> Nah, but I’d prefer if things changed at the usual pace - slow enough for species to adapt and evolve without catastrophic extinctions.
Why do you think that evolution happens like that? Extinction events are a major driver in evolution, and as far as I know, Punctuated Equilibrium Theory still has quite a bit of traction; many models (especially simulations) seem to show that this is what quite often happens.
Who the F cares how earth should look geologically.
I want earth to stay habitable for humans.
If earth wants to boil in greenhouses natural we should do everything possible to stop this natural process.
I think it's simple. Some people don't have climate change problems affect them and lack human empathy.
For them the problem is something they read about - not something real.
If they lived in one of the directly affected areas from climate change, and suffered the consequences, they'd change the tune regarding "why expect earth to look like this geologically", etc.
>The current benchmark for climate change problems is "were things different 10-15 years ago".
Only if one has their head in the sand. Historically higher temperatures year after year, massive loss of arctic ice, etc.
All of those things weren't "always changing", except if you go back to thousands to millions of years. And even then, they didn't get there with the same rate of change we have now.
Yes exactly, all evidence point to some alarming patterns.
The hottest year in recorded history, was it 7/10 were in the last 10 year.
Climate changes over hundred thousands years.
The rapid industrialization caused rapid heating in hundred years! This is a fact and trying to dispute it is akin to sticking you head in sand.
Anyhow the whole line of its natural so we should ignore it is crazy to me. Cancer is natural and yet people treat it.
It doesn't matter if global warming is, or isn't natural, or its a mix. We need to stabilize it to suit us before we go back to having total population counted in millions or so.
Sure, I get that. But my bigger point isn't so much about Alpine skiing. To say simply that people will adapt to new climates belies the loss that people experience with the destruction of their home landscapes and ecosystems. In understanding this, I find the concept of solastalgia to be useful.
From Wikipedia: "Solastalgia (/ˌsɒləˈstældʒə/) is a neologism that describes a form of mental or existential distress caused by environmental change. In many cases this is in reference to global climate change, but more localized events such as volcanic eruptions, drought or destructive mining techniques can cause solastalgia as well."
No, they will use snow canons and artificial snow as long as they can and will do everything they can to deny that this is happening. That is pretty much what you could observe there for many years.
(Though admittedly "just" convert to summer activities sounds much easier than it is. Skiing was something that was always confined to few areas, you can hike just as well in many more places.)
The temps need to be below freezing for snow making to work.
One can easily see the changes over last 20 years by looking at the ski mountains on the East Coast. The skiing season now is late January to mid-April.
Sure, if one is to spend millions of dollars it is possible. It is just not financially possible to do a multi-months season via snow delivery. It is even painful with snow guns.
No, one can now produce snow in ambient temperatures up to 25C. It gets a bit slushy, though, but when the snow heap is big enough it gets almost self sustained. It just costs a lot and is not environmentally friendly to use so much power to cool down the water in the snow cannons.
Locally they are experimenting on heat pump technology, and to use the excess heat to something useful. Then it might be more viable. Probably cannot do it in too high temperatures, but a bit above freezing should work.
Here, they have also experimented on building a gigantic heap of snow at the end of the season, and covering it so it doesn't melt too much during summer. Then it's easier to lay artificial snow on top in the fall, or the natural snow that occurs doesn't just melt when hitting the ground.
If your ambient temperature is 25C, then your ground temperature is going to be way too high. It is simply not possible to cover 4-5 mile runs with 10" base at above freezing and keep it there for 3-4 months. Even if you do, first rain is going to chew through your base, not to mention the totally regular damage from skiers and snowboarders.
Ground temp might not be that high if you're just talking about daily swings, which is how things have been going here in the east. Brutal cold followed by swings well above zero and rain.
So, no climate skepticism here, but I'll push back on the idea that (to date) things have changed that drastically on the East Coast (USA). East Coast skiing has always been a pretty marginal operation, especially when we aren't talking the most northern/high elevation places.
There were numerous years in the pre-snowmaking era where large numbers of East Coast ski areas barely operated.
Repeated bad years for natural snow in the late 70s/early 80s drove a ton of smaller places into closing down.
And there's all kinds of old pictures of the crazy things attempted to save snow before they could make it. Fences to try to catch it from blowing into the woods, giant vacuums to try to get it from the woods and put it on the trails, etc. Whole crews out in summer picking up every small rock and stump so they could open trails with as few inches of snow as possible.
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And back then, conditions were expected to be poor a lot of the time. Skiers today expect wall to wall snow on the runs and a large portion of them to be open just about every day during the main season.
I was going to say exactly this but have to admit being put off by the potential for downvotes.
Hell, I grew up in central Alberta, 1970s and 80s. Latitude 53. Winter time temperatures drop to the -30C range all the time. And yet even there you could not rely on consistent snow cover at the little hills around. Many Christmases well above zero with the lake unfrozen followed by a January of -25C.
Back then the little hills around there were also all closing because people were now able to drive or fly further and go to Jasper and Banff etc. to ski instead of hitting their local hills. And I also remember many days skiing on solid ice in Jasper, which is pretty damned cold, high elevation.
Most of North America is a continental climate. It has always been highly variable. It is getting more so.
Climate change is real and is impacting this industry, but I feel like the really bad effects are still coming. But even when it comes it's not like the winters will be universally _warm_ -- they will be highly volatile, with intense blizzards one day followed by rain later. That's the pattern this year already.
I'm off to Revelstoke to ski in a week and a half. Absolute craploads of snow there this year, while here in the east it has been awful. But last year it wasn't that great out there but was pretty good in the east, considering.
But I don't expect to be seeing ski areas becoming generally untenable operations in the Eastern US until many decades in the future, other than maybe some of the southernmost areas (there's ski areas as far south as Alabama).
Average conditions may be more variable and resorts will have to push even harder in snowmaking windows.
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On the other hand though, there's quite a bit of technological advancement still coming down the pipe on the snowmaking side. In some respects, Eastern US conditions are (for now) arguably improved from what they used to be for many as a result.
The massive automation coming to the industry is making it possible to make a lot more snow and take advantage of small weather windows, and the efficiency improvements have made the energy costs a lot less prohibitive to use extensively (and less environmentally problematic).
It's not necessarily denial, just trying to continue their business model. I use air conditioning to keep working when it's hot, doesn't mean I'm pretending it's cool.
While I would love to see more bike parks, I think most mountain resorts would shutter if these were the only activities bringing in revenue throughout the year.
Those activities don't make nearly as much money as skiing. There are a whole lot of places that are great for mountain biking and hiking, but very few locations with the elevation and precipitation required to support a good ski resort.
Somewhat paradoxically, climate change could make some areas of the Rockies and Sierras more snowy. But depletion of snow in other areas would cause the areas with snow to become even more expensive -- and they're already pretty exclusive today.
> Already, the summer generates 60% of the tourism intake, according to Garmisch Mayor Sigrid Meierhofer.
Indeed, hiking doesnt require you to spend moneys on rental equipment. It's a bit different for mountain biking - most of the time you need lift passes to enjoy the mountain. And with the explosion of electric bikes rentals in the last years, and there are lots of growth opportunities for generating revenue there as well.
And it's not only about hiking/biking, of course.
Of course, having more places to ski is better than having less places - my main concern is people and their jobs, and not specific resort activities per se.
Mountain biking is already on a huge uptick across the world, convenient timing I guess. As an avid rider, to use the terminology, I'm super stoked. We didn't previously have "bike parks" in Australia, but now we have a bunch. With a few lift access bike parks being developed on the ski resorts.
However, a fairly bitter pill to swallow this year was some parks I was looking forward to riding being caught in the Australian bushfires. One was a local park, and I look forward to helping rebuild it once it's safe.
It's a scary prospect for that to become the norm. Nature is dear to me. Being able to go riding in the forest is a pillar of my health, mental and physical. I have consistently been unable to ride this summer due to heatwaves and bushfire smoke. Occasionally I would make poor judgement, and leave to ride when it was clear only to be smoked out on the trails an hour later, from fires hundreds of kilometers away.
Currently in Slovenia (high ski season) there are several low altitude resorts that still have their bike trails open instead of having a ski run on the same piste. They can't even produce artificial snow because temperatures are so high.
They are already trying that, with various success. So summer as income is +- covered these days and can improve only by little, but almost nobody ain't gonna hike or bike in winter through former ski resort area, with +5/+10 degrees Celzius.
Skiing is simply more unique/exquisite experience, more people are willing to spend more. It also often requires less effort, if one is not so fit. Plenty of folks ride down 2 times in the morning, park with beer/wine on the sun, eat, do 1-2 runs and call it a day and go to apres bar. For whole week.
I am a bit skeptical about this 'reinventing' of ski resorts into something new. I look at Chamonix in France, for somebody like me the best mountain place in Europe, maybe even globally. Beautiful hiking, trail running, climbing, world class (or easy) alpinism available quickly, skiing, ski touring, paraglide, bikes and so on and on. The best season for non-winter activities is actually early autumn, September-October - better temperatures than summer, nature is stunningly beautiful, good stable weather.
But almost nobody comes in autumn. Why? Because kids don't have holidays and are back to school. This is the bulk of visitors in mountains, anytime. So summer season for tourism lasts 2-2.5 months. Winter one, still is more like 4 months.
On the other hand Ski Touring is on the rise at least for now. Due to the high prices of ski resort tickets and bad snow conditions many (like myself) started to pick it up. It's the healthier and environmentally friendly version of alpine skiing. As many lower altitude resorts are turning off their cable cars the slopes are invaded by beginner and fitness oriented ski tourers. They are perfect for those because there is no danger of avalanches and no mountain experience is required and they are satisfied with less snow than alpine skiers. Some ghost ski resorts have started to have high parking ticket prices now to at least get some revenue out of it.
> Due to the high prices of ski resort tickets and bad snow conditions many (like myself) started to pick it up.
If anything, ski touring is often more expensive (gear wise, might save on the ski pass if not starting from the top of a lift). It also has a bigger dependency on snow quality if one want a fun ski experience and isn't mainly in it for the touring part.
That does not have to be true. You can get a decent set for 500-600 EUR. And if you use ghost slopes of ski resorts you are actually not that depended on snow like alpine skiers. In my area many ski lifts are not open for business because the slopes are not in perfect shape but that does not stop any ski tourers to go there and enjoy the just decent conditions which are perfectly fine for one or two runs.
I wouldn't call it healthier due to the risk of avalanches and in my experience it's not negligible. It requires some complex skills of being able to both judge the terrain and act fast if something happens. And even then, accidents happen. How many people die annually on the slopes of ski resorts and how many die in avalanches while skiing?
Well, in this case, your decisions define "healthier". In fact, it's up to you whether you study the daily snow bulletin and decide to ski in moderate avalanche danger. It's up to you whether you ski down the steepest descents.
However when skiing in a resort, others can bump into you by accident. Your muscles cool down while sitting on the chair lift, and get tired at the end of the day without really noticing it, which leads to a number of accidents.
I've torn my ACL in a resort couple of years ago, and ski touring feels much safer - at least for me.
Avalanche training and equipment is necessary. The skills aren't really that complex, there are a few rules to follow that will save your life. I can't prove it but I believe most of the avalanche deaths are people with zero training who don't take the situation seriously. You can learn all the necessary skills in a single afternoon.
You can learn the (basic) skills in an afternoon, but being able to use those skills calmly, quickly, and safely in an emergency situation is a whole 'nother ball game. That requires practice, practice, and more practice (at least for me).
I love ski touring and prefer it to skiing these days, but man equipment is expensive. I don't mean high tech, I mean any. And basic stuff is super heavy, not exactly motivating for beginners. Renting it creeps up the price towards paying for ski resort ticket. Used stuff is well... used, with benefits and drawbacks like anything else. You need to be at least an OK powder skier before starting it.
Its simply a different sport. It can be done in similar place, but I prefer proper wilderness whenever possible. And yes, risk of dying in avalanche is non-0 in most places.
> It's the healthier and environmentally friendly version of alpine skiing.
I used to think that too, but recently I'm softening to the argument that a given number of vacationers on even the nastiest bulldozed runs has much less regional impact than if the same number of users would go touring instead, everyone spreading out to seek their own patch of untouched nature.
Of course in terms of global impact (energy use per person) touring is nonetheless much better.
Ski touring is actually something I gave up a few years ago since snow is basically non-existent where I live. That was profoundly different 10-15 years ago.
I do alpine skiing every year but I have no illusion that the tourism severely hurts the environment, although there are a lot of other detrimental factors besides CO2 output.
I mostly ski in regions where your place lies around 2000m and snow is guaranteed. But even this far up you see more and more snow cannons deployed. They also create huge reservoirs with artificial snow to extend the skiing season. Huge waste of energy and skiing on artificial snow is awful, but it probably is financially viable.
We have almost no snow around Oslo at the moment, which is quite rare. There are talks about canceling some upcoming ski competitions because it doesn't make sense to use snow canon when temperatures are positive (ºC).
Meanwhile, a company just opened a small ski resort indoors (a bit like in Dubai) 10~15 minutes by car from the city center: https://snooslo.no. The goal is to have it open and at -4ºC all year long. This is so backwards :(
For some unpredictable value of “pretty liberal” perhaps?
For instance, sex out of wedlock or cohabitation are illegal, including for tourists.
