global warming and ski resorts

[Cindy Kleh]

I'm doing a story on global warming and what various ski areas or their towns are doing to reduce emissions. I am esp. interested in Summit resorts (Breck, A Basin, Copper, Keystone and Vail.) I'm also interested in Aspen, since it's the leader in implementing sustainable slopes policies.

Any thoughts from those who attend the SES at Aspen each year?

[skipuppy]

My nightmare!!! Global warming!!!

-sorry I can't help as far as research.

[Bordy]

Hydrogen.

I think every one should drive hydrogen powered cars with Air Conditioned tail pipes so they can blow their own snow.

[timinor]

I recently heard a study referenced stating that the glaciers on Mars are receding suggesting that there is global warming on Mars which suggests that if there is global warming on Earth, it may be caused by cycles of the Sun and not...dare I say it...caused by the evils of man. I would say that warmer and cooler cycles on the Sun is not that outrageous a concept.

[www.oldsnowboards.com]

I recently heard a study referenced stating that the glaciers on Mars are receding suggesting that there is global warming on Mars which suggests that if there is global warming on Earth, it may be caused by cycles of the Sun and not...dare I say it...caused by the evils of man. I would say that warmer and cooler cycles on the Sun is not that outrageous a concept.

Dude, so what part of THIS planet are you on right now??

MT BACHELOR DUDE!!!!!!

did you get the one or two bedroom? My old buddy old pal??

[CarvCanada]

I find all Atmospheric Science pretty awesome and I'm really into reading up on all of that, there's a lot of really cool research out there to read. All my professors agree that it's probably a mix of both natural cycles and humans spreading ****, and all we know is that climates are predictably unpredictable. We definately need to cut down CO2 as well as all the little quantities of dirty-ass chemicals that don't belong on earth at all like CFC-12 and other polutants. In glaciers scientists have mapped out temperature vs. CO2 in the atmosphere for the past few thousand years and found that its really really corelates, and CO2 is the highest its ever been right now. CFC-12 has stopped being produced but it will live up there for quite a while.

There's even clouds (noctilucent clouds - they're beautiful!) that are being formed in the mesosphere in record rates that hardly ever existed before. People started noticing them in the 1800's after bigass volcanic eruptions that emitted CO2.... and now they seem to be forming a lot without the push of volcanic eruptions. Who knows if they existed a lot but people never really noticed them before... We're even discovering only in the last 20 years that there's huge (but faint) lightning blasts that fire up from large stormclouds into the stratosphere and fan out at altitudes of up to 90km! They go up in either big red cones (Red Sprites) or blue collumns (Blue Jets). Humans don't know too much, we're still pretty low tech!

[Justin A.]

Hello, haven't any of you seen "The Day After Tommorrow"?

Just kidding that movie sucks.

Anyway, Global warming and the subsequent global cooling are natural cycles. Almost 95% of the water that is locked up in the melting ice banks (glaciers, ice caps) is fresh. Fresh water is less dense than salt water, so as the ice banks melt, there is more and more fresh water being cirulated in our oceans near the surface. Also, the melted ice is very very cold, so we now have cold water at the surface of the oceans. The warm water that was at the surface has now been suppressed below the fresh, and now that it is out of the direct sunlight, will proceed to cool. Now, because of all of the glacial melt, the oceans are cold (but not as a direct conduction of the lack of energy in the cold water meltoff). We get our weather from the oceans evaporating and then the water vapor condensing and forming rain. Suprise! Our weather has shut down as a result of the cold water now floing in our oceans. The end result of this is accelerated radiational cooling from our planet (like happens on a clear night when it gets cold) and thus we are stuck with another ice age. Yes I know it sounds far-fetched, but I worked with some very brilliant people last year at the NOAA Research Center for Climate Change, and this is what we came up with. By 2050, the summer ice at the north pole will be gone, and by approximatley 2075-2080, the summer ice will be extending past where it is today.

________

COLORADO MEDICAL MARIJUANA

[sic t 2]

If they don't belong on the earth, where did they come from???

