REPORTER: Thom Cookes
This is one of Europe's oldest and most glamorous ski resorts, Kitzbuhel, in the Austrian Alps. It's the playground of royalty and the super rich, and these winter tourists contribute around 5% of Austria's gross national product. But if things get any warmer, it's an income that looks like it's literally drying up. High up on a mountain the snow cover is good, but lower down, it's a different story, and the tourists here are unimpressed.
IRISH MAN: Yeah, we are surprised.
IRISH WOMAN: Just experienced it, though. It was just...you're going slush, grass, muck. You know, he has muck all over his sleeves and everything.
REPORTER: It's an expensive holiday. You must be a bit disappointed.
IRISH WOMAN: If you were to judge your holiday on the first day, you'd go home.
For ski resorts in the European Alps, this was one of the worst winter seasons on record. Across Europe, hard questions are being asked about what the future holds for winter tourism, and what impact global warming will have in the Alps. According to a report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development - the OECD - just a two degree increase in temperature would mean a third of all Alpine ski resorts wouldn't have enough snow to be viable.
DR BRUNO ABEGG, UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH: Well, right now we are experiencing a very extraordinary winter - a winter like one we could experience in 50 or 70 years time, so this is very extraordinary, but in a way it gives us an idea of what might happen in the future.
Bruno Abegg is one of the authors of the OECD study. He says that because of climate change, banks are already refusing to lend money to some of the resorts at lower altitudes.
BRUNO ABEGG: They're thinking about giving credits to businesses and usually they're not willing to give new credits for smaller business lower than 1,500m.
The Kitzbuhel village is well below 1,500m, and until now, the secret to its financial success has been that, every year, it hosts the most famous downhill ski race in the world - the Hahnenkamm. Apart from putting Kitzbuhel on the tourism map, the race weekend itself brings in a huge amount of money.
MICHAEL HUBER, KITZBUHEL SKI CLUB: We calculated about 30 million euros which will be brought into the area from outside.
REPORTER: Just from the one race weekend?
MICHAEL HUBER: Yes, it's only this race weekend.
According to Michael Huber, if the Hahnenkamm doesn't happen, the effects are felt right across the Austrian tourism industry. But this year, the season was so bad that there wasn't enough snow to cover the Hahnenkamm run and it was too warm to make artificial snow with machines like these. Undeterred, the race organisers took the extraordinary step of flying snow in by helicopter.
AXEL NAGLICH, HAHNENKAMM RACE ORGANISER: We had three different types of helicopters, but between three and six, seven cubic metres per load, so it's a little drop on the hot stone, but a lot of drops filled the holes.
For an entire week, a relay of helicopters carried snow from a nearby mountain, and trucks and excavators pushed it into place.
DR BRUNO ABEGG: From their perspective, it was necessary to do so, because they wanted to have this world famous Hahnenkamm race, but from an ecological point of view, it was nonsense.
REPORTER: Why is that?
DR BRUNO ABEGG: Because it's very, very expensive.
AXEL NAGLICH: I don't know the final calculation, but our calculations were based on about 65-70 euros per cubic metre to be placed on the track, which is a lot of money for a race.
REPORTER: But presumably that's not something you want to do every year.
AXEL NAGLICH: No, no, no, no.
REPORTER: Is this year unusual?
AXEL NAGLICH: Yeah, we hope this is unusual.
All up, the race organisers spent around 300,000 euros - or nearly $500,000 - shifting the snow. Environmentalists in Austria were furious, and Greenpeace staged a demonstration in Kitzbuhel.
JURRIEN WESTERHOF, GREENPEACE AUSTRIA: This cannot be the solution. We have to do something to stop climate change and we have to do fairly rapidly, otherwise it will be too late, and having these cosmetic tricks like bringing snow with the helicopter, if this is going to be normal in 20, 30 years because there's not enough snow anymore I think that's a very clear sign that we should do something now, instead of bringing snow with helicopters and trying to ignore that there is climate change taking place.
After all the money spent on preparing the race track, Mother Nature had one last trick to play. With just five days to go, a freak storm blew the snow away.
