We have the intellect to imagine the finality of our own demise but do not have the sophistication to overcome our survival instinct and accept it.
Solution? Magical thinking and childish promises of everlasting life.
Ergo, religion.
rac·ist
rāsəst/noun
a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.
Ask yourself honestly if this describes what you believe to be true.
If the answer is yes, you are a racist.
We have the intellect to imagine the finality of our own demise but do not have the sophistication to overcome our survival instinct and accept it.
Solution? Magical thinking and childish promises of everlasting life.
Ergo, religion.
rac·ist
rāsəst/noun
a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.
Ask yourself honestly if this describes what you believe to be true.
If the answer is yes, you are a racist.
Winter isn’t coming: How ski resorts are responding to climate change
The impact of climate change is well-documented: temperatures are rising, droughts are becoming longer, and winter is getting shorter and shorter. For snow-sport enthusiasts, this begets the inevitable question: Is skiing a dying sport? Can Ski Mountains survive shorter winters? Vail Resorts is betting they can.
The threat posed by global warming on the ski industry can already be seen across North America, and continues to get worse. Winters are getting shorter, and the snow pack is getting thinner and thinner. As temperatures rise, Ski Mountains at lower elevations are seeing rain on more days when in the past they saw snow. Resorts have historically manufactured snow during bad winters, but can’t make the snow they need if temperatures are too high. And, to make conditions even worse, global warming has intensified droughts, making less water available for the creation of artificial snow. A climatologist recently predicted that by 2039, 50% of the ski resorts in New England would have to shut down. Should global warming continue at its current pace, only mountains reaching the highest elevations, such as those in the Rocky Mountains or the European Alps, will have access to viable skiing. [9]
Skiers, snowboarders, and resort owners aren’t the only ones that suffer in bad winters. A recent study argues that the snow-sports industry more broadly adds $12.2B to the U.S. economy every year. [3] Small mountain towns depend on winter tourism to keep locals employed and to contribute to their tax base. In California, the small town of Mammoth Lakes suffered such a downturn during successive droughts that it was forced to declare bankruptcy. [8]
While the planet has yet to turn things around, business leaders in the ski industry refuse to let shorter winters hurt their bottom line. The CEO of Vail Resorts, Robert A. Katz, has a simple strategy when it comes to threat of climate change: Make your business about much more than snowfall. [12]
Vail Resorts has invested aggressively in “weather proofing” to ensure they can attract visitors no matter the weather. Vail, and the 14 resorts it owns around the world, have built more golf courses, mountain bike trails, water slides and other warm weather activities to attract outdoor enthusiasts all year round. Some mountains have gone even further – developing approaches to skiing that don’t need any snow at all. The Midlothian Snowsports Center outside of Edinburgh, Scotland offers “dry skiing,” which uses carpet like surfaces to mimic the experience of skiing year round. [6]
Katz also cites a specific strategy to “own more of the mountain” [12]. Lift passes make up about half of a mountain’s revenue, but by owning more hotels, restaurants, and other attractions, a ski resorts can capture a larger share of wallet from each visitor. [12]
Vail has deployed other tactics to secure its financial position. Vail, and other mountains, have aggressively expanded their sale of season passes before the season starts. Although revenue per skier might be lower through season passes, it acts as a hedge against a bad season. Even if they experience a year of bad snowfall, season pass revenue, which is collected before the winter begins, can cover a lot of fixed expenses. Vail has also expanded aggressively to increase market share and diversify its risk: a good year in Canada may make up for a bad year in Utah. [10]
The Ski Industry has recognized its own contributions to climate change. Ski resorts across North America have taken proactive steps to lower their carbon footprint. Many mountains have created management positions to focus on sustainability, and resorts like Vail have curbed their energy use, installed solar panels and increased their recycling programs. Resorts are also working to raise awareness about climate change and to lobby for more environmental protection. Organizations like Protect Our Winters, The Mountain Pact and The National Resource Defense Council are all examples of organizations that have formed to create coalitions of mountain towns, resorts, winter athletes and climate scientists. [7]
If efforts to fight the effects of global warming don’t succeed, winter sports may become a thing of the past. Pessimists predict that skiing in the future will be limited to places like the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, which boasts a 400 meter indoor ski slope in the middle of the desert, filled with artificial snow. The efforts of Vail resorts and Robert Katz may help mountains stay open in the short term, but, in the longer term, we must find ways to significantly reduce global greenhouse gas emissions so that winter doesn’t become a season of the past. [1]
https://rctom.hbs.org/submission/win...limate-change/
We have the intellect to imagine the finality of our own demise but do not have the sophistication to overcome our survival instinct and accept it.
Solution? Magical thinking and childish promises of everlasting life.
Ergo, religion.
rac·ist
rāsəst/noun
a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.
Ask yourself honestly if this describes what you believe to be true.
If the answer is yes, you are a racist.
Global warming worries ski resorts
Count ski resort owners as among businesses who worry more than a little about global warming and climate change.
