Global warming may challenge lower-altitude ski areas like Vail - shown here last week - to make more snow and cut higher runs. Colorado’s ski areas will have to carve runs higher up the mountains and triple their snowmaking if they are to co-exist with global warming over the coming decades, a new study says. That extra snowmaking will require a lot more water at a time when it is very expensive to buy senior water rights, says the study presented today to the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. And it would have to come from a distance away, because any diversion close by would harm wildlife habitats.

Gondolas will have to be revamped - to take skiers from skimpy snow at the bottom of the mountain high up to where there is a permanent snowpack. Aspen Mountain’s snowpack line - the elevation at which winter-season snowpack can be assured - will be 2,400 vertical feet higher up by the end of the century. “Ski resort operators are really scrambling,” co-author Mark Williams, a geography professor at the University of Colorado, said. “The bottom line is that in order to survive, these ski areas will need to find the necessary water wherever they can and hold it in storage to satisfy future snowmaking needs.”

One sliver of good news is that Aspen Mountain looks like it will fare quite a bit better than Park City, Utah, which could have no snowpack at all at its base by the end of the century. Williams and co-author Brian Lazar of Boulder took detailed looks at Aspen Mountain and Park City, but said their findings on Aspen would apply to most ski areas in Colorado, as well.

The authors painted a future scenario for the two ski areas - for the years 2030, 2075 and 2100. And they looked at three projections - optimistic, in which there is an immediate reduction in CO2 emissions worldwide; mid-line, in which the reduction comes a little slower; and business-as-usual, in which there is no reduction in total emissions. Unhappily, the past five years, total worldwide carbon-dioxide emissions have exceeded even the pessimistic business-as-usual models. The business-as-usual scenario will cause average temperatures to rise by about 4 degrees in Aspen by the time today’s toddlers have graduated from college, Williams said.

The new study was sponsored by Aspen Mountain and the Park City Mountain Resort said Lazar. Two nonprofits - the Aspen Global Change Institute and the Park City Foundation - are working with the ski areas to better understand environmental climate change. “Ski industry officials know that warming is real, and that small changes in climate have substantial effects on ski areas,” said Williams, also a fellow at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine research. One sliver of good news for Colorado is that its resorts likely won’t suffer as dramatically as Park City in Utah, which likely will no snowpack at its base by 2100. Smaller ski areas in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Oregon, Washington and California’s Sierra Nevada, could be forced out of business in the coming decades as air temperatures continue to warm, they said.

Read this out of touch with reality story here. Talk about cognitive dissonance! Last year record snows fell throughout North America including Colorado- 8 Colorado ski resorts set new records: Snowmass, (450 inches), Beaver Creek (430 inches), Crested Butte (422 inches), Monarch Mountain (482 inches), Powderhorn (320 inches), Silverton (550 inches), Steamboat (489 inches) and Telluride (353 inches). This year has been very snowy in the Northwest and Rockies and will again be a banner year. In fact today I received an email from a father of a man who runs the race department at Beaver Creek who reports 12 feet of snow on the ground, a new record. This will be typical of what we can expect in the decades ahead with a switch back to a cold PDO and more La Ninas and a quiet sun. The authors again rely on faulty tinkertoy models that have failed miserably to capture trends (reds and browns IPCC model scenarios and yellow their solution with CO2 held in check, blue and green is actual temperature).

See larger image here

Climate Audit, December 18, 2008

One of the interesting by-products of the GISS screw-up in October was that we learned the names and locations of quite a few Siberian weather stations - that are glaring “hot spots” on temperature anomaly maps. However, most of these places are among the coldest places on earth.

One of them was Verhojansk, about which Anthony Watts had an interesting post last week; it was one of the screwed up NOAA-Hansen sites. It vies for the title of coldest place (in the Northern Hemisphere) with nearby Ojmjakon. (the place where the lowest-ever temperature in the Northern hemisphere was recorded - Verkhoyansk with a record of minus 67.8 degrees Celsius (minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit) and Oymyakon with a minimum of minus 67.7 degrees Celsius (minus 89.9 degrees Fahrenheit).