”If you holiday in the emirate unmarried and you come to the attention of the authorities ... if it’s then discovered you’re sharing a room and a bed you can be jailed and then deported.”
Oslo, too? Damn, tried skiing last week in Germisch-Partenkirchen. No luck, Khandhar was more green then white, +2 Celsius in the shadows at 9 in the morning. Not the first time, but the first time I had that in January.
Mentally said goodbye to day trips, I'm simply living too far from the Alps now it seems. Going back to my youth in 80s and 90s, I remember skiing from late November all the way to, say, March. At resorts that closed over a decade ago due to a lack of snow.
It is. It is super ominous. Scientists have been doing their best to warn the general public for decades. Sometimes I wish there were an afterlife so the people knowingly preventing action would have some sort of consequence. So many people will preventably die in the coming years and decades, and we will have destroyed the planet for centuries everyone who is left. I think people generally don't appreciate how much worse the climate will get even if every person instantaneously disappeared and all anthropogenic CO2 emissions stopped.
Alpine Skiing? Of all the things Climate Change will affect, that's the last thing we'll miss.
I mean, we're talking of millions (billions potentially in the future) people out of their homes, horrible droughts, famines, fires, weather phenomena, animals extinct, etc, so skiing is the last thing to concern with...
Don't be flippant. As someone growing up in the mountains, the ski resort is the one thing keeping the wheels turning. Loosing it will actually quite literally mean forcing us out of our homes.
>As someone growing up in the mountains, the ski resort is the one thing keeping the wheels turning. Loosing it will actually quite literally mean forcing us out of our homes.
Of course there would be negative consequences for mountain villages and such. But ski tourist industry decline is not the biggest tragedy. These people are indeed forced to leave their Alps village but they can still go get some job in the city in a first world country. That's versus millions of third world immigrants or dying kids in Africa/Asia due to droughts/climate change developments for example...
Poor people losing their homes, livelihood and lives won't move people to revisit their life style choices, though. Not being able to go on a skiing vacation just might.
It always makes me sad to see realistic comments like these downvoted on HN by the out of touch 1%. Does a leisure activity enjoyed and easily substitutes by an exceedingly small minority of people really hold anything against the other devastating effects of climate change?
The "arsonists" were just people that left campfires burning; I think the fire ministers have stated that a larger portion of the fires were started by lightning strikes.
The majority were either natural starts (lightning) or accidental (unsupervised campfires and I think one was due to a tossed lit cigarette) however after the fires had been burning for a while there were a few cases of arson because some people just like to see the world burn.
Regardless of which fires were started by what cause however, the fires burn extremely hot and spread fast as a result of conditions caused by climate change. This turns something as simple as a tossed cigarette into a meaningful fire hazard and turns a normal fire into one that spreads aggressively enough to render it nearly impossible to stop with a large amount of manpower. That makes them actually impossible when they are burning all over the country and the mostly unpaid volunteer fire fighting force is spread thin dealing with them.
That's the thing I've taken away from all of this, climate change doesn't necessarily increase the number of incidents to unreasonable levels (the rate goes up but not to apocalyptic levels), instead it takes otherwise minor or normal incidents and sets the conditions to allow them to escalate in increasing severity.
How do we know we can attribute the fires to climate change?
It seems like every natural disaster gets attributed to climate change, since 'climate change is happening', and, in turn, all these natural disasters are given as evidence that 'climate change is happening'.
Hotter weather dries out vegetation making fires worse. That overall hotter weather is the result of climate change. It's not circular, nor is it that hard to understand.
No. There were hundreds of individual fires across the country, as the entire continent saw unprecedentedly dry weather conditions. It wouldn't matter whether it were lit by lightning, a utility pole or a match, the fact was that the forests and air were unprecedentedly dry and the fires became quickly impossible to control and spread quickly.
I agree with you, but it's amazing how people can still not think about things.
I fondly remember the old (apocryphal) story about how you can pop frogs in a pot of water, and if you increase the heat slowly enough, they'll stay in it until they boil to death. "Silly frogs" we all thought. Yet, here we are.
I don’t understand why people repeat a story they know is false as if it still somehow contained wisdom. If anything the reality suggests the opposite where people will eventually react if a room slowly gets warmer over time etc.
> our morning coffee will motivate us to action better than some civil war in Syria
You bet. Also because civil war in Syria has nothing to do with climate change and all to do with politics. But people are too busy worrying about the future to care about the present.
Yes, the conflicts around the middle east started because people couldn't afford bread. The reason is failed grain harvests pushed up the cost of wheat. Something that's easy to miss if you live in the rich part of the world.
Please. The conflicts in the ME have been going on for decades or centuries, but if we want to find proximal causes these are Israel's military occupation, US's support of Israel and ME dictators and US interventionism, with the obvious case of a 2003 destruction of a state on false pretexts.
I can't tell if this is parody or not. Of course they're not related. The "civil war in Syria" is a regional power proxy war and has nothing to do with climate or "the price of bread."
Of course conflict has many causes, the corruption and long standing sectarian rifts are clearly foremost on the list but there’s a plausible case that a portion of the blame for the war is due to climate related impacts:
> The authors acknowledge that many factors led to Syria's uprising, including corrupt leadership, inequality, massive population growth, and the government's inability to curb human suffering.
> But their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compiled statistics showing that water shortages in the Fertile Crescent in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey killed livestock, drove up food prices, sickened children, and forced 1.5 million rural residents to the outskirts of Syria's jam-packed cities—just as that country was exploding with immigrants from the Iraq war.
> ... there’s a plausible case that a portion of the blame for the war is due to climate related ...
No, there really isn't, and if PNAS is making such claims, they should be derided. The authors should also be closely examined for why they might be making such preposterous claims; they may belong to governments or groups which ... actually caused the conflict in Syria.
Such assertions are transparent propaganda which should be laughed to scorn by any numerate person.
Agreed, and yet here we are. People flood the streets to campaign against climate change and when a deranged president in the White House brings the world on the edge of a new major war everybody keep their mouths shut.
Most of the climate change discourse is nothing but a huge distraction from the real issues of the world.
Climate change affects everyone and has a straight forward fix (elect people who care). Raising awareness is, in effect, all that is necessary from the people. Syria is far more complicated and most people don't even know who the main factions are, or who is fighting them. Or how to stop it. Or why it started. Etc.
How can you be so simplistic? CO2 is a byproduct of basically everything we do. We can change that but it's not at all straightforward, quick or painless.
> Syria is far more complicated
Of climate science? Come on... Climate change seems to be the only issue that has any activism left: and it sure the powerful think it's a great outlet for people's desire for change. One huge issue that explains everything that is going badly in the world, while being so far removed from actual events and the responsibilities involved as to leave political actors entirely free- except from getting a bit of flak from a sixteen year old now and then.
> there’s a plausible case that a portion of the blame for the war is due to climate related impacts:
There's a "plausible case" that many deaths of frail elderly people are caused by common ailments such as cold or flu. So what do you think is killing people, the fact of being extremely old and frail or the flu?
We're trying to reduce everything to a single common cause, vague and global, when there are precise responsibilities and much more direct actions we could take. We're all with Greta Thunberg when she campaigns about the future risks of climate change, and when the US (with the silent complicity of the EU) brought the world on the brink of a new major ME war, with the potential for millions of deaths, nobody said a damn thing. I find it disgusting.
The connection between conflict in Syria and fossil fuels is that USA/Saud wanted to build pipelines across Syria, and Syria's sovereign government didn't want to build those pipelines. That's why USA created ISIS and gave it lots of arms and ammunition. Recently, we assassinated one of the guys who saved Syria from ISIS.
Will morning coffee do it though? There is enough coffee reserve that the rich/powerful who make decisions will still get coffee, whereas the Dunkin and Starbucks crowds would just be more angry, regular people without the power to change more than 5% via personal action...energy transition HAS to come from leaders, not from the people.
For better or worse, the bushfires in Australia have certainly put the effects of climate change to the forefront of people's minds. Whether or not it's directly related to climate change is almost a non-issue, the fact is that it represents what is likely to come, and is a real world demonstration of the displacing power of these changes.
I only worry once summer is over, they'll forget, and when it really matters we'll be complacent again and elect the wrong people.
Last thing I read was there have been around 150 people arrested since November for starting the fires in Australia... whether or not they were coordinated has not been revealed.
This is intentional misinformation designed to elicit this exact response. Right wing blogs are taking the stats from NSWs police force who caution people for things like discarding cigarettes and having small fires on their properties and heavily implying there’s some leftist arson campaign that is responsible. It’s laughably implausible.
The spread of the information on Facebook causes the most damage I think. People who would never get involved in these lines of thought previously are now rabid supporters for accusations like the Bureau of Meteorology doctoring the numbers, an arsonist campaign, and my personal favourite, the Greens stopping backburning being the cause. (Greens are in favor backburning, but are also in an incredibly low power position and couldn't enact any policy in that regard anyway)
You read false claims then. The original statistic was 'police-related actions'[0]. This includes things like cautions or fines for throwing a cigarette on the ground (and many other things). 24 people have been arrested for arson. They think the majority of the fires were started by dry lightning.
There is a large amount of misinformation floating around circulated by bots and trolls[1].
This is false. Even if it wasn't false, it wasn't what started the fires that was uncharacteristic. The nature of the spread and intensity of the fires is what was so devastating.
We have a bushfire season every year, but we were not able to control these fires. We're seasoned at this, yet it was not good enough.
Coffee might move the needle, although I'm sure the big chains (Starbucks, McDonalds, Dunkin, Tims) would quickly move to some ersatz blend of roasted plants and lab synthesized caffeine. If they transition the formula slowly enough, lots of us may not even notice.
As an aside, I'm not 100% sure this isn't already happening with Tim Horton's.
End-user / consumer behaviour changes will have only a fractional impact on climate change; what is necessary is for large scale policy changes.
Which by the way are already happening; all over the world, governments are slowly adjusting emission rights, energy companies are transitioning to renewables and closing coal plants, car companies are required to only sell low emissions cars, and billions of trees are being planted all over the world.
It's already happening at a huge scale but all you're thinking of is small changes that you yourself could reasonably do that, in the end, have a negligible impact on a global challenge.
Problem is, renewables are pretty much a scam. Look at pie charts that show how much energy comes from windmills/ sun parks. We need something more powerful like nuclear power-plants.
Personally, I hold the same view of climate change that I've had as long as I've been aware of it.
Humanity isn't yet advanced enough socially and in collective maturity to take the necessary actions to stop climate change.
We're still part animal, part sentient, and we don't know where that line lies, much less control which side we're on all the time.
All we can do is understand what the impact of climate change will be and plan to survive if we can find a way to do so.
Within the next century we are definitely going to have:
* Massive numbers of displaced people due to rising seas, excessive heat, lack of water, lack of food. The bulk of these people will die.
* Existing countries that do not or can not take steps necessary to safeguard their population sufficiently to maintain their economy, military strength, and the logistics that support it are going to undergo major changes, possibly including dissolution or massive shrinking of borders.
* The wealthy of the world will not lack anything, be it food, water, housing, cooling, military protection, etc. The weakening of governments across the world will allow these people more power and freedom than ever before. We may enter a new age of kings by other titles.
The world at the end of the next century is going to be vastly different from the present world. Humanity will survive, but that's setting the bar low. Many humans will die, many ideals will die, and we may not learn anything from all of it. In other words, humanity will be the same as it's been through all of recorded history.
It's already happening in other places. Skiiing in Upstate NY and Vermont is a joke. In the early 90s, it wasn't the best ski experience, but it was there. The Ski club in my school had about 40% of the class in it.
Coffee would work the same way. We already have different strata of coffee. If supply tightens up, 80% of the market would turn into ersatz coffee with added caffeine, and whatever still was being produces would become a bigger luxury item.
I never thought I would see it, but that’s what has also happened here in Michigan. The smaller ski areas closed down a few years ago and now even some of the larger resorts, that cater to the more affluent, are struggling to stay open. The winter’s here now seem so strange and disquieting from what I experienced as a child.
It isn't just climate change. Skiing has become less popular. Places are closing down because of a demographic change. New ski areas not being built, existing ones closing down. Mostly, anyways. There's a bit of an exception to that in B.C.
Cheap flights also mean that people don't bother with their local ski areas in the midwest -- they fly west for luxury vacations instead.
It does seem though that skiing might be having a fairly recent resurgence.
Agreed. My stepfather used to work at one of these ski areas and the sporadic opening and closures, before the snow just disappeared altogether, drove away business.
This is why people are travelling more to ski (ironically, making the snow worse). It’s insurance for your holiday. Now people aren’t looking for just nice snow, we’re hunting higher elevations as we know it’s colder.
I actually probably wouldn’t bother with a < 1400m Ski resort anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere this year.
Does that have to do more with the popularity of skiing?
The resorts in Colorado get big dumps and then two days later the places are totally skied off with the same "icy moguls." It's because so many people ski powder days. It doesn't take long for the snow quality to degrade, even on a powder day.
Demographic change was kids switching to snowboards from skis, climate change is chasing everybody from the hills.
Less days of skiing makes skiing less "fun" as a hobby; your free weekends need to correspond with the remaining good ski days. Can't ski too many times and you stop getting your skis or boards waxed and sharpened, stop buying new gear and you just stop going.
