The hotel receptionist calls this mid-September low season the “calm before the madness”. Wandering through Davos on a biting autumn morning, “calm” feels like an understatement. The winter sports museum is closed, the ski rental shops are empty or shuttered, and in the carriages of the Parsennbahn funicular, which hums quietly up to Davos’s largest ski area, the few tourists have room to wander around.
As the funicular glides to a halt at 2,663m on the Weissfluhjoch ridge, I follow a pair of mountain bikers out into the thin air, heading for a vertiginous platform that looks north towards Klosters across the shoulder of the Todalp mountain. The lifeless lunar surface (“tod” is German for “dead”) is bare but for heaps of building material and the wooden deck of a ski bar which lies marooned amid the scree.
A month from now, however, the annual transformation of the Todalp will begin. Snow will bury the rocks and fill the hollows on the upper slopes and paint these grey-browns a fetching white. The landscape will be changed into what Thomas Mann called “the towering marble statuary of the high Alps in full snow”, in his novel The Magic Mountain. Once again, Davos-Klosters will make sense as a place where royals, presidents and the super-rich come to play. The snow won’t simply prettify the landscape, it will also increase its value: skiers will pay hundreds of pounds for a six-day lift pass, while the wealthiest winter visitors will spend several thousands to stay for a week in the town’s more expensive hotels.
Mann came to Davos in the early 20th century, when the winter transformation was entirely nature’s work. These days, it is Florian Grimm’s job to give nature a hand. Grimm (“like the brothers,” he says disarmingly) is the Parsenn ski area’s head of snow management. When I meet him at the bottom of the funicular, together with Frédéric Petignat, the resort’s communications director, he is wearing a dirty fleece and a broad-shanked gold ring in his left ear. In these last few weeks of preparation for the ski season he is busy organising the giant effort of snow production that lies ahead.
One night in October, when the temperature and humidity conditions are right, he will switch on the first set of giant yellow snow cannon and begin to spray out millions of litres of cold water mixed with air which will freeze and drop to the ground as manmade snow. He will cover two high, north-facing pistes first, building up a base layer that will help to prevent the natural snowfall from melting. When the snow is deep enough, the machines will switch to making a lighter, drier top layer that will feel to the skier like new-fallen natural snow. “We will try to run the snow-producers every hour possible in October,” Grimm says, “because most Octobers you don’t expect to get 10 nights that are below freezing.”
As the snow piles up, snow tractors will move in to sculpt the ice particles and create the optimal snow sports experience, and as winter progresses and temperatures cool through November and December, Grimm will edge snow production down the mountain. By Christmas – when suites at the Belvédère hit $8,220 (£5,100) a week – Grimm aims to have every run in the resort open, even if natural snowfall has been poor.
Ten or 15 years ago, when artificial snow-making was in its infancy, the resort had a handful of snow cannon which fired out large, crude ice pellets. They had to drag the machines all over the resort and keep them working throughout the season to fill holes in the pistes. Now they have 380, many of which are automated and fixed in position, and this massive capacity means the resort can exploit even a small window of low temperatures quickly. The result is much better, more reliable conditions for a clientele ever harder to please. “Today nobody would accept stones any more, or spots of grass in spring,” says Grimm. “They just want to have white from the top to the valley, and they know we have a system to do this.”
The machines are surprisingly energy efficient, but at up to an estimated £5 per cubic metre, large quantities of manmade snow are not cheap. Ten years ago, says Petignat, a skier’s lift ticket just paid for the lift system. Now it is combined with the profits from the bars and restaurants to pay for the snow and the piste-modelling too: “It would not be possible to run the mountain without that.”
Climate change is not something many ski resorts want to talk about. Marketing executives who respond positively to my initial inquiry become elusive when the c-word is mentioned. In a multibillion dollar business where snow reputations are crucial, it is easy to see why. Grimm and Petignat are keen to point out that climate change has barely affected Davos-Klosters, one of the highest and most snow-sure resorts in the Alps. There is no question, however, that warming has begun to hit the world of winter sports, and a 2007 poll found that the industry believes artificial snow is its best defence. Capacity around the world has massively expanded since then: manmade snow production in Switzerland grew from less than 10% of piste area in 2000 to 36% in 2010, while Austria reached 62% at the end of the same period. In the north-eastern US, according to Elizabeth Burakowski, a researcher at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, around 98% of resorts now rely on artificial snow. Without it they can no longer be certain of opening during the crucial Christmas and New Year period when they earn 20% of their revenue.
The Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) is housed in a modern glass and concrete building on Flüelastrasse, a few hundred metres from the bottom of the Parsennbahn funicular. Part-funded by the Swiss government, the SLF is arguably the leading snow science institute in the world. (Its main rival, the Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment in Himachal Pradesh, was set up by the Indian government to advise the army how best to use snow in its battles with the Pakistani army 5,000m up on the Siachen glacier.)
