Skiing is an elusive luxury: tourism, by nature, conceals its mechanisms well. The activity is designed to be a break from everyday life, popping into a view a couple weeks a year, a wonderful whim on the odd weekend away.But skiing is also an industry employing nearly 200,000 people in some fashion in the United States, worth some $10.7 billion yearly. If you're one of those people in, say, Telluride, Colorado right now--e.g. making a career out of people sliding down some snow on boards, along with the rest of the town--you might be a touch nervous: this fall has been bone dry. Actually, save for a fairly epic outlier 2011/2012 season, the past ten years have been dry. Lots of sun, little of the valuable, let's-go-for-a-sleighride kind of snow.The slopes in Telluride have been open since Thanksgiving, but that has only to do with snowmaking machines. Up until this week, when a more favorable weather pattern moved in, you'd have found mostly dirt and brown grass. This weekend is calling for a solid foot of new snow and it could make all the difference: there aren't too many industries that have such a short lag time between weather and "$$$" as snow sports.But several new reports/studies have terrible news for skiing in the future. One of them, from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Protect Our Winters, claims "economic devastation" to come for the industry, while The New York Times reports:Under certain warming scenarios, more than half of the 103 ski resorts in the Northeast will not be able to maintain a season length of 100 days by 2039, according to a study to be published next year by Daniel Scott, director of the Interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. By then, no ski area in Connecticut or Massachusetts is likely to be economically viable, Mr. Scott said. Only 7 of 18 resorts in New Hampshire and 8 of 14 in Maine will be. New York’s 36 ski areas, most of them in the western part of the state, will have shrunk to nine.Indeed, the key words for Northeast winters to come is "wintry mix," a lot more winter moisture, but not enough cold air to keep it white. But it's bad all over the country. In Colorado, average winter temperatures should rise some seven degrees farenheit by the end of the century. According to the Times, that means zero snowpack for Park City, Utah, and about a quarter of the current nowpack for Aspen. Expect ski towns around the country to turn back into ghost towns, abandoned by mining the first time, and tourists the next.Skiing, however, is just a narrow slice of the coming perma-drought, which also means potential devestation to ranching and farming. It's already bad actually; Telluride, in southwest Colorado, also happens to be surrounded by dry reservoirs, ranches selling off cattle, unproductive farmlands, and forests that are either burned recently or waiting for some spark to explode.The ski situation isn't much better in Europe, sadly. A 2008 study from the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research suggests even more severe climate consequences. New Scientist reports:In the late 1980s, there was a dramatic step-like drop in the amount of snow falling in the Swiss Alps. Since then, snowfall has never recovered. In some years, the amount that fell on the plateau between Zurich, Bern and Basel was 60 per cent lower than was typical in the early 1980s, says Christoph Marty at the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos. He has analysed snowfall trends spanning 60 years and adds that the average number of snow days over the last 20 winters is lower than at any time since records began more than 100 years ago.Superstorms are expected to increase with climate change. Remember, the balance is shifting in favor of extreme events. But two feet of snow over a weekend in New York and Philidelphia doesn't mean very much without sustained cold temperatures. Which should be along in 10,000 to 100,000 years, in the form of the next ice age.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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