Shortage of Snow Leaves Alps Buried In Debate
Some Blame Global Warming, Others Less Dire Causes, For Europe's Bare Ski Slopes

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 21, 2007

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.

But last Wednesday, what the village got was rain increasing from a drizzle to a downpour and moist clouds and fog hanging overhead. All but a few die-hard skiers shunned the slopes. At the Dany Magnin ski shop, 20 pairs of skis had been rented in three days, about one-tenth the norm. Ski school director Bernard Feige, 44, said he had not booked a single lesson Wednesday for his 380 instructors. "We are waiting for the snow -- it's very stressful," he said. "In France, our instructors are independent, and when they work less, they earn less."

"I have friends in all the French resorts, and they are all telling me it's a disaster in the ski areas," said Alaine Dresco, 52, manager of the Au Vieux Moulin hotel.

Megeve's high-end shopping, quaint village ambiance and famous restaurants have long attracted many non-skiing tourists, helping to insulate the town from skiing downturns, local officials say. The resort has 483 snow cannons capable of producing 5,300 cubic feet of snow an hour, tourism director Duvillard said, but if temperatures remain above freezing, the cannons are useless.

"We were raking autumn leaves from our lawn today -- 10 to 15 bags of them -- saying, 'What are we doing? We're meant to be up skiing!' " said Phillip Hamilton, 64, a recent retiree from Britain who has owned a house in Megeve for 20 years.

Megeve had to cancel a women's World Cup slalom race in December and a women's downhill race earlier this month. Nearby, last week's men's World Cup downhill had to be moved from Chamonix to Val d'Isere, 35 miles to the south and 3,000 feet higher, after the International Ski Federation ruled that the thin snow cover on the Chamonix course made conditions too dangerous.

In the Alps these days, people tend to fall into two camps: those who see the weather problems as evidence of global warming and those who think it's part of an unavoidable natural cycle.

"We can't do anything if countries like the United States don't sign the Kyoto accords," the 1997 pact on global warming, said Bertrand Bibollet, 25, who works at a local ski rental shop. "Resorts below 1,000 meters [3,281 feet] are doomed to close in the next 20 years."

But others pointed out that Megeve had its best ski season in decades last year, with cold weather allowing skiing from Dec. 15 to April 15. They also noted that the resort had suffered bad years before -- particularly the 1989-90 season, when the first snow did not arrive until Jan. 27. "I don't believe in global warming -- I think it's a cyclical, natural phenomenon," said Dominique Socquet, 40, head of the ski school at Combloux, a small resort connected to Megeve by a system of lifts and trails.

Whatever the cause, only three of Combloux's 62 ski runs were open Friday, and many employees were being forced to take extra days off to avoid wholesale layoffs. Despite the slowdown, Combloux's mayor, Raymond Turri, vowed the resort would not close, because of the damage that could do to its reputation.

Meanwhile, this week the resort will hold its second annual conference on global warming, to highlight the problem and the danger posed to the ski industry. "We are worried," said Laurent Ancenay, tourism director for Combloux. "We are low, at 1,200 meters [about 3,937 feet], and when they tell us we are not going to have snow in a few years, we want to know if it's true."