Ski It While You Can

??? Has anyone heard the recent story in the news about the Cascade snow pack? Scientists are predicting that with global warming the Cascade snow pack could decrease by 50% in the next 50 years. I don't know about you but I find that pretty disheartening. Now you would think that the ski culture and the ski industry in this country would be up and arms and outspoken about the issue of global warming but you barely ever hear a peep about it and usually no more than a short little blurb in the rags. Until recently I have seen very little advocacy support by the ski culture or the ski industry. Has anyone seen a full blown article about the current and potential affects of global warming on skiing in any of the industry rags - mainstream or backcountry? I have to wonder why this issue has not been out in the forefront. Are we all just out living in the moment and having too much fun making turns to care? <br><br>I picked up last months issue of Ski Magazine because it had an article about East Coast Extreme and having my ski roots in New England I had to check it out. There was an add from NRDC (Natural Resources Defence Council) concerning skiing and global warming. I was glad to see that the advocacy groups are finally trying to tap into the hearts and minds of skiers. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this subject ever since seeing that add. Yes, it has been in the back of my mind for years now, but seeing that add got me to check out their website, and do some google searches on global warming and affects on the Cascade snow pack. I think we need more support of advocacy so they can run adds like that and get people thinking about this and once we start thinking about it we may actually do something about it. We need more articles published in the rags and as a culture we need to speak out in order to preseve the mountains and sport we love so much. If we don't are our kids going to have the opportunity in 40 years to experince the bliss of cutting up an untracked slope? <br><br>Did you know that many of the glaciers in the Cascades have already receeded 40% since 1979. Did you know that when the Nisqually Bridge at Mt Rainier was built it was actually built to span over the Nisqually Glacier? Now you can barely see the foot of the Nisqually Glacier from the bridge. Even this year, which everyone would probably agree has seen great ski conditions for the most part, I have noticed that the creeks up at Snoqualmie Pass are not really filling in. Source lake is still open as of last weekend. I have also noticed over the last 13 years of my Cascade backcountry skiing experience that the snow line (the elevation at which the winter snow pack remains all season) has been slowly inching up. There are predictions that in 40 years the snow line which is now around 2,400' will be over 4000'. That means you can kiss a lot of the backcountry skiing at Snoqualmie Pass good by. Does the ski culture really want to continue to ignore this?<br><br>So I've started this thread, I'd like to see it grow and explode and turn into a movment just like a snowball falling from the limb of a fir tree onto the snowpack starting a small sluff that grows and gains momentum and mass until it becomes a class 4 avalanche.<br><br>Check out these links:<br>www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/default.asp

seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/100613_climatechange19.shtml

Well all of the diesel exhaust from ski lifts can't be helping either. Neither does the exhaust from all of the cars we use to haul ourselves out into the hills.<br><br>Dirty air deposits crap all over the glaciers, and that is thought to hasten their melting, and/or inhibit the retention of new snow. So what is more to blame, global warming, or air pollution itself? <br><br>Does this have anything to do with the rumors of millions of tons of dust and other various air contaminants flying over the Pacific from Asia? Or even, for the sake of argument, could this just be an ignorable "natural climate trend" as per the dogma of corporate industrialism?<br><br>Or should we just try to carpool to work instead of driving by ourselves in an SUV from Everett to Seattle twice a day? Since when did "one man, one car" become the creed of the modern metropolis?

Haven't you seen....sand dune skiing is already the rage!<br>Just imagine no more boiler plate to deal with on gnarly descents, just nice scree slopes....doesn't sound too bad.

Some scientists say we'll experience a mini ice age when the polar ice caps melt. If this is true, I'm all for global warming! ;D

Lots of people are plotting glacial retreat using sat photos and surveys. The results fall mainly on deaf ears in this country. <br>I saw an old photo of Greenlake in Seattle, frozen with 100's of people ice skating on it. I don't think you'll see that any time soon. I believe it was the Economist that had an article recently that European banks are no longer financing new ski resorts built below 5000 feet.