MICHAEL HUBER: We had about 60-80 ks of wind speed 24 hours long, but the problem was 10, 12 degrees plus.
REPORTER: And rain, yeah?
MICHAEL HUBER: And rain and a mixture. The racetrack was ready, was 100% ready. It didn't melt it - it blow away. It was like with the hairdryer.
After the storm, the Hahnenkamm downhill race was cancelled. Across the Austrian border in the Swiss Alps, is the Engadine valley. Here, climate change means much more than a lack of good ski runs. It's life threatening. I've come here with scientists from the Swiss Avalanche and Snow Research Institute, who've been studying Mount Schafberg. Like many mountains in Switzerland, it's covered in avalanche fences to catch the snow and to stop it from thundering down the slopes. But much of the mountain itself is actually permafrost - a mix of frozen soil and rock - and, like everything else in the Alps, it's warming up.
DR CHRISTOPH MARTY, SNOW CLIMATOLOGIST: Our scientific understanding so far is, OK, it melts, but we don't really know what's happening with the water of this kind of old ice, where it's going, where it sway, and we do not have increased hydro precipitation in summer, so we just have to assume a kind of worst case scenario - that the whole mountainside can, will come down.
In the village of Pontresina, below Mount Schafberg, they're not taking any chances. That's Mount Schafberg up there behind me and these huge avalanche dams have been built to prevent bits of Schafberg from tumbling down the mountain and flattening the village of Pontresina below us here, and as Schafberg warms up and loosens up, it threatens to do exactly that. The barriers were completed three years ago, and from the air, you get some idea of just how huge they are.
Marcia Phillips, one of the researchers studying Schafberg, is flying me up to the mountain to check its temperature. She and her colleagues have also been testing new types of avalanche fences, and she wants to see how they are holding up. We are dropped off literally on the side of the mountain. But as we climb down the slope, Marcia discovers that one of the fences has collapsed.
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS, PERMAFROST RESEARCHER: We can leave heavy stuff up here, but I want to take my camera because this is amazing. This is incredible.
REPORTER: Why is it incredible?
DR MARCIA HPILLIPS: Because they've been standing here for 10 years, and I've been measuring non-stop for 10 years every hour the temperatures, the movements every year and everything, and they seemed quite stable until last time I came, and now it's fallen over, so I don't know what's happened.
These enormous steel avalanche fences were specially designed to be anchored in moving permafrost, instead of solid rock, but this one has been pushed back up the mountain.
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS: This support was lying on that concrete there. Problem is, to have avalanche defence structures, you need to have stable ground, which we don't have here - we have a creeping permafrost, and the long-time aim of this was to observe how they react when the ground moves relatively quickly.
The reason the ground is moving is because it's warming up.
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS: Here we are at the top of a bore hole which is 20m deep and we have 12 thermometers at different depths measuring the temperature of the permafrost and that also allows us to see the thickness or the depth of the active layer which is the layer that melts in summer and here it's about 50cm, but in a very warm summer, it might be as much as a metre.
REPORTER: What's been happening? What's the trend been?
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS: It's been getting warmer and we had, for example, in summer 2003, which was very, very hot here in the Alps, we had an active layer of 1m, which also caused the whole slope to creep more strongly.
If the mountainside gives way, hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of rock and ice will tumble down here towards Pontresina. From the top of Schafberg, you can see another obvious sign of global warming.
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS: So that is the Mortarasch Glacier in the background here and it's receding quite rapidly now. I think in 2003 it went back 80m or 85m in one year.
REPORTER: Is that a bad thing?
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS: It's a very important water reservoir for the Alps and underlying countries so in the long run, yes, it's a bad thing.
This winter, there's no problem driving over the high alpine passes, which are normally closed by deep snow. I'm heading further west to the French resort of Megeve. This is Adrien Duvillard, a former downhill World Cup champion and now the Director of Tourism here. It's snowing, and he's showing me around the ski runs. This has been his family's home for generations, and he's passionate about the risks Megeve faces from global warming.
