Snow shortage threatens Alps with wet winter season
bbc.comIt's strange. Not alps here but seems to be all over Europe... I got to Czech Republic early December. There was snow on the ground everywhere we went. First time I've seen snow in Prague (last winter was mostly just cold and rainy). In my SO's town, like a foot of snow and was -10C. A few days before Christmas travelled to another small town south of Prague, even more snow. Then suddenly the weather shifted and it's been +15C for the last 2 weeks or so. All the snow gone and feels like spring. Strange weather.
Strange weather should now slowly not be surprising anymore to anyone .. when will the last ones realize we are kind of doomed since years?
This is just the "normal" heatwave now over Europe that occurs in winter.
Yes, early December was cold, and then there was a dramatic, 15°C to 20°C change here (near Paris, we went from 0°C to almost 15°C at noon in two days). That was around 20/12, IIRC. We went from colder than usual to close to record highs in no time.
Now, it’s getting cold again but even if it remains cold it’s too late to build up a decent snow cover for skiing.
It's not threatening the Alps. It's threatening the tourism industry in the Alps - which itself is threatening the Alps.
So, IMHO, not really a bad thing in the long run.
Yes, many of these places currently rely on tourism as their primary source of income. So yes, they will have to change and find other sources or accept that people move away from these places.
I live in Switzerland. This year, we had mosquitos on January 1st. WTF?
For the first time ever I had to cancel my holidays due to climate change. I was planning on skiing in the first week of January, not gonna happen.
It was 14 degrees during the day on 31 Dec. 20 years ago it was unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year.
Meanwhile, western US resorts are having their best November and December in over a decade. Alta has already received 300 inches this year!
> 20 years ago it was unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year.
This is one of those widely spread Mandela effect-style misconceptions.
The chances of a white Christmas in the UK are around 10%, and depending where you are in the US [0], especially if you consider the population density not pictured in that chart, even lower.
Humans generally hugely overestimate how often a white Christmas actually happens due to selection bias.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(weather)#/med...
> The chances of a white Christmas in the UK are around 10%, and depending where you are in the US [0], especially if you consider the population density not pictured in that chart, even lower.
Why do you assume the OP is in the UK or US? We’re discussing climate and weather in the Alps; there are plenty of places in Europe where a white Christmas really was not unusual.
The probabilities in Germany are around 12.5% and around 40% in Switzerland itself [0].
To live anywhere where to quote OP "it [would be] unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year" would basically mean living in a skiable country itself, so I did do a lot of assuming there.
But then I don't ski. I wouldn't know if skiers take vacations around the world to see different snow.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei%C3%9Fe_Weihnachten_(Wetter...
I spent a while looking at this trying to figure out why 14 degrees would be a problem before I realized it was Celsius rather than Freedomheit.
You can come to USA. Utah and california had great starts to their ski season. One of the best, infact.
Weather is not climate.
What is the purpose of your comment? Do you have a belief that if the global mean temperature were, for instance, raised 3 degrees celsius that this change would not result in noticeable changes in weather? Weather does not affect or result in global warming but global warming does affect and result in weather change.
Many people maliciously conflate "climate change" with "man-made climate change".
The year 2002 called and wants its denialism back. The effects of added CO2 are so simple to understand, CO2 is so easy to measure...
For all intents and purposes, at our scale both are the same. You have to go back several decades for baseline natural variation to be larger than the human-caused increase in average temperatures.
Weather and weather events are a consequence of a number of factors, a big one of which is climate and change in the latter therefore also drives change in the former.
Example: in my home city the winters have been getting warmer on average pretty drastically. I'm in my mid-twenties, around the time of my birth the average winter weather YoY was still cold enough to freeze the sound (not the audio one) near my home deep and hard enough anyone could walk nearly the whole width from one bank to the other. During my early childhood we had ~0.5m of snow nearly all winter but I can't remember having even a "white christmas" since I was ~14. Even this winter we had like 10-15cm of snow total, most of which melted as soon as hit the ground, a layer of ~5cm stayed for around a week a bit before christmas. The holidays themself were cold (not freezing) and it rained almost the entire time.
Extremely funny, because for the last fifteen years whenever it got bitterly, unseasonably cold (like in the US last week) - climate deniers would quietly chuckle and be shouted down with screams of "weather is not climate".