Christoph Marty, a tall, 46-year-old, is the SLF’s expert in snow and climate change: in 2008 he published a research paper that found evidence of a step change in the rate of decline of snow coverage in the winter of 1988-89. Recently, however, northern Europe has seen several very snowy winters, while the scientific community has debated an apparent slowdown in the rate of warming in the past 15 years. Is it possible, I ask, that climate change may end up giving northern Europe more snow?
“There is no doubt in my mind that it will get warmer and we will have less snow,” says Marty. “I can say as long as I live at this altitude that I will have snow. But I have three kids, and they will have kids too. Never mind the grandchildren, my kids will experience a time where it is not normal that you can ski, where it is not normal you will have snow. For them it’s really a frightening thing to think about.”
The easiest way to express the rate of decline of natural snow, he says, is in terms of altitude. Assuming a rising temperature trend of 3.5C over 100 years (the Alps are warming faster than the European average), by mid-century the snowline will have risen between 150m and 200m, and by 2100 it will have moved upwards 300m to 400m. Perennial ice in Europe then will be a rare commodity: forecasts for Switzerland show that 90% of the country’s glaciers will have disappeared by the end of the century. As for the longevity of winter sports, “it really depends what exactly you are asking for,” says Marty. “For snowshoeing or building a snowman you don’t need that much snow, whereas if you are a ski manager you have to groom the rough mountain slopes. The natural variability of snow cover is also really large, so even in the past we had winters with very little snow and winters with huge amounts and we will still have that, but it will be shifted so that we will have fewer winters with lots of snow and more and more with little snow.”
Several small low-lying Swiss resorts have already become unviable, and for others it is just a matter of time. The ski areas with the best chances of surviving will be those that are highest, and Switzerland and France are better placed in that regard than Austria or Germany. Marty also warns that warming will not necessarily happen in the linear way people expect, and there are social factors to consider: “Do the people still want to go skiing if the village like Davos and Chamonix is totally green and warm? When you won’t have the winter feeling?”
Winter sports are already flatlining, or even declining, in Europe and the US, in part because of the enhanced competition from long-haul winter destinations. Those that do come tend to be more opportunistic, Marty says. “Tourists say it’s a problem for them, they don’t come for a week any more just for a few days if they see the weather is good. At Christmas you can go to Egypt for scuba diving, which probably costs no more than skiing, and your chances of good conditions are much better than if you book for a week in the Alps, when nobody can tell you what the snow or weather conditions will be.”
There are, of course, greater reasons to lament the loss of snow than the demise of a sport, even if its roots go back at least 10,000 years. Synte Peacock of the atmospheric research centre in Boulder reels off a long list of benefits that the planet’s large expanses of snow and ice provide. Among the most significant is the albedo effect: snow reflects the sun’s radiation back into space and helps to keep the Earth cool. The reduction in global snow cover, which is particularly serious in the Arctic, is part of a dangerous positive feedback loop in which higher temperatures mean less snow, less reflected energy and therefore increasing temperatures. Scientists believe this is part of the reason why the Alps and the Arctic are warming more quickly than average.
Water storage is also a major issue: snow and snow-fed glaciers do an extraordinarily efficient job of retaining water in winter, when precipitation is plentiful, and releasing it steadily through spring and summer. Marty describes the Alps as the “water towers of Europe”, and when they are gone – even if their absence is mitigated by increased rainfall caused by a warmer atmosphere – water will likely run short and the levels of major rivers will fall.
“Some parts of the world are very dependent on glacier water storage, and if we lose the glaciers it will be a big problem,” says Peacock. “This will totally change the distribution of when water is available. As you lose your winter storage of drinking water, there are places where you’re going to have to start shipping drinking water in.
“And it’s not just about drinking water, it will change the amount of water available for irrigation for farming in a lot of areas. In parts of the world – south Asia and Switzerland, for example – glacial runoff is also used for irrigation: that will change.”
Water shortages are also likely to reduce the capacity of hydroelectric projects, and may force hundreds of millions of tonnes of shipping carried on major rivers such as the Rhine to move to road or rail.
Other knock-on effects of the snow shortage include the threat to animal and plant species that are dependent on snow, the thawing of Siberian permafrost, which will release vast quantities of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, and the melting, over a period of centuries, of the Greenland ice sheet, which contains enough water to raise global sea levels by seven metres.
Among the more catastrophic scenarios, the decline in winter tourism may seem irrelevant. But it is the immediate economic benefit of snow that people care about most, Marty says. Laurent Vanat, a winter sports consultant based in Geneva, estimates the world’s ski industry is worth $60n-$70bn (£37bn-£43bn). However small a fraction of the global economy that may be, it is critical to mountainous regions in Europe and North America. Vanat estimates that 44% of the 400 million global skier visits in the world are to the Alps, while the US, with the largest number of skiers, accounts for 21%.
“For Switzerland as a whole, tourism is very important,” says Marty, “but the regional economy here can’t really exist without tourists. So if you take a town like Davos, about 70% to 80% of the economy is tourism-dependent. If there is no possibility to ski here any more, then I would say at a guess that half of the inhabitants will have no job, because even the bakery sells less bread and so on. So regionally and locally the impact is huge.”
