On a clear day, beneath the slopes of the Matterhorn, you can see for yourself the retreat of the alpine glacier – the most vivid example I know of global warming in action. My map of the area, published seven years ago, shows the ice sweeping down the whole north face of the mountain. Today the glacier has shrunk to half its size. In another seven years, say locals, the great wall of ice that, in 1861, prompted the Victorian mountaineer Edward Whymper to describe the “terror of its invincible appearance” could well have disappeared altogether.

It is not the only example. Along the Haute Route, which runs from Chamonix to Zermatt, we saw whole valleys, scoured and black, littered with the debris of broken rocks, left in their wake by steadily melting glaciers.

You might imagine, therefore, that the Swiss, for whom the mountains are the very soul of the country, would be impassioned in their defence of the environment. That combination of stern efficiency and national diligence which ensures that their trains run silently and on time, their streets are swept clean and even their mountain paths are carefully mowed, must surely place Switzerland in the forefront of the campaign to cut carbon emissions.

You would be wrong. High on the slopes above Zermatt, we came upon evidence that, even here, the defence of a profitable tourist industry takes precedence over the need to protect the natural environment. In the midst of a complex network of brilliantly engineered hydroelectric systems, designed to keep the towns and villages of the southern Alps supplied with power, stood row upon row of brand new snowmaking machines, ready for the next skiing season. Sometime in late autumn they will be transported to the fashionable ski resorts of Verbier, Zermatt and the rest, where early snow is desperately short, and used to manufacture a few more hectares of the white stuff so that this year’s tourists can be gulled for one more year at least into imagining that global warming is just an illusion and that the slopes will forever remain glistening and pure.

As an example of chronic and pig-headed frivolity, the snow machine has a lot to answer for. It is wasteful, energy-inefficient and environmentally indefensible. A single ski resort needs as much electricity as a small village just to keep its snowmaking systems going, and they are insatiable consumers of water. To cover one hectare (or 2.5 acres) of a snow slope, which may last less than a day, a snowmaking system needs 880 gallons of water; to cover all of the slopes in the Alps that have artificial snowmaking facilities, the annual demand has been estimated at 20 billion gallons of water, or enough to satisfy the needs of a city of 1.5 million inhabitants. Because alpine resorts are, despite their icy surroundings, often short of water, these precious supplies must either be stored on site or ferried up by helicopter. The Swiss, veteran users of airborne travel, favour the latter. The French dig reservoirs. The Austrians do both.

It would be hard to conjure up a more potent symbol of environmental perversity than the use of carbon-spewing fossil fuels to help to dispose of millions of gallons of carefully extracted water in order that a few thousand tourists can slide down a slope for an extra week. The OECD, which has been monitoring the skiing industry, last year produced a dry but devastating report entitled Climate Change in the European Alps, from which these figures are extracted. Its editor, Shardul Agrawala, is diplomatic, but firm, in his conclusions. “It is critically important to factor in the[se] environmental implications, and not just operational costs, in making decisions about artificial snowmaking,” he said.

This is, as you may suspect, more than simply an alpine issue. For some reason, sport, leisure, wildlife and the general pursuit of happiness remain impenetrable barriers to perfectly sensible attempts to introduce alternative sources of energy and stem the ravages of climate change. In Scotland, the expansion of the wind farm industry has been slowed and often halted by objections that range from complaints that too many pylons spoil the view to suggestions that the occasional absent-minded hawk might collide with a propeller. In Perthshire, where the inhabitants of Dunkeld are proposing an energy-efficient and well-landscaped hydroelectric scheme on the River Braan, the plans have been thrown out by the National Environment Agency because the river is used by a few dozen canoeists every year.

Yet if we take the warnings about climate change with any degree of seriousness, we have to change our terms of reference. Instead of hailing the inventiveness of the ski resort that makes its own snow, we should accept the harsh reality that nature has terminally curtailed the skiing season. Much as we cherish our birds of prey, we should remember that their prospects of survival are threatened not so much by a freak collision as by the three-degree rise in global temperatures that will occur in the next 50 years if we do not manage to wean ourselves off a reliance on oil and gas. Stuff the skiers, sink the canoeists, gag the bird-lovers; this is a battle for survival, not an exercise in self-indulgence.

And, since you ask, no, I am not cancelling my next skiing trip. But I intend to go where the snow is actually snow rather than nucleated water forced out under pressure through an atomising nozzle, and the hiss of the skis is not drowned out by the ugly growl of some alien machine trying to persuade me that, even though the glacier is melting and the ice is retreating everywhere else, here we can still pretend that we are living in the time-warped artifice of a winter wonderland.

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