Sustainability of the skiing world

Drail

Drail

Active member
Just to warn anyone who reads this (I am writting this after I have written the thread below)... I may have gotten carried away, and I appologize for the length. there is a lot that is on my mind, but I tried to only mention things that are important to skiing,

Perhaps it belongs in the 'articles' section, but does anyone really go there?

I've been reading up on a bunch of geological and economical stuff about our world and society... the word 'sustainable' seams to be said by everyone more and more... but sustainability of the ski world isn't really talk about much, is that because we all know that the skiing world (not just the industry, but the entire sport/hobby/etc) is in jepordy.

everyone's always talking about climate change and global warming and all that shit... well, hate it or not, the amount of carbon dioxide being pumped into the air is being done so at a rate that is far faster than the earth can absorb it... and it's scientificly proven that more carbon dioxide and methane gas's does heat up the atmosphere. So if we continue on at this rate than we will soon be in a world without winter (soon in geological terms, not like in 5 years, but more like 50 or 100 or 1000, or fuck, maybe a million)... but the average temperature of the planet is rising.

but there is something interesting about the fact I just mentioned... almost all of the carbon dioxide that is being pumped into the air is being done so by burning non-renuable resorces such as oil and coal. now, (as we should all know by now) the rate at which we are consuming oil is huge... and if we continue on like this for much longer than, well...

just think about what would happen to society if we ran out of oil before we could live without it. The result would probably be worse than any epidemic nature would try to throw at us.

so, driving enviromentally safe cars (or if you live in a urban area, don't even drive, just take public trasit - unless of course you're going skiing in the mountains, but than - pick up that hitch hiker along the way, you'll be saving the planet by car pooling. better design your house so that it needs less heating and less air conditioning... but there are things that are out of our hands as an individual. for example: of every 100 units of energy created at the power plant, 91% of that energy is lost in the grid. deforestation of old growth forests will not only hurt the environment but also hurt the economy if we don't change our methods of logging (clearcuting is cheap and easy, but since when was anything good easy? I don't know how to change these things as an individual, but perhaps if we all stand up to the man than we could get something done.

Don't support a government that goes to war for oil for they are the ones destroying this planet, and don't think for one second that George W. Bush is personally responable for the actions by the American government... do you really think one man has that much power in today's world. George W. Bush is just a friendly face for the world to relate with... it would be as foolish to think that the Pilsbury Doughboy is the creator of easy bake cookies.

Canada tried to ban Shell from selling their gas in it's country because of chemicals that are present in their gas that is very hamefull to the environment, so Shell sued the country of Canada (on U.S. soil) and won. So now Canada has no choice but to allow Shell to sell their product on it's soil. Does that make any fucking sence?

Now, I am not saying that the United States is to blame for all of the worlds problems... china is one of the worlds largest polluters, and sometime in the not to distant future will be the largest polluter in the world.

now - that being said, we must also understand that there are many misteries about our planet that we are not yet aware of... for example - did you know that although the appalacian mountains are still growing (in a way)? yes, they used to be much larger in the past (like 250 million years ago), but as errosion brings them down, they are infact being pushed up... think of it like this: as the river errodes the river valley, the river is not dropping in elevation, but the mountains around them are lifting up - it is like an iceburg, ice is 90% as dence as water so, 90% of an iceburg is submerged, and if you take a piece of the iceburg that is above the water away, than the iceburg will lift to corect the balance... it is the same with mountains, except that mountains lie around the 67% mark, and the water is the lithosphere.

so if we are still learning about how our planet interects with itself, how are we to say that we can change it's path. perhaps the climate and the inhabitance of the planet have always been interconected and it is fate that the world will heat up... I mean, what do we know, the acceleration in the heating of the planet could be a natural thing that happensn approximately 20 000 years after the peak of an ice age, and there is nothing we can do as humans to stop it, no matter how massive of an effort we put forth. So would everything we do to save winter be in vain? noone could answer that. but what I do know is that I will not accept doing nothing. I will not sit around and watch at the planet (and the seasons) get destroyed. I will fight so that my kids may have a chance to ski.

if not for yourself, do it for your sport.

 
there are a couple of things, with the rise in tempurature, a large chunk of ice falling in to the atlantic ocean could colapse the gulf stream thusly bringing forth an iceage (kinda like day after tomorrow deal), also the "energy efficent cars" although produce low emmisions when being used by consumers, create way more polution when being produced in the factories. infact a hydrogen car is worse for the enviroment than the traditional car because it's manufacturing.
 
