winter sports threatened by warming

As if rising sea levels aren’t scary enough, here’s another reason to fear global warming: It could force your favorite ski resort to close. A report issued by the United Nations Environment Program last week said that as global temperatures increase, and the snowline retreats to higher altitudes, many existing low-altitude mountain resorts throughout the world will lack reliable snow cover, be cut off from their ski runs, and risk financial ruin. In one worst-case scenario, none of Australia’s ski resorts would be viable by 2070. The report used temperature forecasts produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of some 2,000 scientists, which estimated that world temperatures will rise anywhere from 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 unless greenhouse gas emissions are radically reduced. UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer said that global warming — in the form of extreme weather such as floods and droughts — will have the most devastating impact on the world’s poorest nations, but “this study on winter sports shows that it is not just the developing world that will suffer. Even rich nations are facing potentially massive upheavals with significant economic, social and cultural implications.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 12/09/2003.