All five cities vying
to host the 2022 winter games could face some of the warmest weather they've
ever seen when the Olympics open
Lindsey Konkel, The Daily Climate
 |
| (Jae C. Hong/AP) |
The temperature has
settled into the mid-50s this week at the Sochi Olympics, and snowboarders were
furious at the slushy condition of the halfpipe Tuesday. Four years ago at the
Vancouver Olympics, rain and fog delayed downhill skiing events, and organizers
resorted to straw bales to build jumps and obstacles for courses where snow
proved scarce.
None of this bodes
well for future Olympics.
A warming climate may
rule out warmer venues such as Sochi or Vancouver in the future. But five
cities vying to host the 2022 Winter Olympics also could be confounding
athletes with unusually warm weather eight years from now.
Upper limits of experience
All of the candidate
cities – Almaty, Kazakhstan; Beijing, China; Krakow, Poland; Lviv, Ukraine; and
Oslo, Norway – will likely be facing temperatures near the upper limits of what
each region has experienced in the past 150 years, according to a Daily Climate
analysis of climate models constructed by University of Hawaii, Manoa,
geographer Camilo Mora and colleagues.
Mora's models merge
temperature records with climate forecasts to predict when the temperature for
any given region "departs" from its historic range.
But it's also
possible, using the models, to show where the temperatures might be in the
2020s. All five cities being considered by the International Olympic Committee
for the 2022 games will likely be in the upper half of the hottest weather
records they've seen over the past century and a half.
The data suggest that
high altitudes and northern latitudes may be an increasingly important factor
in siting future Olympic venues.
"Winters are
going to get shorter. There will be fewer days below freezing. In fact, that is
already happening," said Mora.
The International
Olympic Committee declined to speculate on how climate projections might affect
siting decisions for future winter games.
Weather data are
collected during the bidding process, IOC spokeswoman Sandrine Tonge said in an
email, and assessed by a commission that provides a "detailed report"
to IOC members before the vote.
The host city for the
2022 Winter Olympics will be announced in 2015.
The IOC first
mentioned climate change in its official report of the 1998 Winter Olympics in
Nagano.
Looking to the future
The five cities, some
of which plan to hold snow events as far as 130 miles away, must complete a
250-page questionnaire, which includes a section on climate and weather
conditions. Cities are asked to list average high and low temperatures as well
as precipitation for the month of February at each venue.
But the questionnaire,
which asks for averages based on weather conditions over the past 10 years,
does not require cities to anticipate how climate may change in the seven to
eight years between bidding and hosting the games.
Mora's models do show
only average annual temperature – collapsing seasonal extremes into one number
for the year. They do not show how soon or to what extent winter conditions in
the bid cities could become unsuitable for hosting the games. And while
computer models have become much more sophisticated, they still have difficulty
predicting future temperatures for precise regions.
"The models show
nothing about projected winter change. Usually the winter season change in the
Northern Hemisphere is more pronounced," said Daniel Scott, professor of
tourism management at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
But the data do put
the warming trend into vivid relief. And they suggest that a look back at the
past 10 years' of climate data would offer little bearing on what Olympic
athletes would face come 2022.
Completely different as soon as 2024
Almaty, in central
Asia, for instance, may have a completely different climate as soon as 2024 if
global greenhouse gas emissions continue under a "business-as-usual"
scenario, based on Mora's data.
Beijing and its co-host
to the north – Zhangjaikou – where the snow events would be held aren't much
far behind. Mora's models suggest Zhangjaikou could leave its historical
climate behind as early as 2032.
The mountain towns of
Tysovets, Ukraine and Jasna, Slovakia, where Lviv and Krakow propose hosting
alpine events, would begin to look more like Black Sea resorts such as Odessa,
Constanta or Sochi by the 2050s, based on data from Charles Koven, a climate
scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The most northern city
in the running for the 2022 Olympics, Oslo, can expect to stay within its
climate norms the longest – to 2060 or beyond.
"High latitude
places often have late climate departures, but that does not necessarily mean
climate change won't impact those places," Mora said.
While Mora's models,
based on yearly average temperatures, don't forecast monthly highs, lows or
precipitation changes, they do show warming trends.
"Gone for good'
The "departure
point," Mora cautioned, signifies "the year after which the climate
we knew is gone for good."
In a report published
last month, Scott found that average February temperatures for the 19 previous
Winter Olympic host cities could be expected to rise between 3.4 and 3.8
degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, and up to 8 degrees Fahrenheit by 2090, leaving
only six previous host cities cold enough to host the Games 75 years from
now.
Places such as Squaw
Valley, Vancouver and Sochi would no longer have cold enough winters to host
again, while cities like Lake Placid or Nagano, Japan, would be iffy.
Sochi, the subtropical
Black Sea resort town, boasts February daytime highs around 50 and lows in the
mid 30s, putting it climactically on par with Richmond, Va. Snow events such as
alpine skiing and snowboarding are being held at the Rosa Khutor resort, a
50-mile drive from Sochi in the Caucasus Mountains.
Snowmaking has made
warmer venues possible in recent years, according to Scott's report.
At Sochi, organizers
have enlisted three $2 million snowmaking units capable of creating snow at
temperatures up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit to ensure good track coverage at the
Nordic combined and ski jump events.
But there are limits
to snowmaking as an adaptation for climate change, said Scott. "Can you
make enough snow and not have it melt? If that is doable physically, then it is
an economics question."
Added Mora: "It
will be interesting to see how cities around the world who rely on winter
sports will be forced to invest as a result of climate change."
Lindsey Konkel is a
staff writer at The
Daily Climate,
an independent news service covering energy, the environment and climate
change, and its sister publication, Environmental Health News.