Those microscopic specs of plutonium that are in your lungs (and all our lungs now) were manufactured by man. Actually your body would be carrying more because you were alive (and breathing plutonium polluted air) during the period of all those above ground nuclear tests. Not something to be debated. This is fact. Harmless? Maybe, maybe not. Let us know how you make out.

Sic

[tex1230]

Let us know how you make out

in the words of the great Jim, "No One Here Gets Out Alive"

[CarvCanada]

You can't really argue that we pollute way too much though. Some things are way too hyped/manipulated but it's for sure that there's way too much contamination going on.

[CarvCanada]

I Read the link and learned some stuff, I like the fact that there's all these conflicting views out there, I'll try to read State of Fear, I agree that way too much emphasis is put on Global Warming in media as opposed to massive widespread industrial contamination of water and air with non-natural chemicals, but I think the difference between eugenics and global warming is that, whether or not we are helping to cause it (and whether or not changing our entire infrastructure will even do ANYthing to reverse it), I would argue that it's really not in the best interest of those in power to do anything about pollution since it'll slow our economy down, and any consequences that come out of new laws being passed etc. will really only help the environment (unless there are hidden motives behind laws being passed, but that's unlikely since they'll undoubtedly hold back industry)... as opposed to when people in power supported eugenics it was definately in their interest to hype it up with propaganda and get it an undisputed mindset

Here's a fact that the media really doesn't play on and I guess people just want it "in the past": air conditioners and other ****, when researching what chemical to synthesize, came up with quite a few. While they ended up choosing CFC-12 which goes up into the ozone and catalyzes O3's breaking apart pretty effectively, another option was CFC-13 which luckily was decided against (I'm not sure why). Later on it was found out that CFC-13 catalyzes O3's destruction thousands of times faster than CFC12 mol for mol! We got pretty lucky! Even after the Montreal Protocol there is still way too much **** up there though.

[pm_wizard]

Here's another voice calling for logical reason: http://www.lomborg.com/

"The Skeptical Environmentalist". It is an amusing read, but he does make a careful effort at debunking a number of the arguments in favour of global warming.

One of the problems faced by the human mind is the intellectual arrogance of believing we can discern cycles that may last thousands (or millions) of years using data that we "extrapolate" from a sample that is a best from a few hundreds of years.

We may well be in the middle of a long period of global warming, and we may have helped contribute to its pace, but did we start it?, and can we stop it?, See intellectual arrogance above.

How many people recall the two years of bitter cold winters in Canada and the northern U.S. following the eruption of mt St Helens? One such event contributes far more to climate change than our (albeit wasteful and selfish) use of cars or air conditioning.

Wow, an uncharacteristic rant....

Cheers,

John

[skatha]

Yes, the sun fluctuates in it's energy output....

Yes, we are extrapolating about 150 years of data collection to forecast the future and I believe we don't have enough info to know. There are climate cycles we are just beginning to understand-like the NAO and the SAO when it comes to winter weather and the hurricane season.

We know the Vikings sailed to Newfoundland 1100 years ago with line of sight navigation and had sustainable agriculture there, inferring that Newfoundland was warmer then that it is now.

I spent a day touring the Morrison outcrop in Dinosaur National Monument, with all sorts of references from when our climate was hotter and drier, or hotter and wetter, than it is now.

Interestingly, I listened to a climatologist interview on NPR who stated that our climate changes now are natural fluctuations and that whatever influence may be due to humans,that would be seen in over 100 years from now.

The mini-Ice Age occurred in the 1600's-another climatologist interview I read in a journal stated that what we are seeing now is emergence from that and it is entirely possible that there should be no detectable ice in the northern hemisphere during summer between ice ages-including the arctic.

The Kyoto accords limited greenhouse gas emissions to early 90's production for most of the current industrialized world-excluding China and India-two countries that are on schedule to be the major CO2 producers in the next 25 years.

