Land der Berge, Land der Ströme

I think you will spend 70 seconds reading this post

Early Sunday mornings in Austria on ORF2 are the domain of the Wetterpanorama. Not a piece of programming by the Kuniglberg bigwigs that I used to set an alarm for. Indeed I invatiably hoped to still be asleep under a duvet, unless at an airport flying off somewhere. However, with Sunday mornings now frequently beginning at around 6:00, the Wetterpanorama has become, at least for the more junior viewers of the household, regular viewing, not least as a reminder of a past summer holiday, which led my eldest son, aged 3, to proclaim “I love cable cars!”.

For the uninitiated, the Wetterpanorama is rolling footage from webcams throughout Austria, predominantly from mountains and lakes, although also from cities depending on the weather. When the winter weather is glorious, there are glorious sweeping panoramas from the peaks, with chairlifts and cable cars, and where the cloud is thick, err… clouds. But in this country of mountains and rivers it is also a reassuring programme, accompanied by the strains of accordeon-based folk music. And it is like an Entwarnungssignal for the Alpenrepublik.

However, in light of climate change, without some careful selection of the sweeping panoramas, wintry scenes could soon look very different, with retreating snow lines, rising temperatures and thawed lakes. Sunday reassurance would be shattered. And then there would be ructions among the junior viewers, and our submission to Paw Patrol would be complete.