SALT LAKE CITY — Ski resorts across the country are using the Thanksgiving weekend to jump start their winter seasons, but with every passing year comes a frightening realization: If global temperatures continue to rise, fewer and fewer resorts will be able to open for the traditional beginning of ski season.
Warmer temperatures at night are making it more difficult to make snow and the snow that falls naturally is melting earlier in the spring.
In few places is this a bigger concern than the American West, where skiing is one of the most lucrative segments of the tourism industry and often the only reason many people visit cash-strapped states like Utah during winter.
But even as world leaders descend on Copenhagen next month to figure out a way to reduce carbon emissions blamed in global warming, the industry is still grappling with leaders in some of their own ski-crazy states who refuse to concede that humans have any impact on climate change.
Chief among them is Republican Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, who says he will host what he calls the first "legitimate debate" about man's role in climate change in the spring.
While the world's leading scientific organizations agree the debate was settled long ago, the former Realtor who took office when Jon Huntsman resigned to become U.S. ambassador to China maintains that it wasn't.
"He's said to me that the jury is out in his mind whether it's man-caused and he thinks and believes that the public jury is still out," said Herbert's environmental adviser, Democrat Ted Wilson.
Herbert's reluctance to acknowledge that greenhouse gases contribute to global warming quietly frustrates Utah ski resorts that depend on state marketing money, but it openly infuriates industry officials elsewhere who liken it to having a debate about whether the world is flat.
"That's just kind of raging ignorance," said Auden Schendler, executive director of sustainability for Aspen (Colo.) Skiing Co. "We're not environmentalists, we're business people. We have studied the hell out of the climate science. To have a neighboring governor not believe it ... It's absurd."
The Associated Press: Ski resorts fight global warming; Utah gov unsure
Warmer temperatures at night are making it more difficult to make snow and the snow that falls naturally is melting earlier in the spring.
In few places is this a bigger concern than the American West, where skiing is one of the most lucrative segments of the tourism industry and often the only reason many people visit cash-strapped states like Utah during winter.
But even as world leaders descend on Copenhagen next month to figure out a way to reduce carbon emissions blamed in global warming, the industry is still grappling with leaders in some of their own ski-crazy states who refuse to concede that humans have any impact on climate change.
Chief among them is Republican Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, who says he will host what he calls the first "legitimate debate" about man's role in climate change in the spring.
While the world's leading scientific organizations agree the debate was settled long ago, the former Realtor who took office when Jon Huntsman resigned to become U.S. ambassador to China maintains that it wasn't.
"He's said to me that the jury is out in his mind whether it's man-caused and he thinks and believes that the public jury is still out," said Herbert's environmental adviser, Democrat Ted Wilson.
Herbert's reluctance to acknowledge that greenhouse gases contribute to global warming quietly frustrates Utah ski resorts that depend on state marketing money, but it openly infuriates industry officials elsewhere who liken it to having a debate about whether the world is flat.
"That's just kind of raging ignorance," said Auden Schendler, executive director of sustainability for Aspen (Colo.) Skiing Co. "We're not environmentalists, we're business people. We have studied the hell out of the climate science. To have a neighboring governor not believe it ... It's absurd."
The Associated Press: Ski resorts fight global warming; Utah gov unsure
