Snow Surfing

When the Surfrider Foundation’s winter offshoot — the Snowrider Project — was at Sugarbush last month, the hydrological cycle was a big topic of conversation. The Snowrider Project’s goal is to educate those living in mountainous areas about watershed stewardship and the connectedness of all the world’s H2O.

The idea is to create a sense of responsibility for the mountain creeks that flow into suburban rivers and eventually meander into the ocean, where the Surfrider Foundation does its most extensive work.

Now that the sizable Green Mountain snowpack is poised for a spring run, it’s a good time to consider what we’re sending downstream.

Because the Surfrider Foundation and Snowrider Project are environmental organizations and as such take global warming seriously, I asked the Snowrider representatives on hand last month (pictured below) about warming and how it might affect the surf.

My argument about warming helping skiing was shot to pieces this year with all the rain we’ve received, but the theory of heavier precipitation events — bigger storms — had to have an affect on the surf, right?

Remember that spot in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” where Gore ran footage of hurricane Katrina and juxtaposed the death and destruction with his climate change science? His point (made in a definitively political fear-mongering way that soured the whole movie for me): expect bigger storms in a globally warmed world.

Gore and his co-Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, believe hurricanes will get bigger and more frequent as global temps increase.

Here on the East Coast, the best surfing occurs when storms are barreling up the coast. In the days before they touch land, they send swells to the coastline and surfers start to get that same buzz we snowriders do when powder is in the forecast.

So I’m thinking — just as I used to about skiing — this warming thing is going to be great for surfers.

Not so fast, I was told.

Along with the predicted bigger and more frequent storms, there is also a predicted sea level rise associated with global warming. The rising sea level has the potential to completely wash out the beach breaks along the east coast, I learned.

So while more storms might mean more swell, the swell won’t be breaking where it does now. Where will it break? Good question, but I inferred from our conversation that coastal homes might be involved.

The thing is, the IPCC has moved on to the idea of adaption — that is, whatever’s happening may be beyond our power to control it so it’s time to learn to live with it.

That is not at all to say conserving resources and developing renewable energy is not worthwhile. Even if the Earth’s climate is out of our hands, our pursuit of better energy use and production should be no less aggressive. If we can achieve that, we may eliminate our need for an Iraq policy or a business relationship with Saudi Arabia.

And if in achieving that we put a dent in climate change, and these mid-winter rain storms turn back to snow and surfer’s aren’t worried about their beach breaks washing out, so much the better.