Много интересна статия. Препоръчвам. Ползвайте преводач.
Аз лично не мога да взимам крайно отношение по върпоса с глобалните климатични промени, но е факт, че има сериозни опасения за бъдещето на ски спорта като култура и начин на живот. Най-вероятно всичко това ще се промени по фундаментален и критичен начин и най-вероятно ските надали ще са това, което бяха.
Rising Temperatures Threaten Fundamental Change for Ski Slopes
NEWBURY, N.H. — Helena Williams had a great day of skiing here at Mount Sunapee shortly after the resort opened at the end of November, but when she came back the next day, the temperatures had warmed and turned patches of the trails from white to brown.
“It’s worrisome for the start of the season,” said Ms. Williams, 18, a
member of the ski team at nearby Colby-Sawyer College. “The winter is
obviously having issues deciding whether it wants to be cold or warm.”
Her angst is well founded. Memories
linger of last winter, when meager snowfall and unseasonably warm
weather kept many skiers off the slopes. It was the fourth-warmest
winter on record since 1896, forcing half the nation’s ski areas to open
late and almost half to close early.
Whether this winter turns out to be warm or cold, scientists say that climate change
means the long-term outlook for skiers everywhere is bleak. The threat
of global warming hangs over almost every resort, from Sugarloaf in
Maine to Squaw Valley in California. As temperatures rise, analysts
predict that scores of the nation’s ski centers, especially those at
lower elevations and latitudes, will eventually vanish.
Under certain warming forecasts, more than half of the 103 ski resorts
in the Northeast will not be able to maintain a 100-day season by 2039,
according to a study to be published next year by Daniel Scott, director
of the Interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change at the University of
Waterloo in Ontario.
By then, no ski area in Connecticut or Massachusetts is likely to be
economically viable, Mr. Scott said. Only 7 of 18 resorts in New
Hampshire and 8 of 14 in Maine will be. New York’s 36 ski areas, most of
them in the western part of the state, will have shrunk to 9.
In the Rockies, where early conditions have also been spotty, average
winter temperatures are expected to rise as much as 7 degrees by the end
of the century. Park City, Utah, could lose all of its snowpack by
then. In Aspen, Colo., the snowpack could be confined to the top quarter
of the mountain. So far this season, several ski resorts in Colorado
have been forced to push back their opening dates.
“We need another six or eight inches to get open,” said Ross Terry, the assistant general manager of Sunlight Mountain, near Aspen, which has delayed its opening a week, until Friday.
The warming trend “spells economic devastation for a winter sports
industry deeply dependent upon predictable, heavy snowfall,” said
another report, released last week by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Protect Our Winters, an organization founded to spur action against climate change.
Between 2000 and 2010, the report said, the $10.7 billion ski and
snowboarding industry, with centers in 38 states and employing 187,000
people directly or indirectly, lost $1.07 billion in revenue when
comparing each state’s best snowfall years with its worst snowfall
years.
Even in the face of such dire long-range predictions, many in the
industry remain optimistic. Karl Stone, the marketing director for Ski
New Hampshire, a trade group, said that good winters tended to come
after bad ones — the winter of 2010-11 was one of the snowiest in recent
memory — and that a blizzard could balance out a warm spell. The basic
dynamic he lives with is unpredictability; some areas that were warm
last week have snow this week and vice versa.
“Things can change quickly, thanks to one storm, and that’s usually how
it works this time of year,” he said, noting the current on-again,
off-again snow pattern.
On a warm day last week, when the thermometer reached 51, Bruce McCloy,
director of marketing and sales here at Mount Sunapee, was generally
upbeat about the coming season, but he could not ignore the brown slopes
outside his office window.
“The real problem with a day like this is that you can’t make more
snow,” he said. “There are only so many days until Christmas, and we
need so many days at certain temperatures to get the whole mountain
done.”
Even in the Rockies, it is difficult to find enough water to make snow.
After last year’s dry winter and a parched, sweltering summer,
reservoirs are depleted, streams are low, and snowpack levels stand at
41 percent of their historical average.
At Sunlight in Colorado, the creek that supplies the pond that, in turn,
provides water for snow guns has slowed to a near-trickle.
“It’s a nice day — for September,” said Greg Ralph, the marketing
director at Monarch Mountain, which depends exclusively on natural snow.
Monarch was scheduled to open the day before Thanksgiving but has
pushed back that date to Friday.
Mr. Ralph estimated that 250 employees at Monarch have been “on hold” as
the resort languished in the unseasonable warmth.
Concerns about global warming are intensifying at a time when the
industry has seen little growth. While ski seasons have swung between
epic and terrible over the last 30 years, the number of ski visits
nationally from 1979, when the industry started keeping records, to 2011
has grown at a compounded annual rate of only 0.6 percent. Counting
2012 would put the growth rate closer to zero.
The chief reasons, according to people in the industry, are the aging of
baby boomers, long skiing’s most active enthusiasts, and the fierce
competition for time, whether from Caribbean cruises or computers.
Add something called “backyard syndrome,” in which urbanites in easy
driving range of a ski resort — say, Bostonians, who live 90 minutes
from Sunapee — are reluctant to head north unless they see snow at home.
Even when live webcams show a resort blanketed in white, Mr. McCloy
said, it is hard to move city dwellers to the mountains “until they’re
shoveling snow or they’re stuck in it.”
In response to these problems, ski areas have developed strategies to
lure people to their resorts even if the skiing is marginal. Many have
expanded into four-season destinations and offer an array of activities
that do not depend on the weather: concerts, yoga, craft fairs,
conferences, water parks and spas. Sunapee opened a new adventure park this summer with canopy ziplines, a treetop obstacle course and golf.
The most basic strategy for coping with a lack of snow is to make it,
and as of the 2009-10 season, 88 percent of resorts belonging to the National Ski Areas Association were
doing so. Improvements in snow-making technology have helped resorts
compensate for warming trends, and several have invested millions in new
energy-efficient tower guns.
“So far, the technology has kept up with climate change,” said Mr.
McCloy at Sunapee, one of those resorts that Mr. Scott in Canada
predicted would be put out of business eventually by global warming. “In
fact,” Mr. McCloy said, “it’s probably improving faster than climate
change is happening.”
That may not be the case for long. “With nighttime minimum temperatures
warming at a faster rate than daytime maximum temperatures,” the Natural
Resources Defense Council report said, “it is uncertain as to what
extent snow-making will last as an adaptation strategy.”
Where the Snow Is (or Isn’t)
Conditions at some major ski resorts on Wednesday.
Alta (Utah)
Trails: 110 of 116
Base Depth: 48 inches
Aspen (Colo.)
Trails: 51 of 170
Base Depth: 10 to 25 inches
Bretton Woods (N.H.)
Trails: 15 of 102
Base Depth: 12 to 36 inches
Jackson Hole (Wyo.)
Trails: 74 of 112
Base Depth: 48 to 67 inches
Killington (Vt.)
Trails: 34 of 141
Base Depth: 24 to 36 inches
Vail (Colo.)
Trails: 44 of 193
Base Depth: 18 inches
Stratton (Vt.)
Trails: 29 of 94
Base Depth: 12 to 22 inches
Compiled by Emma G. Fitzsimmons from resort Web sites. Conditions can change significantly from day to day.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/us/climate-change-threatens-ski-industrys-livelihood.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&smid=fb-share
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