The reality is that shorter winters and warmer weather can be a real threat to resorts' bottom lines. For skiers, climate change means less snow and shorter seasons.
At the recent Ski Utah media roundtable, the trade organization released information that it plans to continue its partnership with Protect Our Winters or POW.
That groups working with the winter sports community throughout the world to reduce the effect of climate change.
In Utah, Alta, Snowbird, Sundance and Powder Mountain are partnering with Ski Utah. The big push this year will be promoting car pooling and use of public transportation to get skiers to the resorts.
http://archive.sltrib.com/article.ph...46&itype=CMSID
We have the intellect to imagine the finality of our own demise but do not have the sophistication to overcome our survival instinct and accept it.
Solution? Magical thinking and childish promises of everlasting life.
Ergo, religion.
rac·ist
rāsəst/noun
a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.
Ask yourself honestly if this describes what you believe to be true.
If the answer is yes, you are a racist.
^ Reminds me of Jimmy Carter's 'energy crisis' when we weren't supposed to have any petrol by now. lol
cancel2 2022 (03-22-2018)
How Ski Resorts Are Fighting Climate Change
The non-profit group Mountain Pact encourages mountain towns to unite politically. The goal: galvanize politicians to protect winter.
s New England confronts sidewalk avalanches and digs itself out from underneath a blizzard, West Coast skiers are dealing with the opposite problem. Squaw Valley, which averaged 450 inches of snowfall per year between 2008 and 2014, has received less than a third of that amount this season, according to a February snow report. The snowpack situation is so dire there that the International Ski Federation canceled the skicross and snowboardcross World Cup two weeks before it was scheduled to launch, in early March.
Much has been made about the impact of global warming but nowhere is it felt deeper than at ski resort towns, whose economies are pegged almost entirely to snowfall. It sounds obvious, but if it doesn’t snow, no one comes to town to ski, which means no one buys après beer or dinner or groceries or gasoline, and the town loses a revenue stream it depends on.
This isn't just happening in California, a state in the grip of a 100-year “megadrought,” but across the entire western high country. A 2008 study from the University of Maryland estimated that Colorado (which has the largest ski-based economy in the country) would lose $375 million in revenue and 4,500 jobs by 2017 due to skier attrition from lack of snow.
“It’s a bigger issue than, ‘Oh, we can’t ski,’" says Diana Madson, executive director of the non-profit Mountain Pact, a new advocacy group focused on stemming the impacts of climate change on ski towns. “It’s loss of jobs and major environmental degradation.”
In Tahoe, where January snowpack levels are the lowest on record, Madson is drawing up ways to help mountain towns survive the increasingly warming winters. She studied the effect of climate change on mountain towns at the Yale School of Forestry, and found that drought, lack of snow, and more frequent fires were chipping away at the economic base of ski towns nationwide. She also noticed that towns were spending resources addressing the symptoms but not the larger cause of distress. The observation led her to the novel idea that ski towns, if they were to pool their resources and knowledge, might become a formidable political bloc. If only they had a common framework, Madson thought. Last summer, she started Mountain Pact, which galvanizes those communities to lobby for the kind environmental policies that will help the high country adapt to climate change.
“Climate conversation has been focused on urban areas and coastal areas,” Madson says. “Mountain towns are not being heard.”
And they should be. Dr. Elizabeth Burakowski, a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who co-authored a 2012 study about climate change’s impact to tourism, says that there’s already strong evidence that mountain towns are suffering from winter warmth. The country’s $12.2 billion winter tourism industry can’t survive on snow-gun slopes, the study says, and ski resorts account for 36 percent of winter tourism-related employment. “In order to protect winter—and the hundreds of thousands whose livelihoods depend upon a snow-filled season—we must act now to support policies that protect our climate, and in turn, our slopes,” the report says.
The notion that climate variability is melting away the viability of resort living isn’t new. Sustainable practices have been baked into ski resort operations for a while now. Aspen, for instance, is capturing methane from a nearby coal plant to power its snow guns, and Deer Valley runs its snowcats on bio-diesel. But a lot of those actions have occurred only at the resort level, and smaller towns without Aspen’s robust economy can be paralyzed by the scope of adapting their infrastructure to the changing climate.
Madson, who grew up on the west side of the Sierra Nevadas, spent last summer traveling across the West, talking to town managers and local business councils to see if they’d join Mountain Pact. By the fall, she had a handful of mountain towns, including Aspen, Tahoe, Vail, and Park City on board. The partners drew up a list of common problems, like drought mitigation and wildfire. “We didn’t have a focus on legislation before,” says Matt Abbott, Park City’s environmental project manager. “Together we’ve got a lot more leverage than alone.”
Park City has had a climate adaptation plan in place since 2009. It caps the community’s water and energy use, and outlines a concrete plan for smart growth and disaster relief. Park City is on the front end of the curve of climate planning, in part because it has a diversified economic base and good funding, but Abbot says he’d like to pave the way for smaller towns with less robust economies.