It is hard to imagine that anyone will seriously listen to a bunch of recreationalists complain about losing a couple of weeks off of each end of their ski season, when the impact of droughts, fires etc., etc. will be a much more serious consequence.<br><br>Note also that it will be decades before it likely will be plainly obvious of the slow creep in the climate change. The bottom line in our culture is to spend it all now and pay later (or die and leave the mess to your kids), so it is not likely that enough people will complain about this issue. In general we can't even manage something as straight forward as a credit card, how we gonna change this in such a selfish society. Very unlike the total outcry that would happen if the change were sudden.<br><br>

At Crystal Mountain on Saturday I saw a banner for Keep Winter Cool, which is "a partnership between NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) and the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) to raise visibility and public understanding of global warming and spotlight opportunities that exist right now to start fixing the problem."<br><br>www.keepwintercool.org/

Speaking of defense it looks like this global warming is hot issue with the pentagon.<br><br>Editorial: Global warming/Dire warnings from Pentagon<br>(Star tribune) <br> <br>Published February 8, 2004 ED0208A <br><br>Discussions of global warming's probable impacts tend to have a good news/bad news tenor, and often a tone of plucky optimism -- sure, we may be growing cotton instead of corn in Minnesota someday, but we can adapt to that.<br><br>Part of this complacency derives from large uncertainties about what those impacts will be, and how gradually they may be felt. Though the warming trend is clear, and the role of human contributions well understood, forecasting the effects remains an exercise in conjecture.<br><br>Unfortunate attitudes contribute as well: our impatience with questions that can't be answered clearly and quickly, our indifference to faraway suffering. So does our confidence that we can avoid, manipulate or accommodate all downsides of environmental mismanagement.<br><br>Such conceits are threatened by growing evidence suggesting that the global climate could change quite quickly and unevenly -- and by a recent Pentagon assessment of what this might mean for U.S. security. Its findings are described in depth in a recent article in Fortune.<br><br>As a starting point, the strategic planners took a mainstream explanation for several sudden ice ages that have occurred in the last 13,000 years. It concerns the "great conveyor" current of warm water that flows from the tropics to the U.S. eastern seaboard and then across the Atlantic to northern Europe, creating far milder winter regimes than would otherwise prevail.<br><br>Scientists believe that spells of rapid warming weakened this current, diluting it with increased rainfall and meltwater from Arctic ice. This caused the flow to shut down in as little as 10 years, and led to ice ages that persisted as long as a thousand.<br><br>The last long one, selected by the Pentagon planners for their models, began 8,200 years ago and was over in about 100 years. What would a recurrence in the next few decades do? A sampling from their scenario:<br><br>• Droughts, famine and freezing weather produce huge streams of refugees -- from Mexico, South America and the Caribbean into the United States; from Africa into southern Europe; from Scandinavia into western Europe -- forcing the destination countries to become fortresses.<br><br>• Small wars break out as invaders seek the resources needed for survival. Armies from Eastern Europe invade Russia, or border conflicts escalate between India and Pakistan. Perhaps Japan seizes Russia's eastern oil fields, or Spain and Portugal battle over fisheries.<br><br>• Ballooning demand for heat outruns the capabilities of fossil-fuel technologies, and many governments build nuclear power plants. A byproduct is weapons-grade fissile material, enabling a half-dozen countries to acquire their first nuclear weapons.<br><br>All speculation, of course. But behind it lies respectable data and reasonable assumptions -- not to mention history. We need not go back many centuries to find periods when starvation or other forms of scarcity stimulated all-out war.<br><br>Another interesting feature of this report, of course, is its preparation in a presidential administration that officially regards global warming as a problem of dubious weight and no particular urgency. What a remarkable disconnect: While the White House pursues policies that accelerate production of globe-warming gases, the Pentagon is war-gaming what will happen when the climate reaches a tipping point.<br><br>