Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Will Global Warming make it easier or more difficult to exercise? The answer apparently depends on how you squint at the latest study.
How climate change could affect the way we exercise
Sarah Berry APRIL 26 2017
The extreme changes of weather recently – from a seemingly endless heatwave to seemingly endless rain – affect more than the environment; they also affect the way we move.
For months it has often felt too hot or too wet to exercise. Long walks and runs have been replaced by cabin fever, indoor yoga classes and finally trying out some of the new livestream fitness classes you can do from your lounge (some Australian ones worth checking out include Varlah, Voome, Yogaholics and The Robards Method).
But, generally, for many of us during times of extreme weather conditions, we simply become more sedentary, exchanging the walk to work with the car or swapping the bicycle for the bus. Whether it’s lethargy from heat or an instinct to bunker down from the wet, we sit more and do less.
If we do that for too long, there is an impact on our health.
…
Sounds bad, right? Maybe not;
Study Finds A Rare, ‘Small Silver Lining’ Of Climate Change: More Exercise
Jeremy Rellosa April 25, 2017
This is obvious: If it’s 10 degrees below zero outside, chances are you won’t see many runners on the street. But on a 70-degree spring day, you’ll spot more.
Given this link between weather and exercise, how will climate change affect it? That’s what one researcher at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wanted to understand.
A study published Monday in the journal Nature offers an answer: Overall, we’re likely to see higher rates of physical activity as our country gets warmer.
“That could correspond to increases in benefits that we receive from being more physically active,” said lead author Nick Obradovich, a postdoctoral fellow at the Kennedy School. “This is one of the very rare studies that has shown some small possible benefits associated with warming for the United States.”
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Read more: http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2017/04/25/nature-climate-exercise
The abstract of the study which caused this confusion;
Climate change may alter human physical activity patterns
Nick Obradovich & James H. Fowler
Abstract
Regular physical activity supports healthy human functioning. Might climate change—by modifying the environmental determinants of human physical activity—alter exercise rates in the future? Here we conduct an empirical investigation of the relationship between meteorological conditions, physical activity and future climate change. Using data on reported participation in recreational physical activity from over 1.9 million US survey respondents between 2002 and 2012, coupled with daily meteorological data, we show that both cold and acutely hot temperatures, as well as precipitation days, reduce physical activity. We combine our historical estimates with output from 21 climate models and project the possible physical activity effects of future climatic changes by 2050 and 2099. Our projection indicates that warming over the course of this century may increase net recreational physical activity in the United States. Activity may increase most during the winter in northern states and decline most during the summer in southern states.
Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0097
Sydney might not suffer the extreme winter cold of northern states of the USA, but Sydney winters are not much fun – even 50F can be a turnoff for outdoor activities if it is rainy, dark and windy. But maybe I’m prejudiced – my preferred exercise temperature is a nice 90F day, splashing about in my tropical swimming pool.
No human can detect the change in average temps due to global warming. Get real.
If worried, join a health club and exercise in 72 degree exercise rooms.
One of the many reasons why I do not believe that climate change is catastrophic or bad is because something that explains everything explains nothing. Getting more exercise? Climate change, now pay up. Getting less exercise? Climate change again, now pay up. Getting more hurricanes? Climate change, now pay up. Getting fewer hurricanes? Climate change again, now pay up. It is like people saying “God can do anything” when something they cannot explain happens. That is not science, it is blind faith.
Methinks the climatistas know that their project is doomed and now they’re just clutching at straws in order to sound relevant.
I ski 12 months a year without leaving California and have been doing so for more than a decade, although in the summer I have to hike to get my turns. This year, it looks like Mammoth and Squaw will be spinning lifts all summer and I won’t have to hike to keep my streak alive. So yes, a cooling climate will change my exercise patterns.
Heavy snow here in WY this morning. Great exercise shoveling, if it don’t kill you. If it don’t kill you it’s supposed to make you stronger. Still here, but most certainly do not feel stronger and it’s still snowing.
I gave up sex, drugs, and alcohol. And, began exercising.
It was the worst 15 minutes of my life.