$100+ lift tickets are killing alpine skiiing. While in college in southern New England, we'd pile a few dudes in a car, drive up to Vermont/NH/Maine at 5am, get there when the lifts open, ski until they close, and drive back home.
Lift ticket prices have become crazy expensive, and every ski area wants to become a resort destination: the messaging here is that you have to be wealthy to be able to ski.
As a result, a lot fewer young people are going to take up skiing- fewer people getting into the pipeline.
What's happened is consolidation with Vail and Alterra buying up many of the most popular areas -- and with it affordable mega-passes (Ikon, Epic) have made it possible to ski at very expensive places for a very low per-day cost -- but only if you are dedicated and can ski more than 10-15 days a year.
And the flip side of that is that per-day lift ticket prices are very high, to milk the casual skier and the luxury-seeking 1%ers who can afford to spent $250 (lift ticket+ rentals+snacks) on a single day at Stowe or Vail or Whistler.
At this point you basically have to either buy one of the mega passes, or seek out the smaller family owned resorts that still charge reasonable prices.
Look into the Indy Pass, it's an affordable pass that gets you 2 days at a bunch independent smaller ski areas.
Freedom Pass (http://freedompass.ski) is another option similar to Indy Pass, which may be better depending on where you live in the US. In the northeast, the Dartmouth Skiway and Magic Mountain are both on it, and are two of my absolute favorite "hidden" places (I have more fun skiing them than most of the mid-size places on Ikon or Epic).
What? Cypress is like $300 for a season pass and it's easily the best local hill. If you want to go to a worse hill, $99 3SKI at Seymour gets you 3 days of lift + 3 days of rentals (anytime in the same season).
If you consider that expensive you moved to the wrong neighbourhood.
I think the problem is many people don't want to commit to season's passes, and at this point that is the only way to make skiing economical. Sucks for people who only get out 3 or 4 times a year.
If I lived Van I'd totally ski Cypress, though. :-)
A lot of ski mountains offer deep discounts if you buy tickets online a few days in advance, rather than at the window the day of, I guess on the theory that they’d rather have sure money than you deciding at the last minute not to go. I’m back in NH visiting family and yesterday I snowboarded at Ragged for $35 by buying my pass on Monday.
Also a season’s pass at Ragged is $249 too, which is an insane deal. There are still smaller mountains in New England that aren’t trying to be mega-resorts where prices are good.
Many towns in VT and NH still have public/non-profit ski hills that are even cheaper. Especially for people who are new to skiing, these are fantastic deals (many also have cheap lessons, and there's no reason to pay big-mountain prices to spend all day on the beginner slope).
I learned to ski here as a kid: http://www.vtsnowsports.org ($75 season pass, $200 for a family).
Down the road from me now (lift currently closed for a mechanical issue, will hopefully re-open this weekend): https://skistorrshill.com ($160 season pass, $270 for a family). There's a bunch of gems like these scattered throughout New England if you look. And, since they're in "normal" towns, there's plentiful cheap lodging and plenty of other stuff to do. You're not isolated at a resort.
Cross-country and back-country skiing are even better options for the budget-minded, and almost limitless in where you can go. Ski-skate sales are full of cheap gear every fall, so the cost to get started is almost nothing.
Unfortunately it's what the market will bear. Of course college kids can't out-compete the hordes of DINKs from the Boston area who decide last minute that this will be a good skiing weekend.
As other commenters have mentioned there are still reasonable prices to be had but you have to go find them. The days of just showing up on a whim and getting a fair price are over (this applies to a lot of things, not just skiing).
>the messaging here is that you have to be wealthy to be able to ski.
It's recreational activity you have to travel to and requires a lot of gear and a somewhat prepared area to do it. That sets a pretty high wealth floor no matter what.
You might be right that prices not related to climate change will kill the industry but if that doesn't happen climate change will increase prices (a mountain that's open for fewer months has to charge more to cover fixed costs) until the same effect is achieved.
Skiing has never been cheaper for the people that actually use the passes. Last year I skied ~40 days, at 8 different resorts in 3 states, for a total of $650.
Of course if I were flying in for a 4 day trip once a year vs living near the resorts, I’d be singing a different story.
We are off to the 3 Valleys in a couple of weeks and the full area lift pass for 6 days is ~300 Euros - which given the vast size of the area and quality of the lifts is actually not too bad.
Certainly better value than the £35 a day you can pay here in Scotland on the rare days where we have snow and no wind!
[€183 for 6 days at Nevis Range, ~€300 for the same in the 3 Valleys....]
I agree. The comment I was responding to said they had to raise prices to combat overcrowding. I was specific in saying that if that were truly their goal, there are other ways to achieve it, and that there are other reasons to raise prices. No need to use over crowding as an excuse.
In the U.S., much of the land where ski areas could exist is owned by the government, typically National Forest or BLM. Some ski areas actually lease the land from the government, which puts constraints on operating hours and overall length of the allowed ski season.
The prospect of the government ever selling the protected wilderness to private companies is often met with public outcry.
Personally, I think the Ikon Pass is a fantastic deal and skiing is more accessible and affordable than it has ever been in my ~25 years of hitting the slopes.
Every week you would hear "it's too expensive, what about the youths?!"
Every week you'd also hear "overcrowding is killing alpine skiing, why are the lines so long, why do we allow so many people?!"
I've never related too much with the people who, upon witnessing the high season hordes as the park operates at 100% capacity, conclude "yes, it's cheaper entry that will fix our problems."
This is why my partner and I have taken up XC skiing in our area vs downhill. We can pay something like $35 a year when we register our vehicle, and we then have unfettered access to the State's national parks, which contain a lot of ski trails in winter.
$35 to have us both access 25+ trails within 2 hour drive, or pay $250 per person for a season pass at the local ski mountain.
Wasn't a tough decision, and I was surprised how many hills there are in XC ski. I thought I would be bored switching over but I really am not!
Austria has gotten more expensive since I moved over here 15 years ago, but is still far cheaper than New England - the big areas are about 55 EUR/day this season, with discounts not really kicking in until you buy 4-5 days.
Given what’s happening to the ski seasons in the Alps, I’m not sure if teaching a kid how to ski today is kindness or cruelty. I’m pretty sure there will still be some decent skiing until I’m ready to hang up my boots (I’m about 40), but my 10 year old niece? Her kids?
> To make up for a lack of natural snowfall, resorts switch on the cannons, although they’re energy intensive
And thus only adding to the climate change problem.
Everyone is or will suffer from climate change, but if even the ones currently suffering don't want to make the changes needed to divert the problem how do we expect people that don't feel the pain yet to change?
And no, things like driving a low milage or electric car is not a change that solves the problem, not driver, or driving less is.
That's why I'm pessimistic this problem will ever get solved in time. Since in order to really solve it (compared to avoiding it for a few generations more) we collectively need to agree that we can't keep on living this way and with so many any longer. Which is just not in our (ironically) evolutionary biological nature as a competitive species.
It's not though. The tech has to capture almost a century of output from the fossil fuel lobbyists damage as well as prevent any new emissions at the same time.
So much damage has already been done by fossil fuels, and unfortunately there is just so much left in the ground which hasn't been exploited yet solely due to politics. Russia wants to extract the fossil fuels in the Arctic which potentially holds vast reserves, the only thing preventing it is the idea that pissing off all the NATO allies surrounding the Arctic is not a good move.
Norway is a very oil rich country and a lot of its welfare is due to the oil, if the profitability of its current reserves wasn't enough, the only thing stopping Norway from extracting its own reserves further north would be domestic, political backlash.
We need to be very vigilant politically because in a purely short term, economic point of view fossil fuels still very much makes sense.
Nearly 70% of Americans wouldn't pay $10/mo more to help fight climate change. [1] This is clearly at odds with what experts are claiming is necessary to meaningfully impact climate change.
Renewable energy is not an infinite resource. It will take eons for us to exhaust the sun's energy with solar panels. But long before that time we will have exhausted our supply of ground minerals that make these panels. You can also only have so many hydra dam installations.
So even if they where using 100% renewable energy. They are 'stealing' that clean energy away from others. So grey energy will still be used to fulfill that demand.
Most of them dont care where the energy comes from. All they care is to keep the stream of tourists. I know, I live in a skiing country which is about to face the end of this era. Nobody from the tourism industry is willing to accept the facts, all they do is pretend it can be handled with artificial snow.
"Most of them", you've done a global survey then, have you? Ski resorts here in Colorado very much care and advertise about their renewable energy usage.
> “If greenhouse-gas emissions continue at the same level, snow will almost disappear at lower levels by the end of the century,”
A common misconception is that if we reduced our emissions, things would get better. The reality is that a particle of CO2 that is emitted today will statistically be there for 10,000 years before disappearing. Once out there it's going to work against us for this whole period. If we reduced our emissions, things won't get better, they will get a little bit less catastrophic and we will have a little bit more time. What we have emitted so far is in the air and it's too late.
Yes, reducing our emissions isn't going to make things "better". It is prevening things getting worse, even catastrophically so. So far, we have not suffered very much from the warming, the bad things are just starting to become visible.
Downvoters, use your fucking brains for once. Look at the world. The majority of people are uneducated and lack critical thinking.
Furthermore, people pay taxes so things get better, no one pays taxes so things don't get worse.
Britain lost billions in lost growth because of Brexit, the majority does not believe that because nothing has changed.
Ask anyone on the street, they believe climate change action means things will improve. They would be extremely surprised to learn it will only slow down the catastrophic results.
Tell me how I am wrong, then downvote. Otherwise you're just a пидор.
I think there would be less mistrust if the environmentalism weren't bundled in all kinds of other radical causes, the more extreme aspects of which are often alienating to the average person. For example, extreme environmentalists are often also extremely pro-immigration; they are utterly conservative in terms of the environment, yet utterly liberal to the point of contemptuous indifference to any societal or cultural damage that might occur as a consequence of unrestricted immigration. People aren't stupid and can sniff these kinds of inconsistencies out.
To elaborate on this point, because you’re being heavily downvoted...
My biggest problem with people being concerned about climate change and at the same time being pro-third world -> first world immigration is that you’re instantly lifting those people’s carbon footprint, dramatically. Isn’t that like, bad? At least as bad as first worlders having children, if not more so? It’s hard for me to take these people seriously when one policy actively works against the other.
> I think there would be less mistrust if the environmentalism weren't bundled in all kinds of other radical causes
Don't know why you're being downvoted but you're spot on with this point. The most off-putting radical cause is people trying to use climate change to push socialism on society.
When the problem comes bundled with a non-negotiable solution, it's reasonable to be skeptical of the messenger.
I'm aware there's climate change denial, but amongst those not wilfully ignorant, I would've presumed the fact that we're now working to slow the rate of change is a well-accepted best-case.
Among those who don’t deny it are a bunch who don’t believe there’s anything we can do (or have done) to change the pace in either direction, there’s just too many unknowns. When it comes to legislation, few are going to tolerate forced lifestyle cramping on something that ranges from “no way of knowing” to “overconfidence in our ability to know”.
I'm obviously using anecdotal evidence, but most of the time I see the issue discussed the people who do believe in climate change don't understand the scale of the thing, don't think the situation is that bad and believe that we will just find a technological way (which, at this point, is more magical than anything) to reduce emissions without impacting our overall comfort and way of life, and without massive climate catastrophes and humanitarian crises
This assumes that even if we stopped all emissions today, things will be fine. Like there's some sort of Pause button. Things won't be fine: if we stopped everything today, we'd reach the +2°C at the end of the century. Things are going to get worse even if we stop emitting.
> Even with afforestation we won't be able to plant enough trees to fill the hole back.
I thought it was obvious that the ideas I proposed had an implicit AND operator in between them, not an OR. No single solution by itself is enough. Going vegan alone isn't enough. Reducing flying alone isn't enough. Eliminating ICE vehicles alone isn't enough. 100% renewable energy alone isn't enough.
> Especially if we use the wood for heating
So don't use it for heating - use it in construction, furniture, or heck turn it into charcoal and bury it. Why would people use it for heating if clean electricity is made widely available?
There are ways to remove the CO2 already in the atmosphere: like planting trees. [1] Also, Microsoft just announced that by 2050 they will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975. [2]
From the perspective of someone who has been in Garmisch two weeks ago: it's not as bad as the article makes it sound. Garmisch is at an altitude of 700 m (2300 ft), but most of the ski area is much higher (in the snow-covered mountains that can be seen in the background of the first photo). Being able to ski all the way down to the ski resort is a luxury, not a necessity, and only those slopes need snow cannons. Plus, there is also the ski area near the Zugspitze, which starts at 2000 m height. I'm not a climate change denier, far from it, but it will take some more decades until skiing in the Alps will die out completely...
People have adapted almost completely to the idea of snow being some rare, special event. People who fondly remember playing in the snow nearly everyday in winter during their childhood have come to expect 50-60 degree January afternoons and think of snow as a special occasion. These people are saying those twice a year snowfalls are proof that nothing is changing, while knowing full well that they were wearing layers of coats and scarves years ago and walking around in t-shirts now.
Coffee could go extinct and our generation would just have nostalgic idle chats about it here and there, but nothing would really change. Kids who never drank coffee would grow up and never think about it, much less care. Bangladesh could completely sink tomorrow, and you'd have people 15 years from now saying it's all some grand conspiracy and Bangladesh never really existed. You'd just have people saying climate never changed and taking family trips to the beach would be a good way to cool off on those hot Nunavut February nights.