I remember very chilly winters about 30 years ago-a NAO maximum period. We've been in a NAO minimum for about 20 years. The Atlantic ocean had warmer surface temps in the 1930's than it has now and we've just now started to describe a SAO.

I believe we need to get more info and stay away from the sensationalization of the media

[Mike T]

I believe we need to get more info and stay away from the sensationalization of the media

Here, here.

I have no doubt that humans affect the environment and the weather. I find it likely that dinosaurs who ate large amounts of flora did so as well.

I thought it was pretty common knowledge that current belief among geologists/archaeologists is ~150 million years ago the average surface temp was quite a bit warmer than today and the air was thinner (oxygen density at sea level about the same as 14000 feet today). But one of my wife's friends who is a firm believer that humans are the root of all evil was unaware. (This was a schoolteacher too - a history teacher - SCARY!)

[CarvCanada]

A lot of the data comes from glaciers which store information that's "frozen in time" for the last few thousand years.That said I really don't believe we're advanced enough to put together all those millions of factors and fluctuating formulas... I don't pay attention to the way the media hypes "climate change" but nobody can argue against the fact that we put too many contaminants everywhere.

[Cindy Kleh]

OK, maybe I shouldn't have used "global warming." It's a term that always gets people arguing. If we can think more selfishly ... how will it affect the sport of snowboarding? I mean, for whatever reasons, it's getting warmer, and it will adversely affect most ski areas.

I was just wondering, since alot of you Bomber guys visit Aspen, if you'd seen anything cool going on in the green scene.

[skatha]

A lot of the data comes from glaciers which store information that's "frozen in time" for the last few thousand years.That said I really don't believe we're advanced enough to put together all those millions of factors and fluctuating formulas... I don't pay attention to the way the media hypes "climate change" but nobody can argue against the fact that we put too many contaminants everywhere.

A few thousand years of weather information for a planet that's 4.5 billion years old is hardly enough to base anything on

Oh, and Cindy, I'll forgive you for the Bush reference-being in Texas, I've had 3 chances to vote against him and I did everytime ;)

I definitely consider myself a greenie, but I had to laugh when I read that cutting the lead and other particulates out of gasoline has made our atmosphere 30% more transparent and may be contributing to global warming!!!

You gotta love science!!!

[Cindy Kleh]

Skatha,

I never dissed Texas. (Isn't Dubya originally from Conn.?) All I am saying is that global warming is happening and it will render almost half of the present ski areas on the planet financially infeasible by 2050 at this rate of warming. Taking fossil fuels out of the earth and releasing that carbon into the atmostphere is not helping the situation. When we run out of easy gas reserves, the dirtier fossil fuels (like coal) will be used, especially by countries like China that are emerging global energy consumers and less concerned with longterm environmental effec

The ski industry seems to be united in the agreement that global warming is happening and pollution is making it worse, and that the consequences for the ski industry will be dire. So what are they actively doing to back up this concern?

Is ski industry profit more important than clean air even if the profit will soon dissappear? Is the Sustainable Slopes Charter a joke?

[pm_wizard]

Cindy:

Intrawest, who own more ski resorts than any other company out there are responding by diversifying into non snow related leisure activities. For a simple example, they purchased the local Ontario ski resort (Blue Mountain), and while they have spent money on more efficient snow making and similar items, the larger portion of their development expense has been focused on golf, bicycle trails, fitness facilities etc.

However, they have also tried investing in ski areas that have higher elevations. There is a limited supply there of course.

In the east resorts are responding simply by putting in more efficient snow making (to raise the minimum temperature below which they can make snow) so that they can respond to warmer periods when the snow gets eroded.

Logically there is very little that a ski resort can do apart from the band aid type commitments to reduce the use of fossil fuels etc. Whistler Blackcomb has moved to eliminate wood fireplaces and stoves in existing and new buildings, but that is mainly an air quality issue, not a global warming initiative.

John

[kjl]

My take on "global warming" pretty much boils down to "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." I definitely agree that it is impossible to prove that it exists, just like looking at a 2 minute window of the stock market couldn't tell you the overall trend over the next 10 years. By the same reasoning, it is impossible to say that we aren't contributing to environmental damage, either.

