Climate change: So where has all the snow gone?
With trees bursting into bud and ski runs looking like spring meadows, the Alpine winter appears to have been cancelled
By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 17 December 2006
Midwinter's day may not fall until later this week, but spring already seems to have come to the roof of Europe.
Holiday-makers turning up in the Alps for their annual dose of winter sports are being met by green meadows, not white pistes. Competitors in the skiing World Cup used to be being swaddled in thermals and Lycra, are instead lounging around in T-shirts as their races are cancelled for lack of snow.
Daisies have been poking though the grass at Austria's St Anton resort. Azure Alpine gentians are blossoming even 3,300ft up, while spring forsythia are giving the valleys an unprecedented splash of colour. And over in the French Alps, fruit trees are already coming into bud.
Right across Europe's highest mountain chain, says the World Meteorological Organisation, only a third as much snow as usual has fallen so far this winter. Temperatures are up to three degrees centigrade higher than normal, and in some resorts the weather is so warm that even artificial snowmaking machines will not work.
Hotels throughout the Alps are underbooked; the Italian hoteliers' association reckons that the lack of snow has so far cost its members £400m this year. World Cup races have already been cancelled or rescheduled in France's Val d'Isere and Megève and Switzerland's St Moritz, and one was only able to go ahead in Hochfilzen, in Austria, after local people trucked in 15,000 cubic metres of snow from Grossglockner, the country's highest peak, to create a thin white run through otherwise green pastures.
Local people and tourist officials are doing their best to remain optimistic. "I am certainly not getting nervous," says Wilma Himmelfreundpointer, the deputy director of tourism in St Anton. And 81-year-old Madeleine Villard, in Motte-d'Aveillans, France, adds: "The onions have more layers of skin, which are also thicker, and that means it is going to get really cold." Certainly, a fresh dusting of snow did sprinkle the mountains last week.
But those wishing to consult the authentic harbinger of Alpine spring will find little consolation. Standing on the Promenade de la Treille in Geneva's old town, it is neatly marked with a plaque declaring it to be the city's "official" chestnut tree.
Every spring since 1818, a special city official has watched the tree (and two of its predecessors) to spot when it puts out its first bud, and solemnly record the date on a special noticeboard in the town hall. It usually falls some time in March, though it has at times crept forward into February. But this year, for the first time ever, the tree burst into bloom in late October - and is still sporting flowers and leaves. Winter appears, officially, to have been cancelled.
Human oracles are no more reassuring. Last week the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that the Alps are "particularly sensitive" to global warming, and have recently been heating up three times as fast as the world as a whole. It said there would be "even greater changes in the coming decades, with less snow at low altitudes and receding glaciers and melting permafrost higher up".
A two-year study, which the organisation is due to bring out in February, will conclude that at present 609 of the 666 medium to large Alpine ski resorts have adequate snow cover for at least 100 days a year - but that these could drop to just 200 if temperatures rise by four degrees centigrade. This is something that, according to some experts, could happen by 2050, on the worst-case scenario (see graphic above).
Germany would be the worst affected, with just a one degree rise - which the experts say could happen by 2020 - leading to a 60 per cent drop in resorts with reliable snow. In fact, the Alps abound with signs that climate change is already well under way. In the 15 years running up to the turn of the millennium, they lost nearly a quarter of the area taken up by glaciers. And more than another five per cent melted in the blistering summer of 2003 alone. Average snow levels are half what they were 40 years ago.
As the ice that glues them together has melted, huge masses of rock have started detaching themselves from mountains like the Eiger, and whole cliff faces have disintegrated. And the ever-canny Swiss banks have started refusing to lend to ski resorts less than 4,500ft up in the mountains.
But it is not just the Alps that are sweltering in this warmest of winters. Friday was the hottest winter day ever recorded in Moscow at 8.6 degrees centigrade - as opposed to the usual minus four degrees - and the temperature in the Russian capital is expected to climb even higher over the next few days.
Jaguars have ventured out of their warm lairs in Moscow zoo to enjoy the balmy weather, and bears have refused to hibernate. Buds are sprouting on the trees and spring flowers such as violets and coltsfoot are blossoming. The Russian state weather centre says it is refusing to freeze "even beyond the Arctic circle".
In Sweden, where bears are also failing to turn in for the winter, the gingerbread houses that families traditionally make for Christmas are collapsing as the damp, warm weather melts the icing that is traditionally used to stick them together. "The problem is the mild winter," says Aake Mattsson of Anna's, the country's leading gingerbread wholesaler.
Normally frozen golf courses are still playable in Scandinavia, butterflies have been seen on the wing in Denmark, heather is flowering in Poland, pavement cafés are doing a roaring trade in Rome, and people were still sunbathing and swimming on Spanish beaches in November.
And in Britain, bathed in warm southern and southwesterly winds, a bumper raspberry crop was harvested in Northumberland at the end of November, blackbirds are hatching broods in Sussex, and bunches of black grapes are gracing a wild vine in Essex.
Back in the Alps, resorts are beginning to wonder how they will keep their 160 million skier-days of tourist business a year in a warmer world. Some have built spas; others are offering winter hiking packages. And some experts are beginning to predict that one day the winter sport season could move to summer, using roller skis.
The Independent
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Climate Change vs Mother Nature: Scientists reveal that bears have stopped hibernating
Published: 21 December 2006
Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is affecting the natural world.
