The Shrinking Alps - Europe

May 2007
After one of the warmest winters on record, the future of Europe's ski resorts hangs in the balance. There's a real fear global warming could bring parts of the Alps crashing down on villages below.

Marcia Phillips regularly checks the avalanche fences on Mount Schafberg. They're meant to stop loose rocks tumbling down and flattening the village of Pontresina below. But much of Mount Schafberg is built from frozen soil and snow. And the mountain, like everything else in the Alps, is warming up. "We have to assume that the whole mountainside will come down", states climatologist Dr Marty. Ski resorts in the alps have been particularly hard hit by unusually warm winters. Banks already refuse to lend money to ski resorts at lower attitudes. As Dr Bruno Abegg states; "global warming is affecting us right now".

Produced by SBS/Dateline
Distributed by Journeyman Pictures

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News & Politics

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[TheScottgb]

It's funny because they are having such cold weather and soo much snow beating all the records

[VietIs250]

This is good news, we dont need fuel to heat out homes in the winter times lol

[MzBUZZKILINGTON]

5:21 So wtf! They should have given up and not held the race. "oh theirs climate change I can't move snow because the world produces too much CO2 and I have as a ski resort must adress this" What a fucking smug moron.

[OtagoMark]

This could actually be caused by lower world temperatures as easily as warmer ones... the vanishing snows of Kilimanjaro were blamed on global warming too but temps there aren't any colder and the cause is land use changes not global warming and ablation ...the planet was warming long before the industrial reviolution, you'd think the rate of warming would have increased if man was adding to it.. but it hasn't...

[TheScottgb]

Europe is quite bad per person but not nearly as bad as the stupid Americans in oil waste and carbon dioxide production

[TheScottgb]

Sorry I ment melt not freeze

[TheScottgb]

The suns getting colder and if the polar ice caps freeze for my lifetime it will get colder first as the seas get colder

[MeesterCrumpet]

no,its too late already

[numbnuts234567]

Almost too late? We have to do something now? Did they say that on the Titanic after they had hit the iceberg. Of course they did. They must have said, "we have to do something about this now! ".

[cruxan007]

sking is priority number one. waste of money, waste of fuel just so a few humans can have a race.. we are freekin doomed..