Europe's going green (that's due to lack of snow)

As these pictures show, Britons hoping to experience a traditional white Christmas in Santa's homeland are in for a disappointment. Rovaniemi, a town on the Arctic Circle in northern Finland, is normally covered in deep snowdrifts at this time of the year, with temperatures going down to -20C.

But in a week when environmental experts warned that the North Pole will be the size of a domestic fridge ice cube in just 40 years, the first arrivals hoping to enjoy sleigh rides, mulled wine and snowball fights felt their spirits sag as the Mercury climbed.

A spokesman for First Choice holidays, the British tour operator that takes thousands of Britons to Lapland, said conditions were "incredibly unusual".

"We're extremely disappointed," said Michelle Gower, of Enfield, North London, who travelled to see Santa's home with a friend and three children, two aged seven, and one aged six.

"There's no snow - it's just slush and it looks ugly. There are no picture postcards here. We couldn't book up for a lot of rides as you can't do them without snow - the husky ride was cancelled. And it's warm, actually. We crossed the Arctic Circle yesterday without even a coat on, it was that warm.

"Rovaniemi just looks like a normal town - there's no snow at all," said Mark Foreman, 46, a lawyer, who travelled to Lapland with his seven-year-old son Max, from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.

"Max had expectations of coming out of the hotel and building a snowman but there's nothing to build one with. He is disappointed. There is so much less for him to be able to do. I've had a little talk with him about global warming."

But it's not only Santaland that the snow is avoiding.   In the Alps, the warm weather has meant one of the worst starts to the ski season on record. Dozens of races have been cancellled and many tourists arriving for their skiing holiday have been greeted by brown fields with not a patch of snow in sight. Last month temperatures were at times 15 degrees higher than normal. It meant that in early December, there was virtually no skiing at all.

For one race in Hochfilzen, Austria, organisers shipped in 260,000 cubic feet of snow. But many others have just been cancelled.

Many of the most popular resorts with British tourists have only limited skiing available. This week the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that higher temperatures threaten to devastate the economies of European ski-ing resorts.

Elsewhere, a 30,000 pound, 30 tonne ice sculpture of a Christmas tree in the ski resort of Klagenfurt has already melted due to the unseasonably warm weather, eight days after it was unveiled after being carved in a frozen food store's coldroom.

A local tourist office spokesman said: "In a normal winter this would have lasted two months.

And yesterday the U.N's weather agency said in its annual report on the state of the global climate that between1997-2006 the average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere  was 0.53 degrees Celsius (0.95 Fahrenheit) warmer than the average for 1961-1990.

"So far the northern hemisphere is warming much more than the southern hemisphere," said expert Omar Baddour.

In the Alps, no snow will ultimately mean massive job losses.  Alpine tourism plays a key role in the economies of countries with ski resorts with some 60 to 80 million tourists to the region each year, and a total of 160 million days recorded annually by ski lift operators in France, Austria, Switzerland and Germany.

But five World Cup ski races have already been cancelled this year. OPEC's warning came with the news of the cancellation of the women's slalom race in the France Alpine resort town of Megeve because of lack of snow.

Women's races in St. Moritz in Switzerland, men's and women's in Val d'Isere in France, as well as the traditional season-opener in Sölden in Austria at the end of October were also all called off.