And people who take fossil fueled flights and automotive rides all over the world are like, super concerned. Here’s Time’s resident climahysteric, Bryan Walsh
Climate Change Could Melt the Winter Olympics
Among the other worries about the upcoming Winter Games in Sochi—terrorism, empty seats, Shaun White’s new haircut—is something even the czar himself, Russian President Vladimir Putin, can’t control: the weather.
The seaside city of Sochi is actually subtropical, with daily high temperatures around 50 F (10 C), and even though the Alpine events will be held on mountains dozens of miles away from Sochi, organizers are worried that rain and high temperatures will wash out the Games—just as they did in Vancouver during the unseasonably warm winter of 2010. Organizers will do their best to counter the climate with hundreds of snow guns and 710,000 cu m (25.85 million cu ft) of snow stashed from the year before, but Sochi could make for a soggy Games.
It likely won’t be the last. A report (PDF) from the University of Waterloo in Canada and Management Center Innsbruck in Austria found that only six of the previous 19 Winter Olympic cities will remain cold enough to reliably host the Games by the end of the century should the most dire predictions of global warming come true. Even by mid-century, close to half of the previous host cities would likely be too warm for outdoor sports like Alpine skiing and snowboarding. That includes cities like Squaw Valley in California (1960), Chamonix in France (1924) and Vancouver (2010). “Fewer and fewer traditional winter sports will be able to host an Olympic Winter Games in a warmer world,†said Daniel Scott, the Canada Research Chair in Global Tourism at Waterloo and the lead author of the report, in a statement.
Walsh notes that it doesn’t help that many of the Winter Olympics are held in places that aren’t necessarily conductive to holding a Winter Olympics, like Sochi. Anyhow, two points. First, none of this proves anthropogenic causation. It’s just part of a mostly natural cycle during the Holocene of a warm periods between cool periods. Second, if they’re relying on their computer models, well, the vast majority have already failed.
In April 75 Olympic medallists in skiing and snowboarding sent a letter to President Obama, urging him to take stronger action on climate change. “Without a doubt,†they wrote, “winter is in trouble.†And if climate change is bad as we fear, so are the Games.
Can we assume that these 75 medalists will refuse to take fossil fueled travel to compete/attend the Olympics? Or to travel around skiing and snowboarding?