Faced with an uncertain future, mountain towns and villages are already trying to diversify into leisure activities that are independent of snow. Burakowski cites the case of Jay Peak, a low-lying resort in Vermont which invested a substantial amount in indoor water parks and alternative activities during the winter season: “They survived the 2011-2012 warm winter – the Winter That Never Was in the north-eastern US – pretty darn well and I think that adaptation strategy really helped them.” She believes other resorts in the region are now starting to look at diversification more seriously.
In Davos-Klosters, meanwhile, there is a vast array of snow-free pursuits, including two golf courses and a driving range, a lake for water sports and a giant ice arena. Still, as people who live in Davos have noted, the town is much less busy in summer than winter. Snow still produces a vital part of the town’s income and the resort’s managers are working hard to make the most of it.
At Marty’s instigation, I drive a short distance east out of town to see the results of another new technique ski areas have begun using: snow farming. A short way up a wooded valley I turn down a muddy track towards a creek. Ahead is what appears to be a heap of several hundred tonnes of woodchip.
In fact, underneath its 50cm-thick insulating blanket of bark lies a vast pile of old snow which the resort made in the last cold days of spring and stored in this cold spot next to the creek. Although 20% of it will have melted over the summer months, enough will be left by the start of the new season to lay down a 1.5km cross-country piste.
None of this, however – not the snow-making, the snow-farming or even the wrapping of glaciers in insulating blankets – is going to do much to slow the creep of the mean natural snowline upwards. Only a combination of politics and major investment in scientific solutions has any chance of doing that.
I put it to Burakowski that in view of its dependency on snow, the ski industry has woken up surprisingly late to climate change. “When you think about helicopter skiing and the amount of driving they do and the fossil fuels they use to get up and down the mountains and to make snow, it can be a bit of a conundrum,” she says.
Do they get it now? “Two out of the past two or three years in California they just didn’t have the snow, and I think for them it was a wake-up call. The more frequently it happens, the more likely you’re going to say maybe this is actually more of a trend and we’re going to start considering what to do about it.” There are, she says, a number of resorts, including Aspen, which are trying to build a new, more sustainable model of skiing.
But a lot of people – including some who work with snow – still don’t seem to take climate change seriously. “When I speak to a lot of people about these projections, they say: ‘Why are you talking about global warming when we had a snowy winter this year?’,” says Peacock. “But one cold winter, or one heavy snowstorm, is weather, not climate. Even in the Rockies, where we’re going to lose nearly all the spring snow cover by 2100, we’re still going to have winters, or maybe consecutive winters, with huge amounts of snow because of these shorter-term patterns.
“That’s something which a lot of people, especially politicians in this country, can’t appreciate, because they have one heavy snow in Washington DC and everyone’s up in arms about how climate change must be a great hoax. People don’t seem to be able to see past what is happening on a two- or three-year timescale. The signature of climate change reveals itself on a timescale of decades to centuries, not years.”
For Marty, ski companies and skiers alike need to take more responsibility. “It’s easy for me to say, because I live in a mountain country, but for people living in Britain, if they go skiing in the Alps by plane I’m not sure if most of them are aware of what they do to the snow. If I was born there, I don’t know if I would ski or not. It’s difficult.”
What will the end of snow mean? “For me,” Marty says, exhaling a lungful of high mountain air, “it would be a terrible thing.”
COLD FACTS AND WARM AIR
Dr Paul Field from the Met Office sheds some light on snow.
Why are snow crystals six-sided?
That’s the basic shape of the solid form of water under atmospheric conditions, which is the basis for the snow crystals – it has that six-sided symmetry.
Can every snow crystal really be unique?
Two things go into that – the temperature and humidity they are exposed to. No ice crystal will fall in the same way, which means they will grow in different ways. Plus you’ve got things happening at the microscopic level with the crystals actually growing. As you add more water molecules on to each one, there could be differences with the way the crystallographic faces are growing: slight deformities or impurities may affect things. Random collisions and subsequent aggregation (sticking together) of snow crystals are another reason for flakes to be different.
Can it ever be too cold to snow?
The colder it is, the easier it is to make ice crystals through ice nucleation. If there is any linkage between low temperature and low snowfall it is probably because if you get the air coming up from the south in the UK it is warmer and hence moister, so you can convert more of that water into snow. If it is coming from the north, the air is typically colder and drier.
Why is there more snow in the mountains?
For one it is higher, so it tends to be colder so the freezing level can be at the ground. Then there’s the orographic effect; because you are forcing the air up, the air gets colder and the relative humidity rises. Water low down in the atmosphere is happy to sit around as vapour because it is warmer and the air is subsaturated but if you take it to a colder temperature it becomes supersaturated - the relative humidity goes up so it wants to condense water out. This extra condensed water will enhance precipitation over the mountains.
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