Which it's true, it was stupid then to take a cold snap as "climate change is fake lol", but it's also stupid now to take a warm spell as "we are doomed climate chaaange".
Generally I wouldn't characterise the climate change deniers as "quietly chuckling", while the other side was "screaming". But no, neither weird cold snaps or weird heatwaves are climate change. However, increased volatility and unusual variation both ways can indeed be caused by and associated with global warming.
Sure. But this is a pointless thing to complain about.
OP could have given a long, complex nuanced statement to appease pedants like "Due to climate change making warm weather and lack of snow in January far more likely than in the past, there was in fact warm weather and lack of snow during my planned trip, so I had to cancel my plans. The odds of this happening without decades of carbon emissions from fossil fuels would have been very unlikely".
Or, you can skip all that excessive cruft which is understood by almost everyone as being implicit and just say due to climate change.
Even my father, an ardent "global warming is bullshit" supporter, admits that something weird is going on with the weather now.
But climate is composed of weather.
#/media/File:Probability_of_a_white_Christmas_in_the_United_States_1981-2010.jpg){kind=link}
A number of ski resorts have already closed down (temporarily one hopes) in Switzerland (https://www.20min.ch/story/so-dramatisch-ist-die-lage-in-den...)
I hope they close down permanently. At least it creates more incentive for countries to invest in reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Nice timing. I was in Avoriaz, France yesterday. At 1800 meters, it is more likely to have snow. Still it hit 13 degrees yesterday. That’s too warm for the snow cannons. It was the only resort around to have snow, so it was super crowded.
With the energy crisis in Europe this winter, I'm sure most people will trade a shorter ski season for higher average temperatures. Maybe Switzerland does not import much gas and would be the exception to this?
I think Switzerland has, in general, not suffered the energy price increases of other countries, but it varies from canton to canton depending on their energy supplies, I think some cantons won't do so well.
My canton uses nearly all renewables, but price increases are still predicted, mine are far less than other cantons, but it still goes up because of grid costs
> With the energy crisis in Europe this winter, I'm sure most people will trade a shorter ski season for higher average temperatures.
Those around the Mediterranean, who’ve lived through 46°C last summer? Even England was miserably hot. Nobody wants it to get any hotter.
Who are you referring to? I live within a couple of kilometers from the Mediterranean and I don't remember the temperature ever reaching 40°C. I don't think summers are much hotter compared to when I was a kid, I still use the AC from early June to early September. Winters did get warmer, and I don't see how that's a bad thing.
Sorry I got my memories mixed up. The 46°C record was in 2019 (near Nîmes, south of France, where I go regularly on holiday). This year we’ve had the usual 40°C, just in 3 waves from mid-June to mid-August instead of the usual August hot week. The water was at 30°C, though, which was unheard of. We’ve also had a lot of wildfires, even more so than usual, although they were less catastrophic than those near the Atlantic.
They did break records on the Atlantic side, with 43°C near Bordeaux and 40°C in Brittany (!)
> Winters did get warmer, and I don't see how that's a bad thing.
It is terrible for several reasons, for example:
- the plant’s cycles are out of whack, with flowers in January that are then destroyed by frost in March
- pests and parasites are not killed by the frost in the winter, which leads to a whole bunch of them in both spring and summer. Look at what this is doing to forests in California.
And that’s considering only local effects. Ecosystems are getting destroyed in real time in the mountains and in the Arctic, where the ground is not permanently frozen anymore, leading to all sorts of fun things (landslides, methane release, wildfires).
There are absolutely no upsides near the Mediterranean, where it never was particularly cold in the first place.
Silver lining, hopefully some rich people of influence are disappointed enough to start taking CC seriously.
rich just fly to wherever there is snow.
Does Europe’s record-setting coal, gas, and biomass energy usage this winter have anything to do with this result?
/s
Big thumps up if this is the question of a climate denier: No we are not having thet because of dumping a lot of CO2 that had been captured over millions of years into the atmosphere, but it is because French's nuclear plants are so rusty that we now used so much more biomass - lol.
If this ""winter"" continues like that I believe we will even use less gas/coal than previous years.. not sure why you think this year is record-setting.. we just switched to different sources?
sounds like its a supply line problem. probably stretching all the way to china.