend of 3.5C over 100 years (the Alps are warming faster than the European average), by mid-century the snowline will have risen between 150m and 200m, and by 2100 it will have moved upwards 300m to 400m. Perennial ice in Europe then will be a rare commodity: forecasts for Switzerland show that 90% of the country’s glaciers will have disappeared by the end of the century.

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The natural variability of snow cover is also really large, so even in the past we had winters with very little snow and winters with huge amounts and we will still have that, but it will be shifted so that we will have fewer winters with lots of snow and more and more with little snow.”

Several small low-lying Swiss resorts have already become unviable, and for others it is just a matter of time. The ski areas with the best chances of surviving will be those that are highest, and Switzerland and France are better placed in that regard than Austria or Germany. Marty also warns that warming will not necessarily happen in the linear way people expect,

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There are, of course, greater reasons to lament the loss of snow than the demise of a sport, even if its roots go back at least 10,000 years. Synte Peacock of the atmospheric research centre in Boulder reels off a long list of benefits that the planet’s large expanses of snow and ice provide. Among the most significant is the albedo effect: snow reflects the sun’s radiation back into space and helps to keep the Earth cool. The reduction in global snow cover, which is particularly serious in the Arctic, is part of a dangerous positive feedback loop in which higher temperatures mean less snow, less reflected energy and therefore increasing temperatures. Scientists believe this is part of the reason why the Alps and the Arctic are warming more quickly than average.

Water storage is also a major issue: snow and snow-fed glaciers do an extraordinarily efficient job of retaining water in winter, when precipitation is plentiful, and releasing it steadily through spring and summer. Marty describes the Alps as the “water towers of Europe”, and when they are gone – even if their absence is mitigated by increased rainfall caused by a warmer atmosphere – water will likely run short and the levels of major rivers will fall.

“Some parts of the world are very dependent on glacier water storage, and if we lose the glaciers it will be a big problem,” says Peacock. “This will totally change the distribution of when water is available. As you lose your winter storage of drinking water, there are places where you’re going to have to start shipping drinking water in.

“And it’s not just about drinking water, it will change the amount of water available for irrigation for farming in a lot of areas. In parts of the world – south Asia and Switzerland, for example – glacial runoff is also used for irrigation: that will change.”

Water shortages are also likely to reduce the capacity of hydroelectric projects, and may force hundreds of millions of tonnes of shipping carried on major rivers such as the Rhine to move to road or rail.

Other knock-on effects of the snow shortage include the threat to animal and plant species that are dependent on snow, the thawing of Siberian permafrost, which will release vast quantities of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, and the melting, over a period of centuries, of the Greenland ice sheet, which contains enough water to raise global sea levels by seven metres.

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I put it to Burakowski that in view of its dependency on snow, the ski industry has woken up surprisingly late to climate change. “When you think about helicopter skiing and the amount of driving they do and the fossil fuels they use to get up and down the mountains and to make snow, it can be a bit of a conundrum,” she says.

Do they get it now? “Two out of the past two or three years in California they just didn’t have the snow, and I think for them it was a wake-up call. The more frequently it happens, the more likely you’re going to say maybe this is actually more of a trend and we’re going to start considering what to do about it.” There are, she says, a number of resorts, including Aspen, which are trying to build a new, more sustainable model of skiing.

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But a lot of people – including some who work with snow – still don’t seem to take climate change seriously. “When I speak to a lot of people about these projections, they say: ‘Why are you talking about global warming when we had a snowy winter this year?’,” says Peacock. “But one cold winter, or one heavy snowstorm, is weather, not climate. Even in the Rockies, where we’re going to lose nearly all the spring snow cover by 2100, we’re still going to have winters, or maybe consecutive winters, with huge amounts of snow because of these shorter-term patterns.

“That’s something which a lot of people, especially politicians in this country, can’t appreciate, because they have one heavy snow in Washington DC and everyone’s up in arms about how climate change must be a great hoax. People don’t seem to be able to see past what is happening on a two- or three-year timescale. The signature of climate change reveals itself on a timescale of decades to centuries, not years.”

For Marty, ski companies and skiers alike need to take more responsibility. “It’s easy for me to say, because I live in a mountain country, but for people living in Britain, if they go skiing in the Alps by plane I’m not sure if most of them are aware of what they do to the snow. If I was born there, I don’t know if I would ski or not. It’s difficult.”