People just kind of adapt to whatever's happening around them. No matter how crazy or awful it is, people just get apathetic after a while. And so long as someone has financial motivations to push the idea that this is normal, people will keep thinking it is and they'll forget just how much things changed.
"The world as first seen by the child becomes his lifelong standard of excellence, mindless of the fact that he is admiring the ruins of his parents." [...]
"Generation to Generation, the natural world decays, the ratchet of perception tightens. Gradually, imperceptibly, big sharks give way to small sharks, small sharks to baitfish, baitfish to jellyfish to slime (algae and cyanobacteria). On land, the big cats and wolves becomes feral cats and coyotes. The wild standard sinks ever lower and becomes ever heavier to raise. Few notice, few care. Eventually nobody remembers that wolves not long ago freely roamed the Adirondacks, and hence there is mad howling over the suggestion of returning them to their homeland. Southern Californians panic on learning that a cougar track has been discovered on the fringes of their neighborhood- mindless that cougars roamed these hills and canyons long before gated communities drew their lines in the chaparral. 'Shifting baselines' help explain why the Pennsylvania deer hunter sees everything right and nothing wrong in a forest that's swarming with deer yet as barren of biodiversity as a city park."
"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck
That’s only part of it. She is also a woman and a foreigner and she is reasonably well-educated. Americans spend more on the war efforts of other countries than we do to our own public schools. Fear, xenophobia and intellectual insecurity are part of this phenomenon as well. She is also economically privileged and Americans are increasingly divided by income and income-related health factors like physical fitness and addiction. Taking advice from a wealthy, educated European female is simply not an option without opening the door to some uncomfortable observations.
These people make take some unscientific ideas to their graves but they will also take a lot of fear and hatred with them.
Don't forget that a Facebook glitch a few days ago accidentally doxxed the person updating her Facebook posts, revealing that it's her father, Svante Thunberg, authoring her posts.
I acknowledge climate change is a thing and should be taken seriously, but the left does itself no favors by manufacturing a petulant child as its messenger. You need messengers that are credible and aren't just preaching to the choir if you want to make progress in convincing people.
Propaganda. Teenagers are not intellectually equipped to decide such complex matters for themselves and can be easily swayed into making decisions that are bad for them. The frontal lobe is not fully matured until around age 25--the monsters who push propaganda know this--get them young, fill their heads with bs indoctrination, and then you have them for life. It's the communist playbook! Anyone that takes two seconds to think about Greta Thunberg knows what's going on there.
Why do you think 18 year olds are conscripted into armies? This is sad, but communists refer to it as "the children's revolution" or some such, it's a long-time tactic that they have used many times before, look it up.
It's pretty consistent for Time Magazine to name ol' Greta Person of The Year given their previous adulation for Adolf Hitler. Great judge of character that magazine is.
It's more like the right picked a "petulant child" as their archenemy, rather than the left picked her. It's not a leftist scheme that Trump is engaging in a twitter feud with Thunberg.
The right ignored IPCC scientists, they laughed at Al Gore (for having a private jet - yeah I get that it's a very easy thing to hate), but somehow they can't do a thing to a teenager largely repeating the points already made (and ignored) by IPCC and Al Gore, all their usual propaganda tactics do nothing against her, and somehow that makes the right frothing mad.
I guess tasting one's own medicine feels awful. Shrug.
I'm worried about the nature of scientific inquiry under those circumstances, but yes, I have witnessed the same behaviors in my work--innovation happens when the people standing in the way retire or get new jobs and are out of the way. Then necessary changes happen. Watched it many, many times.
'Shifting baselines' is a good heuristic. Like Overton Windows.
The reason the modern environmental movement started in Southern California is because the degradation happened within people's life times.
I testified at one of the public hearings about protecting pacific salmon. [1] I mentioned, much less eloquently than Stolzenburg, that new arrivals to the PNW had no idea what had been lost. Just like I could barely imagine the rivers full of fish, as told by the First Peoples.
Maybe we all should be telling more stories. When I was teenager, my boss (from Canada) said they'd play hockey every day, but now their lakes didn't freeze enough. I tell my son that we used to have slugs every where and most every (non summer) morning was foggy until noon.
> Maybe we all should be telling more stories. When I was teenager, my boss (from Canada) said they'd play hockey every day, but now their lakes didn't freeze enough. I tell my son that we used to have slugs every where and most every (non summer) morning was foggy until noon.
It's -40C in Canada where I am currently. Not uncommon, honestly. What is uncommon though, is that the rest of the winter has been very mild. My wife tells similar stories of skating on a local creek that used to freeze at the end of November...
There's a term for this that I can't figure out how to search for. It refers to the way people don't notice how the natural environment changes around them because it's so gradual. The context I saw it in was, I think, the way someone didn't think much of the lack of fish in a body of water other than having nostalgia for fishing with their dad as a kid.
I think the culprit in this case was overfishing, but the term was general enough to apply to any change like this. Maybe someone reading this knows the term.
This was something different. More observational, less judgemental. I think it had the word environmental in it, but that didn't help build an effective search query. It was specific to the phenomenon of people not noticing a change in climate or ecology because it happens over such a long period.
I think you're thinking of the classic shifting baseline example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline It comes up a lot when talking about fisheries stocks, and how each generation basically resets to what is a normal amount of fish.
People do adapt, and I think that's a feature, not a bug, often forgotten. Climate change is real, but how hubristic was it for us to work toward a globally industrialized world, then post hoc pretend that we must A. Take drastic action to preserve the climate within the centuries-long snapshot we're accustomed to, or else the planet is on fire B. Never expect humanity to adapt, and pretend it's some kind of terribly stupid and illogical thing to do.
Certainly in the long term, the climate will change. We harnessed the natural world and brought it on ourselves sooner. I think we should do what we can, but the apocalyptic language of "planet on fire", etc, and all of us pretending that our little snapshot of the climate is all there ever was and we should never expect to adapt to anything else seems utterly foolish and more big-headed than I can put into words.
The planet as a whole is not on fire, sure. But there are much bigger than normal wildfires in equatorial regions - Amazon, Africa, Australia. Australia is the one getting the most attention as it's closest to "western" cities.
> People have adapted almost completely to the idea of snow being some rare, special event. People who fondly remember playing in the snow nearly everyday in winter during their childhood have come to expect 50-60 degree January afternoons and think of snow as a special occasion. These people are saying those twice a year snowfalls are proof that nothing is changing, while knowing full well that they were wearing layers of coats and scarves years ago and walking around in t-shirts now.
As someone who believes in climate change, and grew up playing in the snow - what on earth are you talking about? Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion?
Exaggerating to the extent you are does nothing but hurt the message because it's blatantly and obviously false and when climate deniers read people making claims like you are, the entire discussion loses all credibility.
>As someone who believes in climate change, and grew up playing in the snow - what on earth are you talking about? Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion?
I agree. In the Northeast part of the US we still get really cold and snowy winters. But almost year after year our summers are getting hotter. And the seasons in between those are getting shorter.
The Gatlinburg, TN fires should have been a wake up call for the whole eastern coast of the US. When the east coast summer firestorms come, it will be horrible, worse than Australia by orders of magnitude. Life there isn't adapted to it, nor is the population. I give it 5 years
Here in Toronto I grew up with snow all winter long - quite literally, we'd get the first snow around the start of December and it would stick until the start of March.
Now, this winter has been 30-50 degrees F all winter, save for the occasional blast of polar air. We haven't had snow that has stuck longer than a week. The GP's message was correct. Besides, do you really think that an exaggerated claim will be what makes/breaks a climate denier's point of view?
I grew up in Upstate NY. There were plenty of warm winters in the '70s and '80s. I don't think anything is remarkably different.
Also, we had some summers that were freezing--like you never wanted to go swimming the whole summer except maybe one week in August. Other summers were blazing. My parents' old farmhouse didn't have A/C. They still don't have A/C now.
I'm not sure which years you grew up in Toronto, but historically there can be pretty large swings in the number of days of snow and inches of snowfall.
A minute of googling revealed this for Toronto snowfall [1]:
year days total snowfall
2010 6 18.0 in (45.7 cm)
2018 13 36.5 in (92.8 cm)
I calculate from the limited data on that web page (years 2010-2018) that the mean snowfall in Toronto is 36.6 inches and the standard deviation is 13.8 inches.
It looks like snowfall is increasing not decreasing. However, such limited data doesn't really reveal what's happening or going to happen in the future. There were only 9 data points given on the page I found. Someone can undoubtably find official historical data for Canada that will be more useful.
I live in Upper Michigan and have noticed that our area seems to be less effected than others. If you like data here is some information regarding snowfall in the U.P.
Interesting, thank you! I guess I got caught up in my stress about this winter - while last winter did have a lot of snow, this winter has had nearly 0. Looking out the window of my office I see greenery, not snow, so I figure the huge swings from year to year are something to be concerned about.
When I was in primary school we had at least a week or two of actual snow every winter, whereas today we barely even get freezing temperatures. In the eighties Berlin got 37cm of snow per year (median) and 21 frost days, in the 20-tens we only got 17cm and 13 frost days.
>As someone who believes in climate change, and grew up playing in the snow - what on earth are you talking about? Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion?
New England.
Snow that fell in mid-November and later used to stick around until spring and we'd almost NEVER (like maybe one day every 3+ yr) have a 50-60deg day in January/February. Now you rarely have snow that sticks around more than a couple weeks and having the occasional 50+deg day in January/February is not uncommon. Winters have definitely become more mild in the past 20ish years.
I confirm. The stories nowadays about a freak 70 degree January day in Connecticut really boggle my mind. It was rare that the temp got above freezing then when I was a kid. Also we occasionally had sub-zero cold snaps in the negative teens and I don't hear much about those in New England anymore (although to be fair I don't live there now).
I concur. I'm from "Savoie", FR Alps. I have filmed on Hi-8 the glaciers nearby where I lived as a kid. Some are just no longer visible from the valley.
> Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion?
Here in Buffalo, NY, we've had 1 snowfall this year >6". It was in November. It hasn't been much over 48F though, not in the 50-60F range. But last year had some of that, and we're only half way through January.
> As someone who believes in climate change, and grew up playing in the snow - what on earth are you talking about? Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion?
We've had an extremely mild winter in Rochester, NY. It's finally taking a turn this week, but my expensive ski season pass has had a rough run so far.
> What's more, the high temperature every single day since Dec. 21 has been above freezing. That’s never happened in Rochester’s recorded weather history. The average temperature during that time has been a rather astonishing 35 percent higher than normal.
>climate deniers read people making claims like you are, the entire discussion loses all credibility.
This kind of black or white thinking is absurd. Why would disproving some random comment on HN automatically mean disproving all climate science? It's extremely irritating when someone uses disapproval of a weak claim to as proof that a much stronger claim is also wrong.
It is a very common theme to see "scientists failed to predict highly specific event in area X" and then use that as justification to say something like "CO2 doesn't cause warming".
I'm tired of this topic so I will keep it short: Invest in modern technology (it's good for business). Market it as a jobs program. Stop hanging onto obsolete technology. These incentives will always exist whether it's a scam or not.
>This kind of black or white thinking is absurd. Why would disproving some random comment on HN automatically mean disproving all climate science? It's extremely irritating when someone uses disapproval of a weak claim to as proof that a much stronger claim is also wrong.
So if someone trying to convince you that there's life on Mars starts from the premise that the earth is flat, are you going to give credence to the rest of their talking points or brush them off?
You can be "irritated" all you want, the fact of the matter is people like OP do nothing but hurt the cause and discussion around climate change when they start from a position that's both demonstrably false and so outlandish as to ruin any further discussion. It HURTS the cause because someone who was on the fence would likely be driven off the wrong side.
> So if someone trying to convince you that there's life on Mars starts from the premise that the earth is flat, are you going to give credence to the rest of their talking points or brush them off?
The problem being described is folks using that dumb flat Earther as a reason not to listen to anyone else on the same side of the debate with much better arguments.
"Someone claimed climate change will make the world 180 degrees by 2021, which is silly, therefore climate change is debunked."
Tying every observable short-term climate anomaly to CO2 will continue to backfire as often as not, because the truth is nobody can predict whether one year will be snowier than the next, or whether the next major natural disaster will be a hurricane, a flood, or a fire. The overall claim will actually become harder to sell - if that’s your goal.
They got the date wrong by a few years, and the new expected date is 2030. This is now being portrayed as if a major error was made and climate change is debunked, but it's really just an example of how most science includes a margin of error.
Would you stake your house on a bet that these glaciers will be gone by 2030? Because if there really is a long-term risk of disaster, you’re basically doing exactly that by crying wolf with flaky short-term claims.
That standard never seems to be applied in the other direction, oddly enough. Climate deniers pull a Gish Gallop of trivially debunked claims (far beyond a mere "we got the timeline a little wrong"), and still somehow manage to demand to be taken seriously.
No, I wouldn't stake my house on it, but I wouldn't bet my house for a 99% chance of winning a million bucks, either.
If some idiot made claim X with poor evidence and I used that to conclude claim "not X", I think I might question if I'd been repeatedly concussed. That would be a truly idiotic mode of knowledge acquisition.
Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion?