ADRIEN DUVILLARD, DIRECTOR OF TOURISM, MEGEVE: Now is no time anymore to think about what we should do - we just have to do it. It's a global problem, it's a world problem - it's not only for the ski industry.
To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Adrien is lobbying to have all the ski lift equipment converted to environmentally friendly biofuels.
ADRIEN DUVILLARD: Yes, we are planning for not next season but for the coming years to change all the fuel we are using for the ski machine to biofuel because we want to reduce the impact that we do to the environment.
Faced by climate change, the response from most other ski resorts has been to invest heavily in artificial snow making, and to build ski lifts higher and higher up the mountains. But Adrien is arguing against a proposal for higher ski lifts here. He recognises that, as the climate changes, villages like Megeve will have to diversify by relying less on skiing and more on other types of tourism.
ADRIEN DUVILLARD: 20 or 30 years ago, OK, it was the time to invest, OK, but now it's not time anymore to invest. Now the time is not for huge, many things - it's time for quality, not to show them what we are able to do in getting this place and this place or to build a big cable car. I think we don't care about this.
MICHAEL HUBER: I will not change the attitude of my relatives. My grandfather had been in the ski racing business, my father had been in the ski racing business, so I will and maybe my children will do so and we will not change to table tennis.
DR BRUNO ABEGG: There is quite a change going on. I mean, 10 years or 12 years ago, ski area operators were very interested. They wanted to know more about climate change and the possible impact, but for them it was something very far in the future. Now things have changed because they think it's not so far in the future - it's something that affects us right now.
REPORTER: Do you think people are worrying too much global warming, about climate change, or are they worrying Is there too much talk about it and too much panic?
ADRIEN DUVILLARD: No, not enough.
REPORTER: Not enough?
ADRIEN DUVILLARD: Not enough, because we have to wake up everybody. I don't want to close my eyes. I have children and I want to help them to grow in this world. What we do now, it's not so good. It's time. We are almost too late about this so we have to do something now.
Credits
Reporter/Camera
THOM COOKES
Editor
WAYNE LOVE
DAVID POTTS
Producer
ASHLEY SMITH
This is one of Europe's oldest and most glamorous ski resorts, Kitzbuhel, in the Austrian Alps. It's the playground of royalty and the super rich, and these winter tourists contribute around 5% of Austria's gross national product. But if things get any warmer, it's an income that looks like it's literally drying up. High up on a mountain the snow cover is good, but lower down, it's a different story, and the tourists here are unimpressed.
IRISH MAN: Yeah, we are surprised.
IRISH WOMAN: Just experienced it, though. It was just...you're going slush, grass, muck. You know, he has muck all over his sleeves and everything.
REPORTER: It's an expensive holiday. You must be a bit disappointed.
IRISH WOMAN: If you were to judge your holiday on the first day, you'd go home.
For ski resorts in the European Alps, this was one of the worst winter seasons on record. Across Europe, hard questions are being asked about what the future holds for winter tourism, and what impact global warming will have in the Alps. According to a report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development - the OECD - just a two degree increase in temperature would mean a third of all Alpine ski resorts wouldn't have enough snow to be viable.
DR BRUNO ABEGG, UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH: Well, right now we are experiencing a very extraordinary winter - a winter like one we could experience in 50 or 70 years time, so this is very extraordinary, but in a way it gives us an idea of what might happen in the future.
Bruno Abegg is one of the authors of the OECD study. He says that because of climate change, banks are already refusing to lend money to some of the resorts at lower altitudes.
BRUNO ABEGG: They're thinking about giving credits to businesses and usually they're not willing to give new credits for smaller business lower than 1,500m.
The Kitzbuhel village is well below 1,500m, and until now, the secret to its financial success has been that, every year, it hosts the most famous downhill ski race in the world - the Hahnenkamm. Apart from putting Kitzbuhel on the tourism map, the race weekend itself brings in a huge amount of money.
MICHAEL HUBER, KITZBUHEL SKI CLUB: We calculated about 30 million euros which will be brought into the area from outside.
REPORTER: Just from the one race weekend?
MICHAEL HUBER: Yes, it's only this race weekend.