I’ve taken to occasionally checking on these sites to see how they’re doing and there’s something interesting to watch for over the next few days - the sort of thing that might appeal to people who liked following the summer ice melt. Daily weather information for Ojkjakon is online here

Anyway, in the GHCND history for Ojmjakon online here , there hasn’t been a minus 60 deg C day in December for 15 years and only one in the past 25 years. There has been only one December temperature at Ojmjakon below 62.5 in the GHCND archive (since 1943) - a reading of -62.8 in 1984.

But according to the forecasts here, a low of minus 60 is forecast tonight and minus 63 tomorrow. (Icecap Note: It reached -60C, -76F on the 20th and 22nd). 

The GHCND daily records are maintained consistently up to 2000, but archiving of daily data became very sporadic following the IPCC TAR report. Over the past week, GHCN-D has not managed to record temperatures that were readily available online.

Want to bet the western Russia stations are being recorded. They have been sitting under a ridge and exhibiting warmer than normal readings.

With the number of sunspotless days reaching 16 so far this month, we have now exceeded 1912 as the 2nd quietest sun year since 1900. Only 1913 ranked higher with 311 days. With 12 more days this month as of this writing, we could reach as high as 266 days. Note that 2007 also ranked in the top 10.

See larger graph here.

This is the month by month comparisons of sunspotless days this solar minimum (red) through November and the last minimum in the mid 1990s (blue).

See larger graph here.

The geomagnetic activity has also been extremely low. This is the Ap Index. This plot displays monthly average Ap values and 13-month running smoothed Ap values. The most recent data are always USAF estimates; official values are included as they become available.

See larger graph here.

And longer term here:

See larger graph here.

See this Anthony Watts post on the massive breach of the earth’s magnetic field discovered by NASA and the possible solar role in the lowering of the earth’s Ionosphere to an all-time low altitude. See full post pdf here. See more on the ways the sun may affect our climate here.

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Reuters reports that: Heat is more likely to kill an American than an earthquake, and thunderstorms kill more people than hurricanes do, according to a U.S. “death map” published on Tuesday. Heat and drought caused 19.6 percent of total deaths from natural hazards, with summer thunderstorms causing 18.8 percent and winter weather causing 18.1 percent, the team at the University of South Carolina found. However, the result that heat is the most deadly natural hazard seems to be an artifact of the data source employed by the authors of the so-called “death map.” Their primary data source is the National Climatic Data Center’s Storm Data. However, the NCDC data for mortality from extreme heat and cold is questionable.

As is evident from the paper, the authors are aware that mortality data for these two types of extreme events from NCDC are substantially different from mortality data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) based on the Compressed Mortality File for the United States. The latter uses death certificate records, which provide the cause of each recorded death (based on medical opinion). I would contend that when it comes to cause of death, particularly for extreme cold and heat, medical opinion as captured in death certificate records is probably more reliable than determinations made by the meteorologists in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s NCDC.

The following table from Goklany (2007) provides a breakdown of mortality due to the major types of extreme weather events for 1979-2002 based on data from the CDC database for extreme cold and extreme heat, and various arms of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for floods, lightning, hurricanes, and tornadoes. It indicates that extreme cold, rather than heat, is the deadliest form of extreme weather event. In fact, over this period, extreme cold was responsible for slightly more than 50 percent of deaths during this period for the categories listed in the table.

See large table here

Note that despite the hoopla about natural weather disasters, they contribute less than 0.06% to the annual U.S. death toll! Moreover, as the following figure, also from Goklany (2007), shows, both US death and death rates from weather events are declining, despite any climate change, which we are assured can only make matters worse.

See larger graph here

Finally, the Reuters report notes, “Researchers who compiled the county-by-county look at what natural disasters kill Americans said they hope their study will help emergency preparedness officials plan better.” [The study was apparently funded by the Department of Homeland Security.] As a taxpayer, I hope that emergency preparedness officials look beyond this study to identify and prepare for future emergencies, or they might miss out on the larger disasters, even as they prepare for lesser ones. Read full post here.

NOAA NCDC continues to degrade their credibility. Not only are they cooking the books on temperature adjustments but are doing it on mortality statistics to make heat look more of a threat. Soon I would expect them to start denying the existence of the dust bowl and 1930 heat records which to this day dominate the record books.