Ignoring your 50-60 degrees, this matches The Netherlands quite well. When I grew up in that magical place, snow was a regular occurrence (not all winter long, but snow happened every year, as did ice skating on rivers). Now, when it happens, it is a rare exception.
I actually found a graph for it, but can't account for its veracity. It shows the number of days per year with complete snow cover, over the past 60 years: https://www.weerwoord.be/m/2466231
Remembering my UK childhood with enough snow to play in more than once just about every year, and my kid's experience of almost never seeing snow that settles, I'd say that graph is spot on. It correlates well with my memory, and with family photos.
Guy Fawkes night (Nov 5) was usually too early for snow, but nearly always a cold, frosty night, often clear that you wrapped up well for the firework display. You were usually glad to get back into the warm. A good few years in the last ten and it's been late summer or autumn weather. Barely worth a coat, let alone hat, gloves, scarf and extra layers.
Not as extreme as the comment above, but snowfall in Washington DC has been steadily declining for the last 150 years. From averaging ~22"/year in the late 1880s to ~15" year over the last decade. That decline is despite several very high snowfall years during the last decade, meaning we're having less frequent snow events, but when we do have them, they're big (for DC).
Indeed. And in the last few years we've had a couple of 60+ degree stretches in the middle of winter, whereas I can't remember that ever happening while I grew up in the area. It's all well and good to be able to go outside without a coat in January, but it's low key terrifying.
Yeah, this past weekend was downright weird. Riding bicycles in the Blue Ridge without even a cap or wind vest? Crazy for January. Usually I'd need insulated pants, jacket, and a winter cap this time of year.
Just glancing a record highs, there have been days in the 60's and 70's in January in DC in almost every decade for the last 100 years. The record high for January was 79F Jan 26, 1950. 1980s look chilly.
"As someone who believes in climate change, and grew up playing in the snow - what on earth are you talking about? Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion?
"
My uncle had a hotel at the north edge of the alps. Bought it around 40 years ago. At that time they had skiing throughout winter and it was the biggest money maker. They also had a women's world cup race every year. This lasted for a few years, then they cancelled the race because of lack of snow. By now all ski lifts are closed in the winter. Some of them are used in summer. There is a also a ski jump facility next to his town. Also closed for years now. A lot of hotels have gone bankrupt including my uncle's.
My expectation based on my childhood (I'm in my 40s) is that you would have at least some snowcover from early December through late March. Some winters were snowier than others, but you'd always find a hunk of ice somewhere. There was always 3-5 significant storms with more than 12" of snow. Now we get 1-2, and they typically melt within a week. In any case, the ground would be frozen solid.
I live about 150 miles north of NYC. Last weekend, I planted tulips that I forgot about in the fall, wearing shorts. The weather that we have here today is warmer than the ocean climate around NYC and Long Island was in the 80s when I was a little kid.
The 60s through the 80s were the coldest years of the 20th century. 1978 saw the worst winter on record for New York. The 80s saw record freezes for central Florida that devastated the citrus industry.
Note the central Florida citrus industry was thriving in the first half of the 20th century with freezes being extremely uncommon. During the 70s, it even snowed once in Miami.
I spoke with my mother and father about this topic recently. It was triggered by reading US Grant's autobiography. Grant recollected early on that during his youth they would often ice skate on the ponds and lakes in southern Ohio. I grew up not far from Grant. On occasion, from ~85-92, the ponds would freeze with ice thick enough to skate. By the mid-90s, that was simply done. I remember sledding all of the time during the winter during that same period. I'll ask a friend who still lives next to the hill we used to sled on how often his own children sled. My parents are still there, so I know it's not often -- Not even every winter is there enough snow stuck on the ground to go sledding. The last blizzard that I recall living through was in the early 90s, as well. I left the area in 2001, but returned in 2006-2008. During 2006-2008, there were a few snows that I recall that were ~6"-8" but it was all melted inside of a week. My father was telling me recently that they're lucky to see 3" today and it doesn't stick for more than a few days.
My parents grew up in southwestern PA. My mother grew up on a large farm (dairy and ~500 acres of planted crops) and often recollects about the 50s and 60s. They would often travel on the ag run-off canals and smaller creeks, streams, and rivers, to trade supplies with neighbors. They could travel miles on the ice. They didn't have roads in this section of PA until the late 60s and early 70s, when the coal company came in (and state routes were built to support their industry). They would butcher cattle during the winter and could store it in the back of the barn, in a small stone cellar that was only partially below ground. The meat would freeze overnight and remain frozen into the spring.
These things are gone today and it's happened before my own eyes inside of 2 generations of my own family, at that.
My area has been getting more snow over the last 10 years, more similar to what I had when I was younger. I did notice that years 2000-2010 it appeared that every year was getting warmer/less snow but lately in the short term at least it appears to be climbing back to where it was.
>Hello all, welcome back to another winter season here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This is the 8th year of snowfall reports on FunintheUP.com, thanks for following the snowfall page! FunintheUP has quickly become the #1 place for snowfall totals for those interested. .
This year will be another fun year of snow, are you ready? We have 10s of 1000s of followers that check in from snowmobilers, weather stations, emergency personnel, city officials, road crews, skiers, snowboarders, groomers, ski resorts, and many more people across the country and world who love to follow the snowfall totals across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Last year Tamarack Loc. with 362.8 inches of snowfall for the season, passing the 1978/79 (Houghton county) record of 354.1 inches. This is the 4th highest snowfall amount recorded in the Upper Peninsula. The highest snowfall ever recorded in the Upper Peninsula was in 1978/79 at the Keweenaw county snow station with 390.4 inches. --Thank you so much for your support for over the years, Yooper Steve.
Unless I’m missing something, the last 20 years seems to have more snow than the 20 years proceeding it with the exception of heavy snow in the mid-80s.
Yep, I meant fewer heavy snowfalls and also 4 instances of no/almost no snow until January in last 15 years.
It aligns pretty well with my personal experience in south-west Poland. It's been several years in a row with no snow for Christmas/until new year. OTOH when I was a kid, I remember being stuck on a road on our way to my grandma's place for Christmas due to massive snowfall.
In many parts of Eastern Europe, one or two generations ago, most households had a horse-drawn cart for the summer, and a horse-drawn sleigh for the winter. People would not have kept both, unless there was plenty of opportunity to use them (at least 3-4 full months a year). Fast forward today, nobody owns a sleigh anymore, there are zero days when there is enough snow for them, plenty of carts still going around.
>Coffee could go extinct and our generation would just have nostalgic idle chats about it here and there
Maybe the consumers...you have to keep in mind the competing interests of capitalism. I could see SV and SV VCs falling all over themselves with such a "market opportunity."
>And so long as someone has financial motivations to push the idea that this is normal, people will keep thinking it is and they'll forget just how much things changed.
This! I could see VCs start investing in numerous companies hawking all kinds of caffeine pills and supplements, spending billions on marketing, such that consumers would stop talking about the nostalgia of coffee, rather begin asking how we ever lived without X startup that has disrupted the industry and optimized "human energy."
"MacKinnon illustrates this phenomenon, known in psychology as “change blindness,” with an anecdote about fish photographs from the Florida Keys. Old photographs from the 1940s show delighted fishermen displaying their prize catches—marlins as long as a man is tall. When present-day fishermen see those pictures, they flat-out refuse to believe they are authentic.
Human beings tend to be blind to gradual changes in their environment, assuming that the way things are right now is how they always have been and always will be. We do not miss the former beauty of the world, he would say, because we have never known it.
I am not so sure that we don’t miss it. I think we do miss it, but we don’t know what it is we are missing. We feel a void, a sense of poverty, a hunger for something unidentifiable. Transferred onto money or consumer items, that hunger drives continued cycles of destruction. Transferred onto drugs, gambling, alcohol, it drives the unsolvable social problem of addiction. Perhaps the degradation of nature is not without its consequences after all."
"Explorers and naturalists of previous centuries give staggering testimony to the incredible natural wealth of North America and other places before colonization. Here are some images from another book, Steve Nicholls’s Paradise Found:
Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”
I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now."
I read My First Summer in the Sierra and found it depressing the way he would describe fantastical trees and plants and landscapes in great detail - and then say the sheep trampled and ate it all.
> The last pair, found incubating an egg, was killed there on 3 June 1844, on request from a merchant who wanted specimens, with Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangling the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashing the egg with his boot.
Are you sure that your memory is correct? We have measured a warming of around 1 degree so far and that doesn't seem like enough warming to go from snow every day to 50-60 degree days.
That's not how climate change works. Imagine if this was a technical thread and someone argued that changing a byte in a file or library is fine because "that's not enough of a change to have an effect".
I seriously doubt that snow has gone from common to rare to casual observer, all because average surface temperature has risen 1.4 deg F in the last 130 years. [1] (Granted this is an only average; there could be specific places experiencing that phenomenon.)
Americans are experiencing less snow because they are migrating to warmer areas. [2]
> Kids who never drank coffee would grow up and never think about it, much less care
Which pretty much nails the problem. Us older folks remember that cold, snowy winters were normal, that there were orders of magnitude more insects such that frequent stops to clear windscreen, headlights or helmet visor were just normal. We remember mixed farms that husbanded the land rather than beat it into submission.
Those kid's normal is no insects, no snow, monoculture industrial farmland everywhere, signs of human interference in every remote corner of the globe. Most live in concreted cities where food comes from the shop, not the land. Everything is based on that "normality of childhood". They quite literally don't see the problem. Even seeing old photos and film footage doesn't convey... I wish I'd listened to more of my granddad's tales of shire horses and traction engines. I wish I could have seen through his eyes.
The environment and natural world has become a theme park to visit for a skiing holiday, safari or to farm to oblivion. To watch in the latest Attenborough. Only a few outdoorsy types understand it, even fewer what it used to be any more.
Most of us have no connection with the natural world. Every industry and activity has become unsustainable by injecting rampant consumerism and near limitless fossil fuel into the process. Ironic so many of us are starting to actually care about impact, as it reaches worst ever.
I really do think OP has it right saying we need the "appearance of immediate, severe-yet-not-deadly impacts on our day-to-day lives" before anything truly significant will happen.
> People have adapted almost completely to the idea of snow being some rare, special event. People who fondly remember playing in the snow nearly everyday in winter during their childhood have come to expect 50-60 degree January afternoons and think of snow as a special occasion. These people are saying those twice a year snowfalls are proof that nothing is changing, while knowing full well that they were wearing layers of coats and scarves years ago and walking around in t-shirts now.
I fondly remember playing in the snow in Siberia and above north circle in northern parts of Russia during my childhood. Now in California, I am truly expecting >50F January (and I mostly get it).
In Austria, where skiing is a big thing for certain areas regarding tourism income, we already compensate with artificial snow since many years. I personally find this extremely crazy. Producing aritificla snow is extensive and likely quite bad for the environment. But since tourism is the holy cow, these projects even get funded with public money. I oppose this, but nobody asks mtheindividual if this way of spending public money is wanted. All that seems relevant is to preserve the flow of tourists during winter time.
Frankly, this is nuts. If there is not enough snow for skiing, well, then there isn't...
Climate Change is destroying our hobbies. Most would be concerned simply that climate change is happening. But that we much focus on hobbies sounds just a touch vain. Who is this message trying to reach? CEOs?
It makes me remember, I went skiing in the French Alps last winter, and the snow conditions should have been terrible (sunny, warm, no snowfall for more than a month), but weren't.
Using snow cannons and by moving snow around, they managed to keep most of the resort open. Obviously, it wasn't perfect, and off-piste was out of the question, but it was good enough to be enjoyable.
So while climate change will certainly affect alpine skiing negatively, but resorts made a lot of progress dealing with less than ideal conditions.
Here on the US East coast, we already have several marginal resorts that almost always use snow machines. However, the air temp still needs to be cold enough to support it.
Good thing I got into downhill longboarding. I think it might well be better for the environment too, I can get my adrenaline fix by taking a bus to the hills outside the city rather than having to fly to the alps.
For those who want to snowboard when there is no snow, a "freeboard" is probably the closest emulation on tarmac.
It provides jobs for millions of people, especially younger folks. It keeps a lot of older folks active when it is cold when they might not otherwise be. Plus, skiing is part of the culture of several places.
I don’t particularly like watching hockey, that doesn’t mean we could do without it.
Coal will be shut off "later", the nuclear plants are shut down now, and the idea to reduce the overall energy budget to make up the shortfall hasn't happened either.
So, yah, basically Germany shut down nuclear plants and replaced them with natural gas.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 84.0 ms ] threadAs if the worst thing is the loss of ski resorts?
How about going finding a new place to live, cultivate, and the huge casualties in human life, animals, etc?
Hint: it’s not actually about the skiing.
Why do you think that evolution happens like that? Extinction events are a major driver in evolution, and as far as I know, Punctuated Equilibrium Theory still has quite a bit of traction; many models (especially simulations) seem to show that this is what quite often happens.
Like, sure, mass extinctions happen... but this one is totally optional.
For them the problem is something they read about - not something real.
If they lived in one of the directly affected areas from climate change, and suffered the consequences, they'd change the tune regarding "why expect earth to look like this geologically", etc.
Yea, things have always changed. It's why weather stable regions are historically more habitable than those which aren't.
Only if one has their head in the sand. Historically higher temperatures year after year, massive loss of arctic ice, etc.