In a December in which bumblebees, butterflies and even swallows have been on the wing in Britain, European brown bears have been lumbering through the forests of Spain's Cantabrian mountains, when normally they would already be in their long, annual sleep.
Bears are supposed to slumber throughout the winter, slowing their body rhythms to a minimum and drawing on stored resources, because frozen weather makes food too scarce to find. The barely breathing creatures can lose up to 40 per cent of their body weight before warmer springtime weather rouses them back to life.
But many of the 130 bears in Spain's northern cordillera - which have a slightly different genetic identity from bear populations elsewhere in the world - have remained active throughout recent winters, naturalists from Spain's Brown Bear Foundation (La Fundación Oso Pardo - FOP) said yesterday.
The change is affecting female bears with young cubs, which now find there are enough nuts, acorns, chestnuts and berries on thebleak mountainsides to make winter food-gathering sorties "energetically worthwhile", scientists at the foundation, based in Santander, the Cantabrian capital, told El Pais newspaper.
"If the winter is mild, the female bears find it is energetically worthwhile to make the effort to stay awake and hunt for food," said Guillermo Palomero, the FOP's president and the co-ordinator of a national plan for bear conservation. This changed behaviour, he said, was probably a result of milder winters. "The high Cantabrian peaks freeze all winter, but our teams of observers have been able to follow the perfect outlines of tracks from a group of bears," he said.
The FOP is financed by Spain's Environment Ministry and the autonomous regions of Cantabria, Asturias, Galicia and Castilla-Leon, where the bears roam in search of mates. Indications of winter bear activity have been detected for some time, but only in the past three years have such signs been observed "with absolute certainty", according to the scientists.
"Mother bears with cubs make the effort to seek out nuts and berries if these have been plentiful, and snow is scarce," Mr Palomero said, adding that even for those bears - mostly mature males - who do close down for the winter, "their hibernation period gets shorter every year".
The behaviour change suggests that global warming is responsible for this revolution in ursine behaviour, says Juan Carlos García Cordón, a professor of geography at Santander's Cantabria University, and a climatology specialist.
"Meteorological data in the high mountains is scarce, but it seems that the warming is more noticeable in the valleys where cold air accumulates," Dr García Cordón said. "There is a decline in snowfall, and in the time snow remains on the ground, which makes access to food easier. As autumn comes later, and spring comes earlier, bears have an extra month to forage for food.
"We cannot prove that non-hibernation is caused by global warming, but everything points in that direction."
Spanish meteorologists predict that this year is likely to be the warmest year on record in Spain, just as it is likely to be the warmest year recorded in Britain (where temperature records go back to 1659). Globally, 2006 is likely to be the sixth warmest year in a record going back the mid-19th century.
Mark Wright, the science adviser to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in the UK, said that bears giving up hibernation was "what we would expect" with climate change.
"It does not in itself prove global warming, but it is certainly consistent with predictions of it," he said. "What is particularly interesting about this is that hitherto the warming has seemed to be happening fastest at the poles and at high latitudes, and now we're getting examples of it happening further south, and heading towards the equator.
"I think it's an indication of what's to come. It shows climate change is not a natural phenomenon but something that is affecting not only on the weather, but impacting on the natural world in ways we're only now beginning to understand."
The European brown bear, with its characteristic pelt that ranges from dark brown through shades of grey to pale gold, has black paws and a tawny face. It has poor vision, although it sees in colour and at night, and if threatened rears on its hind legs to get a better view. It can live for up to 30 years. It has acute hearing, and an especially fine sense of smell that enables it to detect food from a long distance. It is carnivorous, but has a multifunctional dental system with powerful canines and grinding molars perfectly adapted to an omnivorous diet.
The animals would normally begin hibernation between October and December, and resume activity between March and May.
The Cantabrian version of the brown bear, a protected species, was once as endangered as the Iberian lynx or the imperial eagle still are in Spain, but is now recovering in numbers. Between 70 and 90 bears roamed Spain's northern mountains in the early 1990s; now 130 live there.
Other seasonal freaks
* The osprey found in the lochs and glens of the Scottish Highlands in the summer months, usually migrate to west Africa to avoid the freeze. This winter, osprey have been spotted in Suffolk and Devon. Swallows, which also normally migrate to Africa for the winter have been also seen across England this winter.
* The red admiral butterfly, below, which hibernates in winter, has been spotted in gardens this month, as has the common darter dragonfly, usually seen between mid-June and October, which has been seen in Cheshire, Norfolk and Hampshire.
* The smew, a diving duck, flies west to the UK for winter from Russia and Scandinavia. This year, though, they have been mainly absent from the lakes and reservoirs between The Wash and the Severn.
* Evergreen ivy and ox-eye daisies are still blooming and some oak trees, which are usually bare by November, were still in leaf on Christmas Day last year.
* The buff-tailed bumblebee is usually first seen in spring. Worker bees die out by the first frost, while fertilised queen bees survive underground between March and September. This December, bees have been seen in Nottingham and York.
* Primroses and daffodils are already flowering at the National Botanic Garden of Wales, in Carmarthenshire. 'Early Sensation' daffodils usually flower from January until February. Horticulturalists put it down to the warm weather.
* Scientists in the Netherlands reported more than 240 wild plants flowering in the first 15 days of December, along with more than 200 cultivated species. Examples included cow parsley and sweet violets. Just two per cent of these plants normally flower in winter, while 27 per cent end their main flowering period in autumn and 56 per cent before October.
The Independent
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