Thats why in the year 2090 the entire NS community is making a village in the Yukon.

Of course it will be much warmer than it is now, so we can ski everyday have have tons of fun.
 
Well I've read that increased temperatures may actually correlate to increased precipitation. So, in certain climates, there could actually be more snow.

The most important thing for our race is to work towards acheiving sustainable energy, whether it be fusion or other means. However, trying to fund this research with the large quantities of money and resources it requires is nearly impossible because our government spends so much fucking money on weapons and threat detection that the fusion research is undermined.

One thing to remember: the planet will be fine. It's the things living on the planet that are going to suffer. People have this separation, both in mind and body, from nature. They think of the "environment" as a separate entity. Unfortunately, the environment is everything--without it, we perish.

The sad part is is that we (myself included) know all this and we're too selfish to actually do anything about it.
 
unfortunatly i cannot find the actual graph and article that i had once read. it had cars and the manufacturing pollutions and the emmissions pollutions, and although the hydrogen car had 0 emmisons, it is crazy how bad the manufacturing pollution was. anyways, so not all my credibility is lost, here is an article on why hydrogen is not the way to go.

http://lfee.mit.edu/metadot/index.pl?iid=2298&isa=Category&op=show
 
Even though you cant find the article do you remember how they are manufactured or what about the process is so harmful? Im just curious not a big deal if you dont remember!
 
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i remeber looking at the graph, they had like regular combustion cars, diesel, hydrogen, gas hybrid, diesel hybrid... idk what else, but they "best" for the environment was the diesel. I can't recal, and i really wich i knew where the article was. sorry man.
 
UMM About the cars, i was doing engineering and we some guys from ubc come and do a lecture to our class about how good hydrogen energy is, and for stupid people it does sound leik quite a good novel technology. Unluckily for the the people giving the speach we were smart engineers and we wanted to knwo the efficency of a hydrogen powered car. I can't remeber the exact number but it was a bit more efficent than gas powered car as i rmeebr ( gas powered cars are around 30% efficent) anwyas, this sounds all good and happy no pollution right? well wrong, we have to produce this hydrogen energy somehow, and how do we do that? Generally we burn fossil fuels to turn into hydrogen energy, in the transformation from fossile fuel energy to hydrgen energy we loose massive amounts of power resulting in hydrgen energy being over 90% less efficent than running a gas powered car. This also means that more pollutin will be created, but this increased pulltion will just be found centralized around these power plants instead of spread through the highway systems. Anyways in my opionion hydrogen energy is just a big consumer scam. Sorta like how video game consols have the technology to put out really good systems but instead they slowly drag you along to make you buy as much as possible, hydrogen energy is just one of thos stepping stones.

Hydrogen energy would be efficent if we got the energy to produce the hydrogen from dams, and or geothermal energy, but its is riduclous to think that the majority fo the world will switch to these cleaner forms of energy in 50 years or so. Anyways there is this really sad site called www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.com or somehting leik that.....and basically it says we are fucked unless we kill alot of chinese people to get enough resources to build giant solar power plants in space.

My plan? Well in a couple of years i wnat to move to northern BC and make a dope resort. Other than that.....i try not to drive when i can, i pic up hithchikers and i support green energies ( even though these are not a solution they will open othe rpeopels eyes and hopefulyl lead us to a better brighter future) Ohh and the thign about a little sub-iuce age would supposibly only affect europe by changing atlantic current sand sending them into a mld ice age....so we could all move to norway as well...that woudl be prtety sick. (Antartica has lots of mountains too! but has relative darkness for 6 months of the year)

P.s.- yes i know my spelling and grammer etc is really shitty. I don't care.
 
diesel is more efficient, but... diesel soot contributes almost half as much as carbon dioxide to global warming. Carbon soot absorbs light energy at all wavelengths from the infrared through the visible into the ultraviolet and then emits this energy as heat in the infrared. Because soot has a rather short lifetime in the atmosphere (it rapidly reacts with oxygen in the air to form carbon dioxide), controlling soot should have a major cooling effect on the climate. This powerful green house gas from diesel vehicles was not considered in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, nor have most computer models of global warming considered diesel soot. This is a major argument against diesel engines. The media seems to be ignorant of the role that soot has in global warming.
 