All of those things weren't "always changing", except if you go back to thousands to millions of years. And even then, they didn't get there with the same rate of change we have now.
Climate changes over hundred thousands years.
The rapid industrialization caused rapid heating in hundred years! This is a fact and trying to dispute it is akin to sticking you head in sand.
Anyhow the whole line of its natural so we should ignore it is crazy to me. Cancer is natural and yet people treat it. It doesn't matter if global warming is, or isn't natural, or its a mix. We need to stabilize it to suit us before we go back to having total population counted in millions or so.
From Wikipedia: "Solastalgia (/ˌsɒləˈstældʒə/) is a neologism that describes a form of mental or existential distress caused by environmental change. In many cases this is in reference to global climate change, but more localized events such as volcanic eruptions, drought or destructive mining techniques can cause solastalgia as well."
(Though admittedly "just" convert to summer activities sounds much easier than it is. Skiing was something that was always confined to few areas, you can hike just as well in many more places.)
One can easily see the changes over last 20 years by looking at the ski mountains on the East Coast. The skiing season now is late January to mid-April.
The snow was delivered via trucks.
Locally they are experimenting on heat pump technology, and to use the excess heat to something useful. Then it might be more viable. Probably cannot do it in too high temperatures, but a bit above freezing should work.
Here, they have also experimented on building a gigantic heap of snow at the end of the season, and covering it so it doesn't melt too much during summer. Then it's easier to lay artificial snow on top in the fall, or the natural snow that occurs doesn't just melt when hitting the ground.
There were numerous years in the pre-snowmaking era where large numbers of East Coast ski areas barely operated.
Repeated bad years for natural snow in the late 70s/early 80s drove a ton of smaller places into closing down.
And there's all kinds of old pictures of the crazy things attempted to save snow before they could make it. Fences to try to catch it from blowing into the woods, giant vacuums to try to get it from the woods and put it on the trails, etc. Whole crews out in summer picking up every small rock and stump so they could open trails with as few inches of snow as possible.
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And back then, conditions were expected to be poor a lot of the time. Skiers today expect wall to wall snow on the runs and a large portion of them to be open just about every day during the main season.
The problem with East coast skiing is that it won’t take that much more warming to make them economically unviable.
Hell, I grew up in central Alberta, 1970s and 80s. Latitude 53. Winter time temperatures drop to the -30C range all the time. And yet even there you could not rely on consistent snow cover at the little hills around. Many Christmases well above zero with the lake unfrozen followed by a January of -25C.
Back then the little hills around there were also all closing because people were now able to drive or fly further and go to Jasper and Banff etc. to ski instead of hitting their local hills. And I also remember many days skiing on solid ice in Jasper, which is pretty damned cold, high elevation.
Most of North America is a continental climate. It has always been highly variable. It is getting more so.
Climate change is real and is impacting this industry, but I feel like the really bad effects are still coming. But even when it comes it's not like the winters will be universally _warm_ -- they will be highly volatile, with intense blizzards one day followed by rain later. That's the pattern this year already.
I'm off to Revelstoke to ski in a week and a half. Absolute craploads of snow there this year, while here in the east it has been awful. But last year it wasn't that great out there but was pretty good in the east, considering.
But I don't expect to be seeing ski areas becoming generally untenable operations in the Eastern US until many decades in the future, other than maybe some of the southernmost areas (there's ski areas as far south as Alabama).
Average conditions may be more variable and resorts will have to push even harder in snowmaking windows.
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On the other hand though, there's quite a bit of technological advancement still coming down the pipe on the snowmaking side. In some respects, Eastern US conditions are (for now) arguably improved from what they used to be for many as a result.
The massive automation coming to the industry is making it possible to make a lot more snow and take advantage of small weather windows, and the efficiency improvements have made the energy costs a lot less prohibitive to use extensively (and less environmentally problematic).
While I would love to see more bike parks, I think most mountain resorts would shutter if these were the only activities bringing in revenue throughout the year.
Somewhat paradoxically, climate change could make some areas of the Rockies and Sierras more snowy. But depletion of snow in other areas would cause the areas with snow to become even more expensive -- and they're already pretty exclusive today.
> Already, the summer generates 60% of the tourism intake, according to Garmisch Mayor Sigrid Meierhofer.
Indeed, hiking doesnt require you to spend moneys on rental equipment. It's a bit different for mountain biking - most of the time you need lift passes to enjoy the mountain. And with the explosion of electric bikes rentals in the last years, and there are lots of growth opportunities for generating revenue there as well.
And it's not only about hiking/biking, of course.
Of course, having more places to ski is better than having less places - my main concern is people and their jobs, and not specific resort activities per se.
However, a fairly bitter pill to swallow this year was some parks I was looking forward to riding being caught in the Australian bushfires. One was a local park, and I look forward to helping rebuild it once it's safe.
It's a scary prospect for that to become the norm. Nature is dear to me. Being able to go riding in the forest is a pillar of my health, mental and physical. I have consistently been unable to ride this summer due to heatwaves and bushfire smoke. Occasionally I would make poor judgement, and leave to ride when it was clear only to be smoked out on the trails an hour later, from fires hundreds of kilometers away.
Skiing is simply more unique/exquisite experience, more people are willing to spend more. It also often requires less effort, if one is not so fit. Plenty of folks ride down 2 times in the morning, park with beer/wine on the sun, eat, do 1-2 runs and call it a day and go to apres bar. For whole week.
I am a bit skeptical about this 'reinventing' of ski resorts into something new. I look at Chamonix in France, for somebody like me the best mountain place in Europe, maybe even globally. Beautiful hiking, trail running, climbing, world class (or easy) alpinism available quickly, skiing, ski touring, paraglide, bikes and so on and on. The best season for non-winter activities is actually early autumn, September-October - better temperatures than summer, nature is stunningly beautiful, good stable weather.
But almost nobody comes in autumn. Why? Because kids don't have holidays and are back to school. This is the bulk of visitors in mountains, anytime. So summer season for tourism lasts 2-2.5 months. Winter one, still is more like 4 months.
Where will financeers spend their winter breaks?
If anything, ski touring is often more expensive (gear wise, might save on the ski pass if not starting from the top of a lift). It also has a bigger dependency on snow quality if one want a fun ski experience and isn't mainly in it for the touring part.
However when skiing in a resort, others can bump into you by accident. Your muscles cool down while sitting on the chair lift, and get tired at the end of the day without really noticing it, which leads to a number of accidents. I've torn my ACL in a resort couple of years ago, and ski touring feels much safer - at least for me.
Its simply a different sport. It can be done in similar place, but I prefer proper wilderness whenever possible. And yes, risk of dying in avalanche is non-0 in most places.
I used to think that too, but recently I'm softening to the argument that a given number of vacationers on even the nastiest bulldozed runs has much less regional impact than if the same number of users would go touring instead, everyone spreading out to seek their own patch of untouched nature.
Of course in terms of global impact (energy use per person) touring is nonetheless much better.
I do alpine skiing every year but I have no illusion that the tourism severely hurts the environment, although there are a lot of other detrimental factors besides CO2 output.
I mostly ski in regions where your place lies around 2000m and snow is guaranteed. But even this far up you see more and more snow cannons deployed. They also create huge reservoirs with artificial snow to extend the skiing season. Huge waste of energy and skiing on artificial snow is awful, but it probably is financially viable.
Meanwhile, a company just opened a small ski resort indoors (a bit like in Dubai) 10~15 minutes by car from the city center: https://snooslo.no. The goal is to have it open and at -4ºC all year long. This is so backwards :(
They aren’t hedging their bets by learning how to work and create things. This will come back to bite them.
But in the mean time, let’s keep snow skiing in the mall with all this foreign money.
For some unpredictable value of “pretty liberal” perhaps?
For instance, sex out of wedlock or cohabitation are illegal, including for tourists.
”If you holiday in the emirate unmarried and you come to the attention of the authorities ... if it’s then discovered you’re sharing a room and a bed you can be jailed and then deported.”
They look the other way almost all the time - until they don't.
Mentally said goodbye to day trips, I'm simply living too far from the Alps now it seems. Going back to my youth in 80s and 90s, I remember skiing from late November all the way to, say, March. At resorts that closed over a decade ago due to a lack of snow.
I mean, we're talking of millions (billions potentially in the future) people out of their homes, horrible droughts, famines, fires, weather phenomena, animals extinct, etc, so skiing is the last thing to concern with...
In any kind of difficult situation, prioritising is crucial.
Of course there would be negative consequences for mountain villages and such. But ski tourist industry decline is not the biggest tragedy. These people are indeed forced to leave their Alps village but they can still go get some job in the city in a first world country. That's versus millions of third world immigrants or dying kids in Africa/Asia due to droughts/climate change developments for example...
I am taking the POV that we need to pray for the appearance of immediate, severe-yet-not-deadly impacts on our day-to-day lives.
Things like an acute year-round coffee shortage, or no bananas. Or beef price rockets to 100$/kg, frequent grid downtimes like we had when we grew up.
Let's face it, our morning coffee will motivate us to action better than some civil war in Syria or dying Koalas.
Put those fires in the US and the national conversation will certainly shift...
Regardless of which fires were started by what cause however, the fires burn extremely hot and spread fast as a result of conditions caused by climate change. This turns something as simple as a tossed cigarette into a meaningful fire hazard and turns a normal fire into one that spreads aggressively enough to render it nearly impossible to stop with a large amount of manpower. That makes them actually impossible when they are burning all over the country and the mostly unpaid volunteer fire fighting force is spread thin dealing with them.
That's the thing I've taken away from all of this, climate change doesn't necessarily increase the number of incidents to unreasonable levels (the rate goes up but not to apocalyptic levels), instead it takes otherwise minor or normal incidents and sets the conditions to allow them to escalate in increasing severity.
It seems like every natural disaster gets attributed to climate change, since 'climate change is happening', and, in turn, all these natural disasters are given as evidence that 'climate change is happening'.
Seems very circular logic.
Except what they can't change.
I fondly remember the old (apocryphal) story about how you can pop frogs in a pot of water, and if you increase the heat slowly enough, they'll stay in it until they boil to death. "Silly frogs" we all thought. Yet, here we are.
You've covered the first.
The second is about the two frogs which fell into a bucket full of milk. We should get ourselves familiarized with both [0] :)
[0] both stories, not frogs
You bet. Also because civil war in Syria has nothing to do with climate change and all to do with politics. But people are too busy worrying about the future to care about the present.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but bro, those things may be related.
I can't tell if this is parody or not. Of course they're not related. The "civil war in Syria" is a regional power proxy war and has nothing to do with climate or "the price of bread."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/relay.nationalgeographic.com/pr...
> The authors acknowledge that many factors led to Syria's uprising, including corrupt leadership, inequality, massive population growth, and the government's inability to curb human suffering.
> But their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compiled statistics showing that water shortages in the Fertile Crescent in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey killed livestock, drove up food prices, sickened children, and forced 1.5 million rural residents to the outskirts of Syria's jam-packed cities—just as that country was exploding with immigrants from the Iraq war.
No, there really isn't, and if PNAS is making such claims, they should be derided. The authors should also be closely examined for why they might be making such preposterous claims; they may belong to governments or groups which ... actually caused the conflict in Syria.
Such assertions are transparent propaganda which should be laughed to scorn by any numerate person.
Most of the climate change discourse is nothing but a huge distraction from the real issues of the world.
How can you be so simplistic? CO2 is a byproduct of basically everything we do. We can change that but it's not at all straightforward, quick or painless.
> Syria is far more complicated
Of climate science? Come on... Climate change seems to be the only issue that has any activism left: and it sure the powerful think it's a great outlet for people's desire for change. One huge issue that explains everything that is going badly in the world, while being so far removed from actual events and the responsibilities involved as to leave political actors entirely free- except from getting a bit of flak from a sixteen year old now and then.
There's a "plausible case" that many deaths of frail elderly people are caused by common ailments such as cold or flu. So what do you think is killing people, the fact of being extremely old and frail or the flu?
We're trying to reduce everything to a single common cause, vague and global, when there are precise responsibilities and much more direct actions we could take. We're all with Greta Thunberg when she campaigns about the future risks of climate change, and when the US (with the silent complicity of the EU) brought the world on the brink of a new major ME war, with the potential for millions of deaths, nobody said a damn thing. I find it disgusting.
I only worry once summer is over, they'll forget, and when it really matters we'll be complacent again and elect the wrong people.
https://www.police.nsw.gov.au/news/news_article?sq_content_s...
There is a large amount of misinformation floating around circulated by bots and trolls[1].
[0]: https://www.vox.com/2020/1/9/21058332/australia-fires-arson-... [1]: https://theconversation.com/bushfires-bots-and-arson-claims-...
We have a bushfire season every year, but we were not able to control these fires. We're seasoned at this, yet it was not good enough.
As an aside, I'm not 100% sure this isn't already happening with Tim Horton's.
Which by the way are already happening; all over the world, governments are slowly adjusting emission rights, energy companies are transitioning to renewables and closing coal plants, car companies are required to only sell low emissions cars, and billions of trees are being planted all over the world.
It's already happening at a huge scale but all you're thinking of is small changes that you yourself could reasonably do that, in the end, have a negligible impact on a global challenge.
All the proposed solutions would end capitalism and even communism as we know them and lead to mass starvation.
It all comes down to a Thanos Snap one way or another.
