The fact that precipitation in the mountain areas of the USA was increasingly arriving as rain rather than snow, because of rising temperatures, had already been confirmed by earlier studies.
The new study merely confirms the trend with even more precise and incontrovertible figures and data. Climate change has shortened the average ski season in the United States by five to seven days over the last half century. The cost to the sector has averaged 252 million dollars a year, because of lost revenue and the higher cost of making snow with artificial snow machines.
“The era of the high ski season is probably over.” That is the blunt verdict of Daniel Scott, a scientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who undertook the research with colleagues from the University of Innsbruck in Europe. “Climate change is
completely changing the business of the ski industry and the tourism sector.”
The United States too - like Europe - is in fact experiencing a series of unusually warm winters. Ski areas in the western half of the country have less than half the normal snowpack, forcing operators to chase greater snow production year after year, or simply to cut back what they offer skiers.
The result is that American skiers are “moving” further and further east. Resorts such as Hunter Mountain, in New York State and a three-hour drive from the Big Apple, which has enjoyed a fair amount of snow this winter, are therefore rising in value. Meanwhile historic winter sports regions, such as Colorado (Aspen, Beaver Creek) and Utah (Park City), are suffering more and more.
It is the media of famous Aspen itself that have raised the alarm in recent months. “Rising temperatures, shorter winters and a declining snowpack are affecting Aspen’s snow-dependent economy”, ran the headline on the site Aspenjournalism.org, recalling how the days of colossal snowfalls are now a more or less “American Graffiti” memory.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in fact, the average temperature of Pitkin County has risen at a rate of 0.4 degrees per decade since
- In 2018, the average temperature throughout the year in the county was 39.5 degrees F, that is 2.9 degrees warmer than the average over the 1950-75 reference period.
And the future scenarios are alarming. “Aspen Mountain will still be skiable in 2030 under all emissions scenarios”, says a report by climate scientists, but “by 2100 the base area of Aspen Mountain will have essentially lost a skiable snowpack”.
According to Prof. Scott’s study too, “this winter’s record temperatures have provided a preview of the future”, testing the limits of artificial snowmaking in many areas of the USA.
If 2023 was the warmest year ever recorded globally, 2024 is following close behind, with extraordinary levels of heat that set new records in January and February.
Besides the ski season, water reserves are obviously at risk, since melting snowpack feeds rivers and streams throughout the spring.
Thus ski seasons are set to shrink by between 14 and 33 days by 2050: this, according to the researchers, even in the best-case scenario, in which the world is able to cut global warming emissions drastically and develop advanced methods of making snow.
But if global emissions could not be reduced, as much as two months a year would be lost to winter sports by the middle of the century.
“The extent of this reduction”, Scott warns, “will depend on the ability of all countries to honour the emissions-reduction commitments made under the Paris climate agreement and on whether global warming can be kept below 2°C”.
If not, goodbye skiing. On both sides of the ocean.
