Love Snow? Climate Change Bites
By Sara Golling
The 2014 Haywood NORAM was a success largely thanks to the work of volunteers who ensured that there enough snow on the track … by shovelling it. You can watch video footage of the event, some of it shot from a drone, on YouTube.
I’m not saying we have never before had low-snow years, or late-snow years. Rossland has had green Christmases in years past. That’s not the real problem. The problem is that climate change is bringing gradually increasing average global temperatures, and rising snow-lines. If you do a little research on anyone who tries to convince us that it isn’t happening, you’ll find that they are being funded by the fossil-fuel industry to do just that — to lie to us. Or else they have been convinced by others who are funded by the fossil-fuel industry, because it’s so much easier to believe something when we want it to be true, isn’t it?
Red has been blasting snow-making machines to help build a base for training purposes, and it works wonderfully — as long as the temperature is below freezing. Of course it doesn’t work quite as wonderfully as a good dump of snow from a fat, productive cloud layer, but the artificial snow-making can provide a very useful supplement. The problem is that the ski-season days when we can rely on below-freezing temperatures for snow-making are diminishing.
Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine describes Porter Fox as a “long-time ski writer and editor” in an interview with him about his new book, “Deep: the Story of Skiing and the History of Snow“. Climate change and what it means for snow quality and quantity, and the future of skiing, is an important part of the book. I recommend reading the interview with Fox in Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine.
Today (December 22, 2014) the independent on-line publication “The Tyee” posted an article, “Peak Snow? BC Ski Resorts Brace for Warmer Era.” Find this article at http://www.thetyee.ca. It’s an interesting read.
Meanwhile, we all know how to minimize greenhouse gas emissions, right? … Hello? Hello? Are you there? I’ve lost the connection …
