No snow and nowhere to go

The alpine economy braces for a rough ride downhill as threats of global warming grow.

High temperatures and rain revisited Megeve, the posh ski resort in the French Alps, and other mountain areas of Europe recently, prolonging a mild winter that is striking hard at alpine economies and fuelling a debate about what is causing the strange weather.

Hundreds of professional ski races in Europe — as much as half the season's schedule — have been cancelled or disrupted, including downhill, cross-country and jumping events in Italy, France, Switzerland, Finland and Norway. Italy alone has cancelled 104 races this season, including 35 in the first two weeks of January.

Ominous report

Race organisers in Kitzbuhel, Austria, used helicopters to dump more than 100,000 cu ft of snow from higher elevations onto the famed Hahnenkamm downhill course to save a race from cancellation and stave off a blow to the resort's economy.

In Megeve, a glitzy but low-altitude resort that is one of France's oldest winter sports towns, vacationers traded skis for umbrellas as temperatures climbed to 45F. In the town centre, workers taped huge sheets of plastic over the skating rink to protect it from the deluge.

About half the area's 200 ski runs were open to begin with, but in a matter of days, barely a quarter were. On the lower half of the mountain, trails that are normally snowbound by mid-January were still alpine meadows, keeping many would-be skiers away. Mayor Girard Morand said lift revenues were 30 per cent lower than by this time last year.

"I have never seen it this bad in January," said Michael Vibert, manager of the Savoyard, a 120-seat restaurant.

The unseasonably mild weather in Europe's Alps and bizarre conditions elsewhere — freezing temperatures in southern California, early-season snow dumps in the Rockies, spring-like weather in parts of Canada and blooming flowers in Paris and London — are raising concerns about long-term climate change and its potential impact on skiing in general, and Megeve in particular.

A recent report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that a temperature rise of 3.6F in the Alps could lower the number of European ski resorts with "reliable" snow conditions from 600 to 400, with lower-lying areas being particularly vulnerable.

"The years 1994, 2000, 2002 and 2003 were the warmest on record in the Alps in the last 500 years", the report said. "Climate model projections show even greater changes in the coming decades."

Adrien Duvillard, Megeve's director of tourism, said: "If we do nothing now, it will be terrible in ten years." He said global warming was beginning to hurt the ski industry. "and if in 20 years we are on the same track, there will be no snow at our altitude".

Keith Fenwick, a forecaster with the Met Office, Britain's national weather service, said temperatures in the alpine regions this year were running between seven and 13F above long-term averages.

Two views

In the Alps these days, people tend to fall into two camps: those who see the weather problems as clear evidence of global warming and those who think it is part of an unavoidable natural cycle.

"We cannot do anything if countries like the United States don't sign the Kyoto accords'', the 1997 pact on global warming, said Bertrand Bibollet, who works at a local ski rental shop. "Resorts below 1,000m are doomed to close in the next 20 years.''

But others pointed out that Megeve had its best ski season in decades last year, with cold weather allowing skiing from December 15 to April 15. They also noted that the resort had suffered bad years before — particularly the 1989-90 season, when the first snow did not arrive until January 27.

"I don't believe in global warming — I think it is a cyclical, natural phenomenon,'' said Dominique Socquet, head of a ski school at Combloux, a small resort connected to Megeve by a system of lifts and trails.

Meanwhile, the resort will hold its second annual conference on global warming soon, to highlight the problem and the dangers it posed to the ski industry.

"We are worried,'' said Laurent Ancenay, tourism director for Combloux. "We are low, at 1,200m, and when they tell us we are not going to have snow in a few years, we really want to know if it is true.''