Two of Canada's best skiers spent Friday in a Calgary conference room instead of on the slopes, but weren't worried about missing anything -- there's no snow.

"The first races in Europe have been cancelled," Sara Renner, an Olympic cross-country skiing silver medalist, told reporters. "There's a race on Wednesday, but if you look at the webcam of that particular venue, it's green pasture with a couple lumps of snow."

A men's world cup race has been cancelled in Scandinavia, too. There just isn't enough powder.

"Our schedule is up in the air," said World Cup slalom champion Thomas Grandi. "There really is no certainty in the next races so it really has become clear over time, now even more so, that there has been a change."

With cancelled races facing them, the skiers have entered the race to beat global warming.

Convinced their sport is at risk, the skiing couple are attacking climate change with the energy that has made them champions.

"I'm not comfortable in twenty years telling my child that I did nothing," said Renner, who is taking the year off to have a baby.

The pair will donate half of Grandi's winnings to promote awareness about global warming.

Scientists have warned that carbon-dioxide emissions trapped in the atmosphere are heating the earth's surface.

"We're a northern country and as a northern country, we are going to be disproportionately impacted by global warming," said environmental scientist David Suzuki.

November storms brought early openings for Vancouver-area ski resorts, with some of the best skiing conditions in memory. Cypress Mountain has a base of 200 centimetres of snow.

Not every season will be this good. But Kent Rideout, at Cypress Mountain, said he doesn't blame global warming.

"We tend to have, I would say, seven to eight-year cycles where you have three to four very, very good seasons, a couple of average seasons and maybe one bad one every seven or eight years," said Rideout. "So it's really hard to predict one season to the next."

With a report by CTV's Todd Battis in Vancouver