I think you are a bit confused.

Manufacturing a hydrogen car is really no different from manufacturing a gasoline fueled car.

Where the difference comes in, is obtaining the pure hydrogen for the Hydrogen car's fuel cells. The only way a hydrogen car will be "clean" is when all the h2 that is in its fuel cells comes from eletrolysis of water, which must be done with electricity from new reneweable energy sources (such as wind turbines, etc) Electrolysis is the only method of obtaining pure hydrogen that does not pollute the air (when clean renewable energy is used) and is a feasible method of mass production.

As far as I know, oil/gas supplies across the globe are only going to last for a double digit amount of years at the current rate of consumptionm, and we need oil for alot more shit than just gettin to the ski mountain. Well thats my $.02
 
hydrogen like you guys have said is posibly feasible if you used wind or geothermal energy. however if you had a leak of h2 it would bond with o3 in the atmosphere forming water which would cause a big hole in the ozone layer
 
first of all I don't think an h2 o3 reaction is spontaneous, because they are relatively stable if I'm wrong correct me and point me to the correct info. alot of the problems with ozone comes fromm chlorine, but hydrogen doesn't seem as reactive with the o3 configuration as chlorine is. but it's been a while since chem, so if you can back up your point that's cool.

secondly I think there's another point that everyones missing, yeah there's global warming, but take a good look at all your ski equipment.

the jackets, pants, gloves, laminates on the skis, and goggles are all plastics, which are hydrocarbon derivatives (they come from oil in case you didn't understand that). oil exhaustion will begin to drive the prices up for things you need to ski, and longterm oil shortages could make it unfeasible to produce ski technology that uses plastics.

just my two cents...
 
you know they arnt.....remember the mayan civillization said 12/21/2012 is the end of time... i think they might be right. get your skiing in while you still can
 
if you actually read the website there are quotes from people such as dick cheney and Simmons, and Warren buffet that indicate that there is alot of truth to the theories out there. Simmons himself suggessted that for things to be stabilized the price of oil must rise to at least $10 (US) a gallon.
 
we won't run out of oil. we will only run out of cheap oil! then we will hopefully find other sources of energy. otherwise ummm were kinda screwed so i am going to start practicing setting snares now so i can survive
 
the earth warming up is just a cycle i mean come on, we went from an ice age to where we are now. the animals farting did not totally fucking make the world warm and go crazy, it just happens, we might be speeding it up a little bit, but thats all im going to give you, TO BE HONEST i think were going into a global cooling period, but we will see in the comming years.
 
what the fuck dude, havent you ever heard that "the simplest answer is usually the correct one" did the earth not come out of a ice age before all of us were fucking up the earth? so it was warming..... what is it doing again.... warming, and theres actually major studies about global cooling, and they have proved it gets warmer before a major ice age... but whatever being a dumbass is easier than trying to sound like an "intellectual"
 
actually we already could live without oil or gasoline. But they can't just simply introduce this technology into the world at once. It would be a huge economy crash. I'm not worried about skiing ending though there's not a whole lot I could do about it.
 
Regarding the comment on the manufacturing plants that produce cars...I was reading an article in one of those shitty airplane magazines coming home about a new BMW plant in germany or wherever they are built, that is a 0% emission plant. And BMW is one of the forefronts of car design, especially in Hydrogen Fuel cells.
 
That's a good call....

Soon we'll be carving our own skis, wearing leather boots and wearing animal furs!

Or, it will drive up the cost of equipment so that only the rich will be able to afford the activity. - worse than it is now.
 
you aren't aware of actions our planet does that we have no explanation for yet?

examples: there is a direct relation to mountain building and climate change... we are not sure if increased mountain building cools down the climate to create an ice age, or if it's the other way around and if the cooling of the climate infact increases mountain production.

i could go on, but i feel lazy right now and not in the mood to type...
 
dude I know hydrogen is unstable, but in low quantities in a gaseous environment I think it is unlikely to have a spontaneous reaction with ozone. yes hydrogen is reactive, I've almost blown up my hand and seen it break test tubes, however that's with O2 not O3... just wondering if it will react with ozone that's all. cause I don't think it just happens on its own (h2 gas sits in air with o2 and doesn't blow up spontaneously...)
 
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