Humanity isn't yet advanced enough socially and in collective maturity to take the necessary actions to stop climate change.
We're still part animal, part sentient, and we don't know where that line lies, much less control which side we're on all the time.
All we can do is understand what the impact of climate change will be and plan to survive if we can find a way to do so.
Within the next century we are definitely going to have:
* Massive numbers of displaced people due to rising seas, excessive heat, lack of water, lack of food. The bulk of these people will die.
* Existing countries that do not or can not take steps necessary to safeguard their population sufficiently to maintain their economy, military strength, and the logistics that support it are going to undergo major changes, possibly including dissolution or massive shrinking of borders.
* The wealthy of the world will not lack anything, be it food, water, housing, cooling, military protection, etc. The weakening of governments across the world will allow these people more power and freedom than ever before. We may enter a new age of kings by other titles.
The world at the end of the next century is going to be vastly different from the present world. Humanity will survive, but that's setting the bar low. Many humans will die, many ideals will die, and we may not learn anything from all of it. In other words, humanity will be the same as it's been through all of recorded history.
Coffee would work the same way. We already have different strata of coffee. If supply tightens up, 80% of the market would turn into ersatz coffee with added caffeine, and whatever still was being produces would become a bigger luxury item.
And it's not looking good.
Cheap flights also mean that people don't bother with their local ski areas in the midwest -- they fly west for luxury vacations instead.
It does seem though that skiing might be having a fairly recent resurgence.
If it’s anything to do with popularity, it’s skiing becoming less popular due to worse conditions.
Japan used to be beautiful fluffy powder snow for 4 months straight.
Now it’s icy moguls with the occasional powder day and a sad 1.5 meter base in January.
No one can believe it but climate change is destroying snow country.
I actually probably wouldn’t bother with a < 1400m Ski resort anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere this year.
The resorts in Colorado get big dumps and then two days later the places are totally skied off with the same "icy moguls." It's because so many people ski powder days. It doesn't take long for the snow quality to degrade, even on a powder day.
Less days of skiing makes skiing less "fun" as a hobby; your free weekends need to correspond with the remaining good ski days. Can't ski too many times and you stop getting your skis or boards waxed and sharpened, stop buying new gear and you just stop going.
Lift ticket prices have become crazy expensive, and every ski area wants to become a resort destination: the messaging here is that you have to be wealthy to be able to ski.
As a result, a lot fewer young people are going to take up skiing- fewer people getting into the pipeline.
And the flip side of that is that per-day lift ticket prices are very high, to milk the casual skier and the luxury-seeking 1%ers who can afford to spent $250 (lift ticket+ rentals+snacks) on a single day at Stowe or Vail or Whistler.
At this point you basically have to either buy one of the mega passes, or seek out the smaller family owned resorts that still charge reasonable prices.
Look into the Indy Pass, it's an affordable pass that gets you 2 days at a bunch independent smaller ski areas.
Freedom looks tempting except absolutely nothing Canadian on it. Too bad.
And Epic will get you unlimited at Whistler, as well as some days at Kicking Horse if you buy the full version.
If you consider that expensive you moved to the wrong neighbourhood.
If I lived Van I'd totally ski Cypress, though. :-)
Also a season’s pass at Ragged is $249 too, which is an insane deal. There are still smaller mountains in New England that aren’t trying to be mega-resorts where prices are good.
I learned to ski here as a kid: http://www.vtsnowsports.org ($75 season pass, $200 for a family). Down the road from me now (lift currently closed for a mechanical issue, will hopefully re-open this weekend): https://skistorrshill.com ($160 season pass, $270 for a family). There's a bunch of gems like these scattered throughout New England if you look. And, since they're in "normal" towns, there's plentiful cheap lodging and plenty of other stuff to do. You're not isolated at a resort.
Cross-country and back-country skiing are even better options for the budget-minded, and almost limitless in where you can go. Ski-skate sales are full of cheap gear every fall, so the cost to get started is almost nothing.
Wouldn’t everyone? Salaries have to be paid, equipment maintained, property taxes paid.
Unfortunately it's what the market will bear. Of course college kids can't out-compete the hordes of DINKs from the Boston area who decide last minute that this will be a good skiing weekend.
As other commenters have mentioned there are still reasonable prices to be had but you have to go find them. The days of just showing up on a whim and getting a fair price are over (this applies to a lot of things, not just skiing).
>the messaging here is that you have to be wealthy to be able to ski.
It's recreational activity you have to travel to and requires a lot of gear and a somewhat prepared area to do it. That sets a pretty high wealth floor no matter what.
You might be right that prices not related to climate change will kill the industry but if that doesn't happen climate change will increase prices (a mountain that's open for fewer months has to charge more to cover fixed costs) until the same effect is achieved.
Of course if I were flying in for a 4 day trip once a year vs living near the resorts, I’d be singing a different story.
Certainly better value than the £35 a day you can pay here in Scotland on the rare days where we have snow and no wind!
[€183 for 6 days at Nevis Range, ~€300 for the same in the 3 Valleys....]
There are other reasons they may be incentivized to use higher prices as the mechanism to decrease crowding, but it is definitely not the only way.
The prospect of the government ever selling the protected wilderness to private companies is often met with public outcry.
Personally, I think the Ikon Pass is a fantastic deal and skiing is more accessible and affordable than it has ever been in my ~25 years of hitting the slopes.
Every week you would hear "it's too expensive, what about the youths?!"
Every week you'd also hear "overcrowding is killing alpine skiing, why are the lines so long, why do we allow so many people?!"
I've never related too much with the people who, upon witnessing the high season hordes as the park operates at 100% capacity, conclude "yes, it's cheaper entry that will fix our problems."
$35 to have us both access 25+ trails within 2 hour drive, or pay $250 per person for a season pass at the local ski mountain.
Wasn't a tough decision, and I was surprised how many hills there are in XC ski. I thought I would be bored switching over but I really am not!
Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan
Given what’s happening to the ski seasons in the Alps, I’m not sure if teaching a kid how to ski today is kindness or cruelty. I’m pretty sure there will still be some decent skiing until I’m ready to hang up my boots (I’m about 40), but my 10 year old niece? Her kids?
And thus only adding to the climate change problem.
Everyone is or will suffer from climate change, but if even the ones currently suffering don't want to make the changes needed to divert the problem how do we expect people that don't feel the pain yet to change?
And no, things like driving a low milage or electric car is not a change that solves the problem, not driver, or driving less is.
That's why I'm pessimistic this problem will ever get solved in time. Since in order to really solve it (compared to avoiding it for a few generations more) we collectively need to agree that we can't keep on living this way and with so many any longer. Which is just not in our (ironically) evolutionary biological nature as a competitive species.
Luckily tech I outpacing fossil fuels and beating them on price.
We need to be very vigilant politically because in a purely short term, economic point of view fossil fuels still very much makes sense.
Nearly 70% of Americans wouldn't pay $10/mo more to help fight climate change. [1] This is clearly at odds with what experts are claiming is necessary to meaningfully impact climate change.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/do-most-...
So even if they where using 100% renewable energy. They are 'stealing' that clean energy away from others. So grey energy will still be used to fulfill that demand.
A common misconception is that if we reduced our emissions, things would get better. The reality is that a particle of CO2 that is emitted today will statistically be there for 10,000 years before disappearing. Once out there it's going to work against us for this whole period. If we reduced our emissions, things won't get better, they will get a little bit less catastrophic and we will have a little bit more time. What we have emitted so far is in the air and it's too late.
Source (http://hapen.fr/jancovici-pib-ou-co2-il-faut-choisir-science...):
- after 100 years, 40% is still there
- after 1000 years, 20% is still there
- after 10,000 years, 10% is still there
"You're paying these high taxes and foregoing real meat because otherwise things would've been way worse, trust us!"
Very few will believe that.
Furthermore, people pay taxes so things get better, no one pays taxes so things don't get worse.
Britain lost billions in lost growth because of Brexit, the majority does not believe that because nothing has changed.
Ask anyone on the street, they believe climate change action means things will improve. They would be extremely surprised to learn it will only slow down the catastrophic results.
Tell me how I am wrong, then downvote. Otherwise you're just a пидор.
My biggest problem with people being concerned about climate change and at the same time being pro-third world -> first world immigration is that you’re instantly lifting those people’s carbon footprint, dramatically. Isn’t that like, bad? At least as bad as first worlders having children, if not more so? It’s hard for me to take these people seriously when one policy actively works against the other.
Don't know why you're being downvoted but you're spot on with this point. The most off-putting radical cause is people trying to use climate change to push socialism on society.
When the problem comes bundled with a non-negotiable solution, it's reasonable to be skeptical of the messenger.
Is this really common?
I'm aware there's climate change denial, but amongst those not wilfully ignorant, I would've presumed the fact that we're now working to slow the rate of change is a well-accepted best-case.
This assumes that even if we stopped all emissions today, things will be fine. Like there's some sort of Pause button. Things won't be fine: if we stopped everything today, we'd reach the +2°C at the end of the century. Things are going to get worse even if we stop emitting.
> What we have emitted so far is in the air and it's too late.
Why? There could be carbon capture technologies implemented, massive reforestation efforts organized.
- planting trees where there were before: reforestation
- planting trees where there never were before: afforestation
Even with afforestation we won't be able to plant enough trees to fill the hole back. Especially if we use the wood for heating.
I thought it was obvious that the ideas I proposed had an implicit AND operator in between them, not an OR. No single solution by itself is enough. Going vegan alone isn't enough. Reducing flying alone isn't enough. Eliminating ICE vehicles alone isn't enough. 100% renewable energy alone isn't enough.
> Especially if we use the wood for heating
So don't use it for heating - use it in construction, furniture, or heck turn it into charcoal and bury it. Why would people use it for heating if clean electricity is made widely available?
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/how-t...
[2] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...
Regarding Microsoft's CO2 pumping:
> Solving our planet’s carbon issues will require technology that does not exist today.
This is exactly what I'm saying in my first post. We are waiting for the technology Messiah.
Coffee could go extinct and our generation would just have nostalgic idle chats about it here and there, but nothing would really change. Kids who never drank coffee would grow up and never think about it, much less care. Bangladesh could completely sink tomorrow, and you'd have people 15 years from now saying it's all some grand conspiracy and Bangladesh never really existed. You'd just have people saying climate never changed and taking family trips to the beach would be a good way to cool off on those hot Nunavut February nights.
People just kind of adapt to whatever's happening around them. No matter how crazy or awful it is, people just get apathetic after a while. And so long as someone has financial motivations to push the idea that this is normal, people will keep thinking it is and they'll forget just how much things changed.
"Generation to Generation, the natural world decays, the ratchet of perception tightens. Gradually, imperceptibly, big sharks give way to small sharks, small sharks to baitfish, baitfish to jellyfish to slime (algae and cyanobacteria). On land, the big cats and wolves becomes feral cats and coyotes. The wild standard sinks ever lower and becomes ever heavier to raise. Few notice, few care. Eventually nobody remembers that wolves not long ago freely roamed the Adirondacks, and hence there is mad howling over the suggestion of returning them to their homeland. Southern Californians panic on learning that a cougar track has been discovered on the fringes of their neighborhood- mindless that cougars roamed these hills and canyons long before gated communities drew their lines in the chaparral. 'Shifting baselines' help explain why the Pennsylvania deer hunter sees everything right and nothing wrong in a forest that's swarming with deer yet as barren of biodiversity as a city park."
~ William Stolzenburg, Where the Wild Things Were
The same effect, but the good side of it.
These people make take some unscientific ideas to their graves but they will also take a lot of fear and hatred with them.
https://pluralist.com/greta-thunberg-facebook-bug-dad-svante...
I acknowledge climate change is a thing and should be taken seriously, but the left does itself no favors by manufacturing a petulant child as its messenger. You need messengers that are credible and aren't just preaching to the choir if you want to make progress in convincing people.
Why do you think 18 year olds are conscripted into armies? This is sad, but communists refer to it as "the children's revolution" or some such, it's a long-time tactic that they have used many times before, look it up.
It's pretty consistent for Time Magazine to name ol' Greta Person of The Year given their previous adulation for Adolf Hitler. Great judge of character that magazine is.
The right ignored IPCC scientists, they laughed at Al Gore (for having a private jet - yeah I get that it's a very easy thing to hate), but somehow they can't do a thing to a teenager largely repeating the points already made (and ignored) by IPCC and Al Gore, all their usual propaganda tactics do nothing against her, and somehow that makes the right frothing mad.
I guess tasting one's own medicine feels awful. Shrug.
It's scary to me how true it rings.
The reason the modern environmental movement started in Southern California is because the degradation happened within people's life times.
I testified at one of the public hearings about protecting pacific salmon. [1] I mentioned, much less eloquently than Stolzenburg, that new arrivals to the PNW had no idea what had been lost. Just like I could barely imagine the rivers full of fish, as told by the First Peoples.
Maybe we all should be telling more stories. When I was teenager, my boss (from Canada) said they'd play hockey every day, but now their lakes didn't freeze enough. I tell my son that we used to have slugs every where and most every (non summer) morning was foggy until noon.
1] https://www.stoel.com/nmfs-final-4d-rule-for-salmon-and-stee...
It's -40C in Canada where I am currently. Not uncommon, honestly. What is uncommon though, is that the rest of the winter has been very mild. My wife tells similar stories of skating on a local creek that used to freeze at the end of November...