Sex is good exercise, or at least it can be. Or is that used to be? Long term memory still works, short term, not so much.
That’s nothing. Ive been sober for about 6,000 days now.
Not in a row or anything though, just in total 🙂
“…but Sydney winters are not much fun – even 50F can be a turnoff for outdoor activities if it is rainy, dark and windy….” Here in Da’ UP, 50°F is shorts & T-shirt springtime weather… camping, fishing, lawnchair & a book, and dog walking weather. We had 6″ of snow yesterday (April 27th) and it’s white all over… hope the daylilies & serviceberry buds do okay….
Here in Da’ UP
Translation: jmichna {j is a MI native} who lives in the Upper Peninsula of the Great State of Michigan.
The UP is known for its snow-free mild winters!
Okay, that’s a joke.
Well, it’s a viscous circle, isn’t it? I exercise, producing more C02 as I huff and puff, and THEN I get hungry, and consume more food – requiring higher food production – more C02 – and of course, there’s all that methane by-product, depending on how much protein I ate. At this rate, I might just destroy the planet single-handedly. I mean, I’m talking a Godzilla Carbon Footprint.
Thank God I don’t ride a bike to work.
I guess my comments were geared more to how people live today and don’t know what it was like without these conveniences they live in. I’m a born and raised Arizonian. I grew up in the fan’s and evaporated cooler day’s and into my twenties the only A/C was in vehicles. We used wood buring stoves at home in the winter. And children played outside in all except strong rain lightning storm’s. I lived in the desert in the late 1980’s at our mining camp for 4 years. During the time it was a month of 115 to 121 at Sky Harbor Airport. We hauled water and had no electricity. I did farm labor and worked on a dairy from 1968 to 1995 and a few tractors had A/C and heating while the most were open without canopies. Hoeing weeds, irrigating, cleaning ditches year around…mostly in early morning hour’s in summer. We could go to the mountains and vist snow, then return home in a day. I lived in one of the worst ice storm’s in Texas in the mid 1980’s one year…that was enough of that for me to not go back. But people tend to depend upon their comtrolled climate and miss the environment directly because it is an inconvenience to be in it.
So-so-so much selection bias with regard to “exercise,” it’s laughable. Who is it that “bikes to work?” Why, the young, the fit, the obsessed, the virtue-signallers, and especially those whose company provides shower facilities at the office. And I’m betting they take alt-trans. on days when it’s raining or snowing. In fact, if you take all the self-righteousness out of “exercise,” no sane person on earth over 16 would do most of this stuff. No one used to. . . that’s why the real scientifically proven truth (move somehow, 20 minutes per day and it need not be all at once) is hidden like the Holy Grail–it’s so boring, so mundane, so OBVIOUS that its wholesale adoption (move some, eat/drink in moderation) would put a vast industry of dissatisfaction and guilt-mongering out of business yesterday!
Gotta agree. I take the dog for a hike each morning, a definite win-win that one (judging by the dog’s eagerness). I also swim every day because it’s the second best way to exercise IMO (guess the first).
I do perform squats each day too, but that is because my knees are shot and it makes them work much better.
I hear you. Even my hobbies were physical. Carrying a deer or javalina over a mile back to the road isn’t the fun part of hunting. Dredging all day moving big rocks under water for a few grains or ounces of gold is a workout. Doing auto body repairs and changing drive train parts – without having a shop or garage – in driveways is by man power. I’ve been testing vehicles for over 20 year’s and doing ballast changes with 10 – 50 lb weight bags from seats or boxes in beds of trucks to the storage bins, anywhere from 150 lbs per seat and over a thousand lbs in truck beds…going up or down in weight. Opening and closing doors, etc, inside and out over a hundred times per function and per shift is physically a workout on a daily bases. So it’s not fun and games just driving all shift…avoiding other driver’s out in traffic. I get it that desk bound jobs is like being a couch potato. I’ve been there too. I was always physically strong and overweight. I blew our both of my shoulder rotor cups training for the strongman competition in the 1980’s. I went down hill, health wise, after that for a few year’s. But the climate never was an issue. Weather Patterns were part of everything I did and I did what needed done in it.