However, my reasoning basically follows the same logic of, ironically enough, the argument that we should have invaded Iraq based on the threat of WMD's - I believe the analogy was that you can't wait for "the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud over an American city."

Our curbing of our damage to the environment shouldn't only happen after we have obtained proof by "smoking gun" - if we wait a thousand years before it gets so bad that the vast majority of the people finally agree that, yes, we screwed up the environment, it could be so bad that fixing it would be unfeasible and intractable. Also, I believe that almost everything humans do happens exponentially (e.g. see Moore's Law, or the Law of Accelerating Returns). So if it turns out that we are indeed doing damage to the enviroment, I believe it highly likely that over time we will be doing more damage, and faster, than we are now, meaning that by the time we understand the problem, it will be orders of magnitude more difficult to rectify the problem than now.

By the way, this is why I can't wait for the eventual supremacy of our new robot overlords - I think people are very bad at making decisions where the benefit happens over very large time scales - I'm fairly sure that any changes we make for the better for our environment will be lost in the noise of random fluctuations over our lifetimes, or our kids' lifetimes, or our kids' kids' lifetimes, but over a long enough time period, our descendents far down the line may be unable to survive because of choices we make now.

The other way to look at it is game theory: it doesn't really matter what the chance of our doing irreversable damage to the environment is as long as it is >0%, as the "payoff" for doing irreversable damage is very, very, bad. Therefore in my mind the burden of proof should not be to prove that we are doing irrecoverably bad things to the environment, but to prove that we definitely are not doing irrecoverably bad things to the environment.

[NateW]

A few thousand years of weather information for a planet that's 4.5 billion years old is hardly enough to base anything on

As someone who only plans to be around for another 10 decades*, I'm quite interested in what happens when you extrapolate from the last 10 centuries.

*I'm an optimist.

[pm_wizard]

Tim,

I don't know what that is, but in the late 60s I worked on the original HARP (High Altitude Research Program) program at the Engineering Faculty at McGill Univ with a launch site in the Quebec Eastern Townships and then in Barbados. That involved using an immense cannon to fire a satellite into an orbital position. It evolved (unfortunately) into a giant cannon for use in firing missiles, and was futher developed by Dr. Gerald Bull and ulimately sold to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and was "retreived" in 1991....

What goes around comes around. I hope this hasn't been resurrected <grin>

John

[CarvCanada]

Haha you worked on that? My parents used to have a house out near Owl's Head and they told me that guy who was secretly selling all this stuff to Iraq lived around there, and the Israeli secret police made him "dissapear" real good.

[skatha]

I'm not saying anyone dissed Texas. I was saying that being in Texas does not equal being a Bush supporter. George W is from Midland, originally

As for global warming, I agree that it's concerning with the predictions and all, but there's no scientific proof that stopping all petrochemical use and manufacture right now will reverse whatever climate changes we are seeing now.

I am happy that Aspen and other resorts that are largely on US Forest Service land have adopted the Sustainable Slopes program-if anything, to save money in operating costs.

But, many of these vehicles will operate with CNG and my problem with CNG involves the construction and operation of the 11 LNG facilites the government wants to open-all in coastal states, most with open-loop regassification processors that will, potentially, result in millions of larval fish and crustaceans dying

[pm_wizard]

CarvCanada,

It was good fun, we used to go out and rig the whole area with seismic sensors and then blow dynamite to measure the ground effect of the blast from firing the gun. The only scary part of it all was driving down the Eastern Townships autoroute with 50 sticks of dynamite and a case of blasting caps in the car!

Dr. Bull was killed in a hotel room in Belgium (I think). It was always rumoured to be Israelis that did him in, trying to stop Iraq from using his weapon to drop nuclear warheads on Israel. Well, I guess they stopped him anyway! The gun he was building in Iraq was many times the size (calibre) of tehone we had in Barbados finally, and it is not clear that it would have survived the first shot!

John