I think the culprit in this case was overfishing, but the term was general enough to apply to any change like this. Maybe someone reading this knows the term.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
edit: The article links to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality
It fits, but it doesn't ring the bell my head is looking for. Maybe that is it. Memory is weird.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064787
Certainly in the long term, the climate will change. We harnessed the natural world and brought it on ourselves sooner. I think we should do what we can, but the apocalyptic language of "planet on fire", etc, and all of us pretending that our little snapshot of the climate is all there ever was and we should never expect to adapt to anything else seems utterly foolish and more big-headed than I can put into words.
As someone who believes in climate change, and grew up playing in the snow - what on earth are you talking about? Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion?
Exaggerating to the extent you are does nothing but hurt the message because it's blatantly and obviously false and when climate deniers read people making claims like you are, the entire discussion loses all credibility.
I agree. In the Northeast part of the US we still get really cold and snowy winters. But almost year after year our summers are getting hotter. And the seasons in between those are getting shorter.
I cannot speak to other areas, but the Adirondack Park fire seasons are actually in the Spring and Fall.
>I give it 5 years
Eh, maybe in southern areas. But that's highly unlikely in the ADK.
Now, this winter has been 30-50 degrees F all winter, save for the occasional blast of polar air. We haven't had snow that has stuck longer than a week. The GP's message was correct. Besides, do you really think that an exaggerated claim will be what makes/breaks a climate denier's point of view?
I grew up in Upstate NY. There were plenty of warm winters in the '70s and '80s. I don't think anything is remarkably different.
Also, we had some summers that were freezing--like you never wanted to go swimming the whole summer except maybe one week in August. Other summers were blazing. My parents' old farmhouse didn't have A/C. They still don't have A/C now.
A minute of googling revealed this for Toronto snowfall [1]:
I calculate from the limited data on that web page (years 2010-2018) that the mean snowfall in Toronto is 36.6 inches and the standard deviation is 13.8 inches.It looks like snowfall is increasing not decreasing. However, such limited data doesn't really reveal what's happening or going to happen in the future. There were only 9 data points given on the page I found. Someone can undoubtably find official historical data for Canada that will be more useful.
[1] https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/Canada/ON/Toro...
Ironically Toronto is the city least affected because of the great lakes, with little or no trend.
http://funintheup.com/snowfall/upper-peninsula-snowfall-tota...
New England.
Snow that fell in mid-November and later used to stick around until spring and we'd almost NEVER (like maybe one day every 3+ yr) have a 50-60deg day in January/February. Now you rarely have snow that sticks around more than a couple weeks and having the occasional 50+deg day in January/February is not uncommon. Winters have definitely become more mild in the past 20ish years.
Valley towns in the Alps.
Here in Buffalo, NY, we've had 1 snowfall this year >6". It was in November. It hasn't been much over 48F though, not in the 50-60F range. But last year had some of that, and we're only half way through January.
> With 118.7 inches of snow, Buffalo had its 12th snowiest winter on record and was 24 inches above the normal of 94.7 inches.
Maybe things aren't quite as dire in Buffalo as you think?
1: https://www.weather.gov/buf/wintersummary1819
We've had an extremely mild winter in Rochester, NY. It's finally taking a turn this week, but my expensive ski season pass has had a rough run so far.
https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2020/01/14/r...
> What's more, the high temperature every single day since Dec. 21 has been above freezing. That’s never happened in Rochester’s recorded weather history. The average temperature during that time has been a rather astonishing 35 percent higher than normal.
This kind of black or white thinking is absurd. Why would disproving some random comment on HN automatically mean disproving all climate science? It's extremely irritating when someone uses disapproval of a weak claim to as proof that a much stronger claim is also wrong.
It is a very common theme to see "scientists failed to predict highly specific event in area X" and then use that as justification to say something like "CO2 doesn't cause warming".
I'm tired of this topic so I will keep it short: Invest in modern technology (it's good for business). Market it as a jobs program. Stop hanging onto obsolete technology. These incentives will always exist whether it's a scam or not.
So if someone trying to convince you that there's life on Mars starts from the premise that the earth is flat, are you going to give credence to the rest of their talking points or brush them off?
You can be "irritated" all you want, the fact of the matter is people like OP do nothing but hurt the cause and discussion around climate change when they start from a position that's both demonstrably false and so outlandish as to ruin any further discussion. It HURTS the cause because someone who was on the fence would likely be driven off the wrong side.
The problem being described is folks using that dumb flat Earther as a reason not to listen to anyone else on the same side of the debate with much better arguments.
"Someone claimed climate change will make the world 180 degrees by 2021, which is silly, therefore climate change is debunked."
Tying every observable short-term climate anomaly to CO2 will continue to backfire as often as not, because the truth is nobody can predict whether one year will be snowier than the next, or whether the next major natural disaster will be a hurricane, a flood, or a fire. The overall claim will actually become harder to sell - if that’s your goal.
They got the date wrong by a few years, and the new expected date is 2030. This is now being portrayed as if a major error was made and climate change is debunked, but it's really just an example of how most science includes a margin of error.
No, I wouldn't stake my house on it, but I wouldn't bet my house for a 99% chance of winning a million bucks, either.
Ignoring your 50-60 degrees, this matches The Netherlands quite well. When I grew up in that magical place, snow was a regular occurrence (not all winter long, but snow happened every year, as did ice skating on rivers). Now, when it happens, it is a rare exception.
I actually found a graph for it, but can't account for its veracity. It shows the number of days per year with complete snow cover, over the past 60 years: https://www.weerwoord.be/m/2466231
Guy Fawkes night (Nov 5) was usually too early for snow, but nearly always a cold, frosty night, often clear that you wrapped up well for the firework display. You were usually glad to get back into the warm. A good few years in the last ten and it's been late summer or autumn weather. Barely worth a coat, let alone hat, gloves, scarf and extra layers.
My uncle had a hotel at the north edge of the alps. Bought it around 40 years ago. At that time they had skiing throughout winter and it was the biggest money maker. They also had a women's world cup race every year. This lasted for a few years, then they cancelled the race because of lack of snow. By now all ski lifts are closed in the winter. Some of them are used in summer. There is a also a ski jump facility next to his town. Also closed for years now. A lot of hotels have gone bankrupt including my uncle's.
>the entire discussion loses all credibility
Now that is an exaggeration.
Climate change is already credible and a localized exaggeration isn't going to change minds...
I live about 150 miles north of NYC. Last weekend, I planted tulips that I forgot about in the fall, wearing shorts. The weather that we have here today is warmer than the ocean climate around NYC and Long Island was in the 80s when I was a little kid.
Don't wear your shorts out tonight because it is going to be <20F and snow.
Note the central Florida citrus industry was thriving in the first half of the 20th century with freezes being extremely uncommon. During the 70s, it even snowed once in Miami.
My parents grew up in southwestern PA. My mother grew up on a large farm (dairy and ~500 acres of planted crops) and often recollects about the 50s and 60s. They would often travel on the ag run-off canals and smaller creeks, streams, and rivers, to trade supplies with neighbors. They could travel miles on the ice. They didn't have roads in this section of PA until the late 60s and early 70s, when the coal company came in (and state routes were built to support their industry). They would butcher cattle during the winter and could store it in the back of the barn, in a small stone cellar that was only partially below ground. The meat would freeze overnight and remain frozen into the spring.
These things are gone today and it's happened before my own eyes inside of 2 generations of my own family, at that.
For those who like data/numbers here you go.
http://funintheup.com/snowfall/upper-peninsula-snowfall-tota...
From the website
>Hello all, welcome back to another winter season here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This is the 8th year of snowfall reports on FunintheUP.com, thanks for following the snowfall page! FunintheUP has quickly become the #1 place for snowfall totals for those interested. . This year will be another fun year of snow, are you ready? We have 10s of 1000s of followers that check in from snowmobilers, weather stations, emergency personnel, city officials, road crews, skiers, snowboarders, groomers, ski resorts, and many more people across the country and world who love to follow the snowfall totals across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Last year Tamarack Loc. with 362.8 inches of snowfall for the season, passing the 1978/79 (Houghton county) record of 354.1 inches. This is the 4th highest snowfall amount recorded in the Upper Peninsula. The highest snowfall ever recorded in the Upper Peninsula was in 1978/79 at the Keweenaw county snow station with 390.4 inches. --Thank you so much for your support for over the years, Yooper Steve.
https://mobile.twitter.com/mourner/status/121746938033601741...
It aligns pretty well with my personal experience in south-west Poland. It's been several years in a row with no snow for Christmas/until new year. OTOH when I was a kid, I remember being stuck on a road on our way to my grandma's place for Christmas due to massive snowfall.
Not in the arctic, but at places more on the limit of the snowline, why would you NOT expect this to be happening already.
Maybe the consumers...you have to keep in mind the competing interests of capitalism. I could see SV and SV VCs falling all over themselves with such a "market opportunity."
>And so long as someone has financial motivations to push the idea that this is normal, people will keep thinking it is and they'll forget just how much things changed.
This! I could see VCs start investing in numerous companies hawking all kinds of caffeine pills and supplements, spending billions on marketing, such that consumers would stop talking about the nostalgia of coffee, rather begin asking how we ever lived without X startup that has disrupted the industry and optimized "human energy."
"MacKinnon illustrates this phenomenon, known in psychology as “change blindness,” with an anecdote about fish photographs from the Florida Keys. Old photographs from the 1940s show delighted fishermen displaying their prize catches—marlins as long as a man is tall. When present-day fishermen see those pictures, they flat-out refuse to believe they are authentic.
Human beings tend to be blind to gradual changes in their environment, assuming that the way things are right now is how they always have been and always will be. We do not miss the former beauty of the world, he would say, because we have never known it.
I am not so sure that we don’t miss it. I think we do miss it, but we don’t know what it is we are missing. We feel a void, a sense of poverty, a hunger for something unidentifiable. Transferred onto money or consumer items, that hunger drives continued cycles of destruction. Transferred onto drugs, gambling, alcohol, it drives the unsolvable social problem of addiction. Perhaps the degradation of nature is not without its consequences after all."
"Explorers and naturalists of previous centuries give staggering testimony to the incredible natural wealth of North America and other places before colonization. Here are some images from another book, Steve Nicholls’s Paradise Found:
Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”
I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now."
> The last pair, found incubating an egg, was killed there on 3 June 1844, on request from a merchant who wanted specimens, with Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangling the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashing the egg with his boot.
Americans are experiencing less snow because they are migrating to warmer areas. [2]
[1] http://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/Temperature-Change-Ove...
[2] https://www.curbed.com/2017/3/27/15077042/sunbelt-snowbelt-m...
One data point is one data point.
EDIT: This is the other side of the its-snowing-so-no-global-warming coin.
Which pretty much nails the problem. Us older folks remember that cold, snowy winters were normal, that there were orders of magnitude more insects such that frequent stops to clear windscreen, headlights or helmet visor were just normal. We remember mixed farms that husbanded the land rather than beat it into submission.
Those kid's normal is no insects, no snow, monoculture industrial farmland everywhere, signs of human interference in every remote corner of the globe. Most live in concreted cities where food comes from the shop, not the land. Everything is based on that "normality of childhood". They quite literally don't see the problem. Even seeing old photos and film footage doesn't convey... I wish I'd listened to more of my granddad's tales of shire horses and traction engines. I wish I could have seen through his eyes.
The environment and natural world has become a theme park to visit for a skiing holiday, safari or to farm to oblivion. To watch in the latest Attenborough. Only a few outdoorsy types understand it, even fewer what it used to be any more.
Most of us have no connection with the natural world. Every industry and activity has become unsustainable by injecting rampant consumerism and near limitless fossil fuel into the process. Ironic so many of us are starting to actually care about impact, as it reaches worst ever.
I really do think OP has it right saying we need the "appearance of immediate, severe-yet-not-deadly impacts on our day-to-day lives" before anything truly significant will happen.
I fondly remember playing in the snow in Siberia and above north circle in northern parts of Russia during my childhood. Now in California, I am truly expecting >50F January (and I mostly get it).
Using snow cannons and by moving snow around, they managed to keep most of the resort open. Obviously, it wasn't perfect, and off-piste was out of the question, but it was good enough to be enjoyable.
So while climate change will certainly affect alpine skiing negatively, but resorts made a lot of progress dealing with less than ideal conditions.
Yeah using snow cannons to keep climate change affected ski resorts open is borderline genius. /s
For those who want to snowboard when there is no snow, a "freeboard" is probably the closest emulation on tarmac.
Though, if or when golf starts getting hit by climate change, that will really move the needle.
Wish there was a way to filter out ridiculousness from the feed.
I don't get the impression of reduction in snowfall nor snow depth.
2010 and 2011 look bad comparatively.. but recent years look variable-yet-stable.
======================
https://www.onthesnow.co.uk/northern-alps/val-disere/histori...
I don’t particularly like watching hockey, that doesn’t mean we could do without it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Germany is switching off the coal plants and replacing them with natural gas which releases only 50% CO2 than coal.
The nuclear plants will be switched off without replacement at all. The over all energy budget will be reduced due to better energy efficiency.
See also the thread from today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062968
Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable (afp.com)
So, yah, basically Germany shut down nuclear plants and replaced them with natural gas.
Good job Germany.