Yes, Virginia, There Is A Climate Change
The question is not whether climate change is happening. It’s whether ski areas can adapt to it. And the answer, so far, is “yes.”
Back when X was Twitter and before the platform was overrun by fringe-theory propogandists and cartoon sexbots I would sometimes post springtime lists of still-open ski areas. And in the East that would often be some April 25-ish version of Sugarbush-Jay-Killington. But eventually I stopped doing this because inevitably some tryhard with an @Ski4Life handle and nine followers would contribute the amazing insight that I “forgot about” Big Snow, New Jersey’s forever-open indoor ski center. And I found it annoying that users of a platform defined by a 140-character limit would demand that each post include the restatement of established basic truths.
Which is another way of saying that I’m not in the habit of professing belief in demonstrable facts undergirded by supercomputers full of data. Or just things that are very obvious. Like I don’t go around saying “It’s an established fact that” … “snow is frozen water” or “the earth is round” or “bears are real.” But apparently we have not arrived at a cultural consensus by which it is acceptable to discuss climate change without including the self-virtuous qualifier “there is indisputable evidence of climate change.” As I discovered (well, already knew but was hoping to step around), when I wrote last week that climate change is not in fact forcing American ski areas out of business.
So I’ll state this once so I never have to again:
CLIMATE CHANGE: A manifesto by The Storm Skiing Journal
The climate conditions under which the U.S. ski industry evolved from roughly the 1920s to the 1970s have changed. The nation’s average annual temperatures have risen while average snowpack has declined. The broad scientific consensus is that the burning of fossil fuels has thickened the planet’s atmosphere in ways that modify and intensify weather patterns. These changes include a general warming trend and seasonal variability that has amplified the challenges of consistent ski area operations. The industry’s best response to these weather fluctuations has been the widespread deployment of snowmaking systems, which are effective but also require substantial consumption of energy and water. To forestall the worst potential impacts of climate change demands a unified, long-term, global transition to non-carbon energy sources.
Ta-da: incredible insight from The Storm Skiing Journal™. Please like, share, and subscribe.
Actually don’t. Because I’m not doing this. I’m not letting the tinfoil-hatters win. I’m not resetting Earth’s atmospheric profile every time I write about the future of skiing. It’s tedious. It’s boring. It’s cloying and frankly stupid. The Storm is intentionally not a climate change newsletter, just as it is intentionally not a ski-gear or competition or rad-bros-jumping-off-things or let’s-profile-10-great-hottubs newsletter. It is a newsletter about the lift-served skiing experience: who makes it, how do they do that, how can we do it as much as possible, and why is it awesome? To ask these questions, we must assume the existence of all those lift-served ski-adjacent things that I don’t write about: ski jackets, the X Games, shitty overpriced lodge food, Backpack Speaker Bro, bears. For example: to ski we must have skis and boots and bindings to attach them. I assume you all know this and own these things. Such is the benefit of writing for a niche audience. But if I tried to make this a gear newsletter I would achieve nothing more than demonstrating how little I know about it. The only thing I know about skis is that I like them. So rather than fake it, I’ll let you scope gear intel from more informed sources.
Supersize that framework for climate change. I know climate change is happening. There are bottomless sources devoted to dissecting its causes, impacts, and tension points. But I’m not tethering that anchor to The Storm. A college professor once told me that if I wanted to be a writer, find something that nobody else was writing about and write about only that. And raise your hand if you think the world needs one more person devoting an entire publication to pointing out that climate change is real.
The question, for The Storm, is not whether climate change is happening. It’s whether ski areas can adapt to it. And the answer, so far, is “yes.” And since my mission is not to play pseudo-scientist to complex planetary systems but to play pseudo-scientist to the strange world of lift-served skiing at its interchange of infrastructure, culture, business, and consumer experience, the relevant follow-up questions for my audience are: which ski areas are best adapting to climate change, how are they doing this, and is their success repeatable?
For example: Wintergreen, Virginia has run three full ski seasons in the past decade with zero inches of natural snow. Why did they get zero inches of natural snow? Man, I don’t know. But they dealt with it (Wintergreen officials note that the resort’s robust summer business helps offset poor winters). Same with Ober, Tennessee, which operated for 127 days last winter with only 16 inches of natural snow. The first ski area to open in North America for the past three seasons has not been sky-high Arapahoe Basin or Keystone, but 210-vertical-foot Ski Ward, Massachusetts, which defies its 335-foot base elevation with a massive contraption that can spit out snow in any temperature.
I understand the temptation to draw a straight line from a changing climate to the failure of a climate-dependent industry. But there is no evidence that the ski industry is in decline, from climate change or any other source. On climate change, specifically, “… we do not have evidence that any ski areas have closed due to climate change,” reads a 2023 NSAA report prepared with input from the Nature Conservancy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Forest Service, and others.
Climate change – and the seasonal variability that has always existed – may in fact have improved skiing’s resilience by forcing the industry into an existential choice in the 1970s: invest in snowmaking or cease to exist. The industry, en masse, chose snowmaking, a once-primitive process that is now highly sophisticated and efficient.
Meaning: lift-served skiing is not a victim of climate change. Rather, it is a super-adapter to it. And there are five core reasons why I believe this dynamic will endure long term:
1) Humans are not passive animals
When man met nature, it was an ugly scene. Malaria, poison berries, blizzards, and sabretooth tigers lined up for joyous daily mass murder. Between 1346 and 1352, the bubonic plague killed an estimated 50 million people, including roughly half of Europe. But then people discovered science. Over the centuries, we gained, as Steven Pinker so eloquently put it in The New York Times in 2021, “an extra life.” “For most of human history, life expectancy was around 30,” he wrote. Today, it’s 72.6 years – and far higher in rich nations. We treat the plague with a dose of antibiotics.