The New York Times has a worrisome story today about climate change and travel…specifically, how climate change will affect the ski industry.
Last year, the article notes, 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.
Climate change means that "the long-term outlook for skiers everywhere is bleak," the story continues. With temperatures rising, analysts predict that many of the nation’s ski centers, especially those at lower elevations and latitudes, will eventually vanish.
Under certain warming scenarios, more than half of the 103 ski resorts in the Northeast will not be able to maintain a season length of 100 days by 2039, according to a study to be published next year by Daniel Scott, director of the Interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
By then, Scott believes that no ski area in Connecticut or Massachusetts is likely to be economically viable. Only seven of 18 resorts in New Hampshire and eight of 14 in Maine will be. New York’s 36 ski areas, most of them in the western part of the state, will have shrunk to nine.
In the Rockies, where early conditions have also been spotty, average winter temperatures are expected to rise as much as 7 degrees by the end of the century. Park City, Utah, could lose all of its snowpack by then. In Aspen, Colorado, the snowpack could be confined to the top quarter of the mountain. So far this season, several ski resorts in Colorado have been forced to push back their opening dates.