Shortage of Snow Leaves Alps Buried In Debate

Some Blame Global Warming, Others Less Dire Causes, For Europe's Bare Ski Slopes

(Giovanni Auletta - AP)

MEGEVE, France -- Freakish high temperatures and rain revisited this posh ski resort in the French Alps and other mountain areas of Europe last week, prolonging a mild winter that is striking hard at alpine economies and fueling debate about what is causing the strange weather.

Hundreds of professional ski races in Europe -- as much as half the season's schedule -- have been canceled or disrupted, including downhill, cross-country and jumping events in Italy, France, Switzerland, Finland and Norway. Italy alone has canceled 104 races this season, including 35 in the first two weeks of January.

Race organizers in Kitzbuhel, Austria, used helicopters last week to dump more than 100,000 cubic feet of snow from higher elevations onto the famed Hahnenkamm downhill run to save a race from cancellation and stave off a blow to the resort's prestige and economy.

In Megeve, a glitzy but low-altitude resort that is one of France's oldest winter sports towns, vacationers traded skis for umbrellas as temperatures climbed to 45 degrees Fahrenheit and rain pelted the mountain from its 7,700-foot summit to the picturesque town square 4,000 feet below. In the town center, workers taped sheets of plastic over the skating rink to protect it from the deluge.

At the beginning of the week, about half the area's 200 ski runs were open, but by Friday, barely a quarter were. On the lower half of the mountain, trails that are normally snowbound by mid-January were still alpine meadows, keeping many would-be skiers away.

"I've never seen it this bad in January," said Michael Vibert, manager of the Savoyard, a 120-seat restaurant that served six dinners Tuesday. "It's hard, but we're not ready to kill ourselves yet. Maybe later. But who knows? Next week it could snow, snow, snow."

The unseasonably mild weather in Europe's Alps -- and bizarre conditions elsewhere, including freezing temperatures in Southern California, massive early-season snow dumps in the Rockies and blooming flowers in Paris and London -- are raising concerns here about long-term climate change and its potential impact on skiing in general, and Megeve in particular.

A recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Alps could lower the number of European ski resorts with "reliable" snow conditions from 600 to 400, with lower-lying areas being particularly vulnerable.

"The years 1994, 2000, 2002 and 2003 were the warmest on record in the Alps in the last 500 years," the report said. "Climate model projections show even greater changes in the coming decades." It cited another report saying that banks in Switzerland were refusing to lend money to resorts below about 4,900 feet.

"If we do nothing now, it will be terrible in 10 years," said Adrien Duvillard, 37, a former downhill racer on the French national team who is Megeve's director of tourism. He said this year's poor snow was clearly evidence that global warming was beginning to hurt the ski industry, "and if in 20 years we are on the same track, there will be no snow anymore at our altitude."

Keith Fenwick, a forecaster with the Met Office, Britain's national weather service, said temperatures in the alpine regions this year were running between seven and 13 degrees Fahrenheit above long-term averages.

In Megeve, the No. 1 sport has been overtaken by a new obsession: snow prognostication. Flurries on Friday, maybe Saturday, certainly by Sunday, no later than Monday, and on and on, ever since the last snowfall on Jan. 4.