EXPERTS WHAT 3 INDUSTRY EXPERTS ARE SAYING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
“Climate change is not an abstraction to us: We need snow and cold to stay in business. By 2100, scientists estimate our climate will warm by 7 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning that the weather in Aspen will match that of Los Alamos, 300 miles south and 500 feet lower. Los Alamos is a beautiful place with
lots of juniper and piñon trees, but it’s very diff erent from Aspen. So everything we do is at risk unless we act now to curb emissions and fi nd another way to create energy and to reduce our consumption of it. But ultimately, this is also about our children and grandchildren. We want to do business in a world that they will recognize. Call us sentimental if you want to, but we think we’re just being practical.”
Mike Kaplan, president and CEO, Aspen Skiing Company PROTECT OUR WINTERS VIDEO:
T e World Cup is the FIS’s economic
engine. In 2007 a
January heat wave wiped out a huge number of International Ski Federation races in Europe, particularly on the World Cup tour.
everyone suff ered: the resorts, the factories, the racers who were at their peak, like Bode Miller,
who won a slushy Wengen race and had to sit idle through Kitzbuehel. I was the only one who profi ted; the series of stories I wrote that winter for T e New York Times became the basis of my book proposal for T e Fall Line, which I started writing in 2009. But any pop those fi rst stories got was from the Associated Press photographs, which showed Austrian helicopters vainly dumping tons of snow on the green and brown hillsides along the Hausberg. You could just smell the manure.
Nathaniel Vinton, author of The Fall Line 56 | 32 DEGREES • FALL 2015
tiny.cc/rmpc3x
See what other snowsports industry stakeholders have to say about climate change and its impact on skiing and riding.
JOIN THE CONVERSATION Do you have strong beliefs about the topic of climate change – on either end of the spectrum (or somewhere in between)? Have questions you want to
pose to your community of instructors? Go to
tiny.cc/kyqc3x to join the Climate Change Conversation post on The Community, PSIA-AASI’s networking tool for snowsports professionals.
T e eff ect of climate change on the ski industry has already been signifi cant. Between 1999 and 2010, low snowfall years cost the industry $1 billion and 27,000 jobs. Oregon took the biggest hit out West, with 31 percent fewer skier visits during low snow years. Next was Washington at 28 percent, Utah at 14 percent and Colorado at 7.7
percent. T e winter sports industry adds $66 billion annually to the U.S. economy, and more than 960,000 jobs across 38 states. With temperatures expected to rise more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, a surprisingly large sector of the U.S. economy appears to be teetering on the brink.
Porter Fox, author of Deep – The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow That winter, almost
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