Madson says that’s why it’s important to band towns together, because a lot of the big picture things they’re facing are the same. They can leverage their collective voice to change state and federal policy and piggyback off of the good ideas of other towns, like Park City’s adaptation plan. “A lot of it is unsexy stuff, like water quality, forest health, and new business plans,” Madson says. “These towns tend to be progressive, they recognize [climate change] as an issue, but there are levels of investment that feel overwhelming. They say, ‘We know it’s happening but we don’t always know what to do and we don’t have any money to do it.’”
Mountain Pact and its partners are focusing on three objectives: adaptation, mitigation, and federal prioritization. For example, they’re working with the Obama administration to block expanded coal leasing on Department of Interior land, and to keep carbon emissions in check. They’ve outlined a plan for how the federal government can support more resilient water infrastructure. In January, they introduced the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, which would allocate more funding to wildfire prevention and give mountain towns more ways to adapt before they’re in crisis mode.
The National Ski Industry Association, which has been trying to reduce the ski world’s climate footprint since 2002, says that Mountain Pact is an ally in the effort to buffer ski areas against climate change. “Out of the gates I can tell you that the ski industry is in total agreement on supporting the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act,” says Geraldine Link, the NSAA’s Director of Public Policy. The NSAA is also lining up with other industry groups that focus on climate change, like Protect Our Winters, a winter sports advocacy group launched in 2007 by big-mountain snowboarder Jeremy Jones.
Mountain Pact is also trying to make mountain towns aware of policy that will impact them. “Those can be hidden,” Madson says. For example, last year the U.S. Forest Service proposed a directive that would prevent a ski area owner from selling off private water rights while the ski area is operational. As it stands, a ski resort’s plumbing could be shut off in the event of a sale if the water rights weren’t included in the transaction. “It was a big deal,” Madson says, “but it was buried as agency policy.”
One of the biggest challenges in addressing climate change is that it’s intangible and wide-ranging. It also makes Madson’s job tougher: It’s hard to convince communities to finance projects that don’t pay immediate dividends or generate easily measurable returns on investment.
But she’s already gaining ground. The Wildfire Disaster Funding Act is on the floor in both the House and the Senate. It has bipartisan support (which is rare for an environmental bill), as well as backing from environmental groups and government agencies. “This bill is a welcome shift to long-term planning for fire that will greatly benefit our communities and our public lands,” says Ani Kame'enui, forest expert for Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign. Across the aisle, parties say they like its smart allocation of government funds and forward-thinking approach—exactly what Madson is pushing for.
https://www.outsideonline.com/193084...climate-change
We have the intellect to imagine the finality of our own demise but do not have the sophistication to overcome our survival instinct and accept it.
Solution? Magical thinking and childish promises of everlasting life.
Ergo, religion.
rac·ist
rāsəst/noun
a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.
Ask yourself honestly if this describes what you believe to be true.
If the answer is yes, you are a racist.
About time the scumbags were called to task!!
BBC Forced To Retract False Claim About Hurricanes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42251921
You may recall the above report by the BBC, which described how bad last year’s Atlantic hurricane season was, before commenting at the end:
A warmer world is bringing us a greater number of hurricanes and a greater risk of a hurricane becoming the most powerful category 5.
As I promised, I fired off a complaint, which at first they did their best to dodge. After my refusal to accept their reply, they have now been forced to back down.
The above sentence now no longer appears, and instead they now say:.What is perhaps of most concern is that this report was written by Chris Fawkes, who is one of the BBC’s weather forecasters, and who should therefore know better.
Scientists are still analysing what this data will mean, but a warmer world may bring us a greater number of more powerful category 4 and 5 hurricanes and could bring more extreme rainfall.
Correction 29 January 2018: This story has been updated to clarify that it is modelling rather than historical data that predicts stronger and wetter hurricanes.
.
Of course, we have the usual problem, that those who read the article originally and who would have been deeply misled, won’t see the correction now.
http://www.notalotofpeopleknowthat.w...ut-hurricanes/
Last edited by cancel2 2022; 03-22-2018 at 01:19 PM.
And our brave, intrepid internet hero vomits more racist bile. How does it feel knowing that you came from Africa just like all other humans pussy boy racist? I bet that sticks in your craw. You can always count on pussy racists pretending to be big men on the internet. Then you meet them in person and they rollover unless they have other pussies with them. You are pathetic.
The only way you can prove the Africa claim is to have pictures of my actual family members that originated there. Do you? I'm trying to finish a family photo album and am missing the great grandfather from how many ever generations ago you claim it happened.
I do believe you've been called out to do just that. You refused.
And vitamin C is great too. It can help reduce viral loads in the body. It can absorb radiation. It can improve your stamina. It can kill almost any bacteria with direct exposure and just makes some shit taste good. But given in huge quantities it will induce vomitting, diarrhea, skin ulcers, mouth ulcers and if given enough death.
So what the fuck is your point.
Not much of picture for your family album but here you go fuckface.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/...ineage-remains
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