As Snow Disappears, Scotland's 2 Biggest Ski Resorts Put Up For Sale

[hatrack]

AVIEMORE, Scotland — This school holiday week, thousands of Britons will be bracing themselves against the wind and sliding downhill through a mixture of mud, ice, and boulders. Scottish skiing has met global warming.

Children will be filing onto chairlifts to be borne up the piebald Scottish mountains for their first taste of snowplowing and of what climate change can actually mean in practice. Experts say the Scottish ski industry is just one of the many that could be crippled by rising temperatures worldwide.

On Friday, the country's biggest resort, Glenshee, and neighboring Glencoe were put up for sale. "Basically, we've lost half a million pounds each of the last two seasons, and it's down to lack of snow," said a Glenshee spokesman. Temperatures have risen to the point where artificial snow is melting faster than the snow machines can churn it out, said Bill Wright of the Cairngorms Campaign environmental group.

EDIT

Tens of millions of pounds have been invested in Scotland's pistes, which host more than 300,000 visitors each winter. But February snowfall has been sparse this year, and mild temperatures in the rugged Highlands have thawed all but the most shadowed northern slopes. Add several thousand holidaying schoolchildren, and the result is a melange of slush, mud, and bruised buttocks."

EDIT

http://www.enn.com/news/2004-02-18/s_13214.asp

[JohnyCanuck]

1. If they can stick it out until the Gulf Stream goes away

they'll have more snow than they know what to do with.


The problem lies with the ocean current known as the Gulf Stream, which bathes the UK and north-west Europe in warm water carried northwards from the Caribbean. It is the Gulf Stream, and associated currents, that allow strawberries to thrive along the Norwegian coast, while at comparable latitudes in Greenland glaciers wind their way right down to sea level. The same currents permit palms to flourish in Cornwall and the Hebrides, whereas across the ocean in Labrador, even temperate vegetation struggles to survive. Without the Gulf Stream, temperatures in the UK and north-west Europe would be five degrees centigrade or so cooler, with bitter winters at least as fierce as those of the so-called Little Ice Age in the 17th to 19th centuries.

The Gulf Stream is part of a more complex system of currents known by a number of different names, of which the rather cumbersome North Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Namoc) is probably the most apt. This incorporates not only the Gulf Stream but also the cold return currents that convey water southwards again. As it approaches the Arctic, the Gulf Stream loses heat and part of it heads back to warmer climes along the coast of Greenland and eastern Canada in the form of the cold, iceberg-laden current responsible for the loss of the Titanic. Much, however, overturns - cooling and sinking beneath the Nordic seas between Norway and Greenland, before heading south again deep below the surface.

In the past, the slowing of the Gulf Stream has been intimately linked with dramatic regional cooling. Just 10,000 years ago, during a climatic cold snap known as the Younger Dryas, the current was severely weakened, causing northern European temperatures to fall by as much as 10 degrees. Ten thousand years before that, at the height of the last ice age, when most of the UK was reduced to a frozen wasteland, the Gulf Stream had just two-thirds of the strength it has now.

What's worrying is that for some years now, global climate models have been predicting a future weakening of the Gulf Stream as a consequence of global warming. Such models visualise the disruption of the Namoc, including the Gulf Stream, as a result of large-scale melting of Arctic ice and the consequent pouring of huge volumes of fresh water into the North Atlantic, in a century or two. New data suggest, however, that we may not have to wait centuries, and in fact the whole process may be happening already.


www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1083419,00.html

[RossMcLochNess]

2. Unfortunately for them...

I think Pennsylvania is receiving the cold temps and snow that they're no longer getting. The past two winters have been worse than I can remember for quite a long time.