Spiegel: For amateur skier Ulrich Strasser, artificial snow is a good thing. "It’s thicker and firmer, and therefore better for carving," he says. But in his role as a scientist, he takes a very different view of the artificial white stuff. Covering entire slopes with manmade powder consumes an enormous amount of energy and water. And for Strasser, a geographer at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, that’s a mountainous problem in a time of climate change (more…). …