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THE STORY OF SKIING AND THE FUTURE OF SNOW

PORTER FOX DEEP IThe Age of Humans

~atterhorn Paradise station, which also uses wastewater to make nques 01- 'l.lo=: snow. But the efforts are window dressing when it comes to slowing nnmired was ci:e global warming. :mil 1898. whe:: Low-elevation ski areas around the Bernese Oberland will see the became the as effects of climate change far sooner than higher ones around Graubunden

winter. the pai:" andValais.63 Still, ski areas like are already preparing for a warmer r....and the slopes future. Glacial melt has left a sizable gap between the lift station and the , home of Zermatt's popular summer skiing 11;.-11 relatively late slopes. Zermatt Mountain Cableways spends $4 million a year filling it until the first III in with an advanced snowmaking system that operates above freezing. re winter visitors The resort is also expanding warm-weather activities in the event that ts spent the night. the mountain melts out faster than expected. One silver lining of climate rear and there arc change for mountain resorts: hotels have seen increased summer bookings i which are rated by tourists who say the Mediterranean is getting toO hot. 5'" from 6,000 to The ebb and flow of Zermatt's has been a constant throughout is over more than history. During Roman occupation, glaciers like the Findelen grew essed by the Klein substantially, prohibiting travel over nearby passes. Four hundred years later, glaciers receded and roads over the passes reopened. Larch forests Julen millionaires, sprung up where there once was ice, until the glaciers advanced again :lee-uic buses have and mowed them down. When glacial ice peaked in 1850, it knocked 1940s because air over farmhouses and covered valuable grazing pastures. ~larrerhorn.~any The most recent melt, Paul Julen said, is part of the cycle. Julen ,rn modern energy remembered stories of panicked farmers selling off their land in the :ctS start every year, 1800s, only to see it uncovered again decades later. "What are you going pace. Recently the to do?" he laughed, shrugging his shoulders. Until it gets cold again, :'L rated for 65,000 snowmaking, water rationing and adaptation will bridge the gap. "It's >idents. what we've always done," he said. urange to see diesel j' in town. Officials es in half in recent nplY with stringent .res into the ground IBM has always been ahead of its time. The company was an early f, Zermatt Mountain adopter of energy conservation, tracking consumption as early as 1973.An snowmaking efforts efficiency initiative between 1990 and 2012 saved an estimated 6.1 billion ,....car station and the

257 Porter Fox

kilowatt-hours of electricity. Since then, IBM has invested in climate a competitr change modeling in South Africa and solar panel research. Its "Water for carbonated Tomorrow" project, in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy, also the gas.The helps develop forecasting tools to better manage the world's rivers. biggest pot! It's another computer pioneer, though, who is funding what people "enhanced, in the climate change world call "Plan B"-the last resort if reducing stranded oil emissions doesn't work. Bill Gates entered the global warming arena the the equivale way he embarks on any large project: by hiring top experts in the field out a caprur to teach him in his living room. Gates's interest lies in an area of study Geoengir called geoengineering-defined as a deliberate, large-scale intervention with system into the Earth's. systems to control global warming. The science has vacil- that it maskr lated somewhere between science fiction and experimentation since the Meteorology 1960s. Proposals include igniting a nuclear weapon on the moon to make the effect pro its orbit shade the Earth from sunlight and planting mechanical trees substantially with chemically coated leaves that draw carbon dioxide out of the air. Europe. Ano Gates has invested millions into researching schemes like stretching the technoio hoses, suspended by balloons, into the stratosphere to spray sulfates that Forum's Glol reflect solar radiation-s-and building machines to churn the ocean in a country or ~ the paths of hurricanes to weaken them.?' One project on which he moving ahen collaborated with NASA designed ships that could spray seawater 3,000 global comm vertical feet into clouds and make them more reflective. rogue counzr The most obvious way to slow warming is to take carbon dioxide agriculture, ir out of the air. Carbon capture and sequestration gained traction in 2007 The ongo when Sir Richard Branson and Al Gore announced a $25 million prize convinced till for anyone who could remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the Lynas writes i atmosphere every year for a decade. No one has claimed the prize, but a new atmosp several companies are in the running. Most use sorbents that bind to carbon ecosystems 113 dioxide, then release it in another process. The scheme would require The Holocen thousands of tall, narrow structures that filter air through honeycomb-like Anthropoce'lf capturing chambers. No company has perfected a product yet, but several fight for sun .. demo units have been made. Global Thermostat recently finished a sample rc-engineer rh plant that captures around two tons of carbon dioxide a day. The biggest hurdle to capturing carbon has been making the machines profitable. One of the greatest ironies of climate change is that there is

258 DEEP I The Age of Humans

a competitive market for carbon dioxide. Companies that make dry ice, carbonated drinks and plant food currently pay around $100 a ton for the gas.The greatest of all the great ironies is that the oil industry is the biggest potential customer. It uses carbon dioxide in a process called "enhanced oil recovery" that injects the gas underground to push out stranded oil reserves. With 80 billion barrels of stranded oil in the U.S.- zena me: the equivalent of 14 years of u.s. oil consumption-the prize to figure ihe jdJ. out a capture-and-delivery solution has grown dramatically. oisrudy Geoengineering has as many advocates as critics, who attest that messing rvenrior, with systems that we hardly understand is ill-advised-not to mention "" vacil- that it masks the basic warming problem. The Max Planck Institute for iiinceche Meteorology in Germany reprogrammed its computer models to estimate .ro make the effect proposed space mirrors might have on the planet.The conclusion: ical trees substantially lower rainfall in North and South America and northern he air. Europe. Another debate geoengineering has spurred is what happens if tretching the technology falls into the wrong hands. Deep in the World Economic i2tes that Forum's Global Risks 2013 analysis is a line that paints a scenario "in which ocean m a country or small group of countries precipitates an international crisis by rhich he moving ahead with deployment or large-scale research independent of the xr 3,000 global community. The global climate could, in effect, be hijacked by a rogue country or even a wealthy individual, with unpredictable costs to

I dioxide agriculture, infrastructure and global stability:' in 2007 The ongoing stalemate regarding mitigation has left some, like Gates, IOn pnze convinced that geoengineering could be humanity's last chance. As Mark from the Lyuas writes in his book The God Species,we already have geoengineered trize, but a new atmosphere. In fact, the massive impact humans have had on Earth's l) carbon ecosystems has prompted a movement to declare a new geological epoch. I require The Holocene is over, according to some scientists. We have entered the omb-like Anthropocene, the age of humans. In this era, Lynas argues, we will no longer

31 several fight for survival and live at the whim of Mother Nature. Rather, we will a sample re-engineer the planet-and possibly others-to enhance human prosperity. nachines r there is

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