According to Michael Huber, if the Hahnenkamm doesn't happen, the effects are felt right across the Austrian tourism industry. But this year, the season was so bad that there wasn't enough snow to cover the Hahnenkamm run and it was too warm to make artificial snow with machines like these. Undeterred, the race organisers took the extraordinary step of flying snow in by helicopter.
AXEL NAGLICH, HAHNENKAMM RACE ORGANISER: We had three different types of helicopters, but between three and six, seven cubic metres per load, so it's a little drop on the hot stone, but a lot of drops filled the holes.
For an entire week, a relay of helicopters carried snow from a nearby mountain, and trucks and excavators pushed it into place.
DR BRUNO ABEGG: From their perspective, it was necessary to do so, because they wanted to have this world famous Hahnenkamm race, but from an ecological point of view, it was nonsense.
REPORTER: Why is that?
DR BRUNO ABEGG: Because it's very, very expensive.
AXEL NAGLICH: I don't know the final calculation, but our calculations were based on about 65-70 euros per cubic metre to be placed on the track, which is a lot of money for a race.
REPORTER: But presumably that's not something you want to do every year.
AXEL NAGLICH: No, no, no, no.
REPORTER: Is this year unusual?
AXEL NAGLICH: Yeah, we hope this is unusual.
All up, the race organisers spent around 300,000 euros - or nearly $500,000 - shifting the snow. Environmentalists in Austria were furious, and Greenpeace staged a demonstration in Kitzbuhel.
JURRIEN WESTERHOF, GREENPEACE AUSTRIA: This cannot be the solution. We have to do something to stop climate change and we have to do fairly rapidly, otherwise it will be too late, and having these cosmetic tricks like bringing snow with the helicopter, if this is going to be normal in 20, 30 years because there's not enough snow anymore I think that's a very clear sign that we should do something now, instead of bringing snow with helicopters and trying to ignore that there is climate change taking place.
After all the money spent on preparing the race track, Mother Nature had one last trick to play. With just five days to go, a freak storm blew the snow away.
MICHAEL HUBER: We had about 60-80 ks of wind speed 24 hours long, but the problem was 10, 12 degrees plus.
REPORTER: And rain, yeah?
MICHAEL HUBER: And rain and a mixture. The racetrack was ready, was 100% ready. It didn't melt it - it blow away. It was like with the hairdryer.
After the storm, the Hahnenkamm downhill race was cancelled. Across the Austrian border in the Swiss Alps, is the Engadine valley. Here, climate change means much more than a lack of good ski runs. It's life threatening. I've come here with scientists from the Swiss Avalanche and Snow Research Institute, who've been studying Mount Schafberg. Like many mountains in Switzerland, it's covered in avalanche fences to catch the snow and to stop it from thundering down the slopes. But much of the mountain itself is actually permafrost - a mix of frozen soil and rock - and, like everything else in the Alps, it's warming up.
DR CHRISTOPH MARTY, SNOW CLIMATOLOGIST: Our scientific understanding so far is, OK, it melts, but we don't really know what's happening with the water of this kind of old ice, where it's going, where it sway, and we do not have increased hydro precipitation in summer, so we just have to assume a kind of worst case scenario - that the whole mountainside can, will come down.
In the village of Pontresina, below Mount Schafberg, they're not taking any chances. That's Mount Schafberg up there behind me and these huge avalanche dams have been built to prevent bits of Schafberg from tumbling down the mountain and flattening the village of Pontresina below us here, and as Schafberg warms up and loosens up, it threatens to do exactly that. The barriers were completed three years ago, and from the air, you get some idea of just how huge they are.
Marcia Phillips, one of the researchers studying Schafberg, is flying me up to the mountain to check its temperature. She and her colleagues have also been testing new types of avalanche fences, and she wants to see how they are holding up. We are dropped off literally on the side of the mountain. But as we climb down the slope, Marcia discovers that one of the fences has collapsed.
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS, PERMAFROST RESEARCHER: We can leave heavy stuff up here, but I want to take my camera because this is amazing. This is incredible.
REPORTER: Why is it incredible?
