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| A ski resort in Colorado that closed early last spring because of the melting snow and warm weather. |
-New York Times
Last year my family opted out of our normal New Year's plan of skiing in Vail, Colorado to visit the sunny beaches of the Dominican Republic. Why? We asked ourselves: will there be enough snow? is the base too thin? will it ruin our skis? And again this year the weather has not quite given us skiers a good winter so far. After many resorts opened in November due to snowfall, they have now been having trouble because of the unusually warm weather. Currently my winter break destination, Vail, has 44 of 193 trails open and the base depth is 18 inches! Now to put it in perspective, 18 or more inches is sometimes known as the "average base depth" for compacted snow; people say that about 36 inches on a groomed run is good and over 60 inches on anything would obviously be the best. Just thinking about last year has been worrying skiers for this coming year. Last year was "the fourth-warmest winter on record since 1896, forcing half the nation's ski areas to open late and almost half to close early." This has also majorly hurt the ski and snowboarding industry; it is estimated that the industry as a whole lost over a billion dollars due to climate change. Analysts have projected that resorts at lower elevation levels will eventually vanish.
In New England, by 2039, about half of the ski resorts will be gone. It is also crazy to read that my frequent ski spots in the Rockies are also pretty spotty: "average winter temperatures are expected to rise as much as 7 degrees by the end of the century." Park City, Utah could be gone; Aspen, Colorado could be "confined to the top quarter of the mountain." I couldn't imagine Vail, Park City, Deer Valley etc closing. Not only should we be concerned about how this will impact our economy, but also the impact on our lives. This industry employs about 187,000 people directly or indirectly, so what happens to those jobs? What can we do to prevent these projections from happening? In our everyday lives, how can everyone of us lesson our carbon footprint? Did we cause this climate change, having a huge impact on tourism and industry?
In its recently released Fourth Assessment Report by NASA, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world concluded there's a more than 90 percent probability that human activities over the past 250 years have warmed our planet (NASA). I, along with these 1,300 scientists, climate change has been caused by humans. This has a huge impact on many industries, especially the skiing industry, because so many runs are being shut down on popular mountains in the Rocky’s and all around the nation and the world.
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