Vail CEO writes opinion piece on climate change

What Katz didn't say is that the likely impact of climate change upon skiing is a rise in the rain/snow line. In that scenario Colorado would be perhaps the least affected major ski region in the world. VR's competitive position vs. other destination resorts would probably be enhanced. The recent purchase of Kirkwood improves VR's "climate" positioning at Tahoe also.
 
What a world we live in!
In the past 13 years I lived through the Tech/Stock market mania of 2000, then the push for the Iraq war in 2003, then the mortgage boom bust of 2006/2008.
Humans are trend followers. One of my main rules of business is "people go where people go". We are herd animals. We feel right by just following what everyone else seems to be doing or thinking. That's the basis of religion. Usually "everyone" is wrong.

There was no global warming from 1940 to the mid 1970's. There are 4 different global data sets show in the graph below using a 5 year mean trend line.
The one showing the highest amt of warming since 1975 show about .6C (1F) of warming. (GISS). The others show, .5F, .7F & .6F. So we'll call it .7F "average". Measuring global temperature is a very, very hard thing to do. Right now some of Europe and much of Asia is suffering through an enormous cold spell.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcru ... 40/mean:60

Nice thoughts from the President about doing as much as we can. The sad reality is that in many cases what we are doing is causing more trouble than we are in. Wind turbines and solar do nothing to slow down CO2 useage, they only junk up our environment. Let me take that back, by making electricity more expensive, the will certainly put less dollars in our pockets to go skiing! Also, we have a couple billion of people on our planet that could not even afford a ski lodge lunch, let alone afford equipments, lift tickets & travel. The want to enjoy the benefits of energy so they can have the time and money to post on message boards too! They have a long ay to go to catch up and what little we do to mitigate the disaster many expect will have no effect.
Read it for yourself, for once the gov't tells us the truth.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/epa-est ... re-no-more

Let's say you were investing in the stock market in 1998, and enjoyed almost 20 yrs of solid well above average returns. You could've listened to the "experts" who said you should just put all your money in stocks "for the long run", and heavyweight tech stocks because that will be the thing, on margin too! Or you could've read some history books and see humans were in the same situation before and suffered through the dreadful stock market crashes of 69/70, 73/74 and the early 80's. When you could have been in all stocks for a couple decades with no return. Kind of like it has been since 1999.

For climate I recommend read some climate "history" which has been completely forgotten and discounted. I just read through Lamb's book on Climate, History... which covers historical climate change over the past millennium.
http://www.amazon.com/Climate-History-M ... 292&sr=1-1
It truly fascinating. Enormous well-documented decadal and multi century climate change. Glaciers growing receeding, wheat growing, not growing, growing seasons lengthening and shortening. It's a hard read, more than most of want to know, but a slow skim should convince even the most ardent skeptic of "natural climate change" that what has happened now, has has happened in the past, possibly to a more extreme degree.

Also, recommended, are the books by Brian Fagan on the Great Warming around 1300 AD and The Little Ice Age of 1600-1800. Those glaciers that are melting, weren't always there, something caused them to rapidly grow a couple hundred years ago and that same something operating in reverse very likely has caused them to recede the past century.

Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much about the future of skiing, nor would I try to fix it. That would be like someone in all bonds in 1999, trying to "fix" their poor performance by moving to stocks! A disaster in the making by following the trend.
 
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