DR MARCIA HPILLIPS: Because they've been standing here for 10 years, and I've been measuring non-stop for 10 years every hour the temperatures, the movements every year and everything, and they seemed quite stable until last time I came, and now it's fallen over, so I don't know what's happened.
These enormous steel avalanche fences were specially designed to be anchored in moving permafrost, instead of solid rock, but this one has been pushed back up the mountain.
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS: This support was lying on that concrete there. Problem is, to have avalanche defence structures, you need to have stable ground, which we don't have here - we have a creeping permafrost, and the long-time aim of this was to observe how they react when the ground moves relatively quickly.
The reason the ground is moving is because it's warming up.
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS: Here we are at the top of a bore hole which is 20m deep and we have 12 thermometers at different depths measuring the temperature of the permafrost and that also allows us to see the thickness or the depth of the active layer which is the layer that melts in summer and here it's about 50cm, but in a very warm summer, it might be as much as a metre.
REPORTER: What's been happening? What's the trend been?
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS: It's been getting warmer and we had, for example, in summer 2003, which was very, very hot here in the Alps, we had an active layer of 1m, which also caused the whole slope to creep more strongly.
If the mountainside gives way, hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of rock and ice will tumble down here towards Pontresina. From the top of Schafberg, you can see another obvious sign of global warming.
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS: So that is the Mortarasch Glacier in the background here and it's receding quite rapidly now. I think in 2003 it went back 80m or 85m in one year.
REPORTER: Is that a bad thing?
DR MARCIA PHILLIPS: It's a very important water reservoir for the Alps and underlying countries so in the long run, yes, it's a bad thing.
This winter, there's no problem driving over the high alpine passes, which are normally closed by deep snow. I'm heading further west to the French resort of Megeve. This is Adrien Duvillard, a former downhill World Cup champion and now the Director of Tourism here. It's snowing, and he's showing me around the ski runs. This has been his family's home for generations, and he's passionate about the risks Megeve faces from global warming.
ADRIEN DUVILLARD, DIRECTOR OF TOURISM, MEGEVE: Now is no time anymore to think about what we should do - we just have to do it. It's a global problem, it's a world problem - it's not only for the ski industry.
To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Adrien is lobbying to have all the ski lift equipment converted to environmentally friendly biofuels.
ADRIEN DUVILLARD: Yes, we are planning for not next season but for the coming years to change all the fuel we are using for the ski machine to biofuel because we want to reduce the impact that we do to the environment.
Faced by climate change, the response from most other ski resorts has been to invest heavily in artificial snow making, and to build ski lifts higher and higher up the mountains. But Adrien is arguing against a proposal for higher ski lifts here. He recognises that, as the climate changes, villages like Megeve will have to diversify by relying less on skiing and more on other types of tourism.
ADRIEN DUVILLARD: 20 or 30 years ago, OK, it was the time to invest, OK, but now it's not time anymore to invest. Now the time is not for huge, many things - it's time for quality, not to show them what we are able to do in getting this place and this place or to build a big cable car. I think we don't care about this.
MICHAEL HUBER: I will not change the attitude of my relatives. My grandfather had been in the ski racing business, my father had been in the ski racing business, so I will and maybe my children will do so and we will not change to table tennis.
DR BRUNO ABEGG: There is quite a change going on. I mean, 10 years or 12 years ago, ski area operators were very interested. They wanted to know more about climate change and the possible impact, but for them it was something very far in the future. Now things have changed because they think it's not so far in the future - it's something that affects us right now.
REPORTER: Do you think people are worrying too much global warming, about climate change, or are they worrying Is there too much talk about it and too much panic?
ADRIEN DUVILLARD: No, not enough.
REPORTER: Not enough?
ADRIEN DUVILLARD: Not enough, because we have to wake up everybody. I don't want to close my eyes. I have children and I want to help them to grow in this world. What we do now, it's not so good. It's time. We are almost too late about this so we have to do something now.
Credits
Reporter/Camera
THOM COOKES
Editor
WAYNE LOVE
DAVID POTTS
Producer
ASHLEY SMITH