The European ski resorts are currently turning an unprecedented green, partly because the Alps are warming up faster than the global average. This has major consequences for ski seasons, scientists and practitioners see.
A persistent air current that brings heat from the subtropics is causing the winter variant of a heat wave in parts of Europe. In the valleys of the Alps heat records are broken, up to heights of 2,000 meters snow just won’t fall. Some of the ski resorts are closed, in France even half of the slopes were closed at the end of December, according to the French industry association DSF. Others try to make the best of it with snow cannons.
A consequence of climate change? Its role in individual weather extremes is often difficult to demonstrate, says Peter Siegmund, climate scientist at KNMI. In any case, it is clear that the climate is also warming in the mountains, which means that snow-poor winter weeks will occur more and more often.
The Alps have already warmed by about 2 degrees in the last 100 years, double the global average, according to the European Environment Agency. This extra rapid warming is partly due to the disappearance of reflective snow and glaciers: dark surfaces absorb more heat than light ones. Precipitation in mountain areas is expected to increase, but this will increasingly fall in the form of rain rather than snow. For every degree of warming, the snow line moves up about 150 meters, according to the EU agency.
The effects are easily measurable in the Alps, as was shown, for example, by a large-scale study in 2021 with data from two thousand measuring stations, spread over the entire mountain range. Below 2,000 meters there is on average roughly a month less snow than in the 1970s, according to the publication in the trade journal The Cryosphere. At higher altitudes it is so cold that little difference was noticeable.
The mountains are such places where the consequences of climate change become concrete early on. “Climate change is my profession, but now it becomes personal,” ETH Zurich professor of climate physics Reto Knutti writes on Twitter, captioning a photo of the mountainside where he learned to ski as a child. Currently there is only a thin strip of snow.
In the coming decades, snow cover, especially below 2,000 meters, will almost certainly continue to deteriorate, according to the international climate panel IPCC. Ambitious climate policy or not: in thirty years’ time mountain ranges such as the Alps will have lost roughly a quarter of their snow mass, it is estimated.
I grew up here in #Gstaad and learned skiing on this slope in the 70s. Back then scientists had evidence that fossil fuel causes warming. This is Jan 1, 2023.
Climate science is my profession, but this is where it gets personal.
When do we understand that we need to change? pic.twitter.com/sbYpGBhQiY— Reto Knutti (@Knutti_ETH) January 1, 2023
How bad it gets after that depends on the greenhouse gas emissions to come. But in all scenarios, mountain ranges lose a snow mass of tens of percent, even most of it if things go wrong. A ski season will be a few weeks shorter in decades than it is now. These are always averages: even exceptionally snowy years will probably still occur despite a warming climate.
The lower-lying ski resorts in particular will be affected by climate change. According to the European Environment Agency, almost half of the resorts in Switzerland and an even larger number in Germany, Austria and the Pyrenees are at risk of attracting enough tourists and winter sports enthusiasts in winter. The European sector threatens to lose billions of euros in turnover every year, although the damage depends on how resorts manage to adapt.
For example, the use of artificial snow will play an increasingly important role, but this costs a lot of energy and water. The already expensive winter sports holidays will probably not get any cheaper. Some of the skiing fun may also be moving to more northern countries, for example in Scandinavia, writes Swiss consultant Laurent Vanat in his annual International Report on Snow & Mountain Tourism.
There are also consequences for sports competitions. Even in the most positive scenario, only 13 of the 21 locations where previous Winter Olympics have been held will have reliable snow in 30 years’ time, according to the IPCC.
Could this also mean the end of winter sports in now popular locations? According to the IPCC, that possibility is only lurking in the darkest climate scenario by the end of the century. In that scenario, the implemented climate policy fails completely, the world population explodes and the development of sustainable technologies is disappointing. Unless ski resorts drastically change the way they operate, the vast majority will be closed by the end of this century.