Study: Global Warming End of Snow Threatens Winter Olympics

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to an “athlete and coach perspective” study conducted by the University of Waterloo in Canada, reductions in snowfall due to climate change will make it difficult to host future Winter Olympic events.

JANUARY 18, 2022

Climate change threatens future Winter Olympics

Failure to dramatically reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases may mean only one of the 21 previous Winter Olympics host cities can provide fair and safe conditions in the future

By Media Relations

Climate change will limit where the Winter Olympics can be held as winter changes across the Northern Hemisphere, according to a study by an international team of researchers led by the University of Waterloo.

The study, involving researchers from Canada, Austria and the United States, found that if global emissions of greenhouse gases are not dramatically reduced, only one of the 21 cities that have previously hosted the Winter Olympics would be able to reliably provide fair and safe conditions for the snow sports program of the Games by the end of this century. However, if the Paris Climate Agreement emission targets can be achieved, the number of climate-reliable host cities jumps to eight, with only six considered unreliable.

“The world of winter sport is changing as climate change accelerates, and the international athletes and coaches we surveyed are witnessing the impacts at competition and training locations, including the Olympics,” said Daniel Scott, a professor of Geography and Environmental Management at Waterloo.”

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“We’ve studied the many ways the Winter Olympics has reduced weather risk since the first Games held in Chamonix, France nearly 100 years ago,” said Michelle Rutty of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment. “But there are limits to what weather risk management strategies can cope with, and we saw those limits exceeded in Sochi and Vancouver.”

“Climate change is altering the geography of the Winter Olympic Games and will, unfortunately, take away some host cities that are famous for winter sport,” said Robert Steiger of the University of Innsbruck in Austria. “Most host locations in Europe are projected to be marginal or not reliable as early as the 2050s, even in a low emission future.”

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Read more: https://uwaterloo.ca/news/media/climate-change-threatens-future-winter-olympics

The abstract of the study;

Climate change and the future of the Olympic Winter Games: athlete and coach perspectives

Daniel Scott, Natalie L. B. Knowles, Siyao Ma, Michelle Rutty & Robert Steiger

ABSTRACT

The International Olympic Committee recognizes the risks climate change pose to the Games and its responsibility to lead on climate action. Winter is changing at the past Olympic Winter Games (OWG) locations and an important perspective to understand climate change risk is that of the athletes who put themselves at risk during these mega-sport events. A survey of 339 elite athletes and coaches from 20 countries was used to define fair and safe conditions for snow sports competitions. The frequency of unfair-unsafe conditions has increased over the last 50 years across the 21 OWG host locations. The probability of unfair-unsafe conditions increases under all future climate change scenarios. In a low emission scenario aligned to the Paris Climate Agreement, the number of climate reliable hosts remains almost unchanged throughout the twenty-first century (nine in mid-century, eight in late century). The geography of the OWG changes radically if global emissions remain on the trajectory of the last two decades, leaving only one reliable host city by the end of the century. Athletes expressed trepidation over the future of their sport and the need for the sporting world to be a powerful force to inspire and accelerate climate action.

Read more: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13683500.2021.2023480

WUWT has written about this “end of snow” climate alarmist cognitive dissonance many times, but it just keeps happening.

The climate models predict global temperatures will soar. So if you believe in the models, there must be a date by which all the snow must melt.

The failure of the snow to melt to date seems to be almost universally disregarded as an anomaly. Climate scientists weave elaborate theories of “enhanced water cycles“, “oceans swallowing all the heat” and Arctic warming disrupting the polar vortex, to excuse the allegedly temporary failure of their models to perform, because, you know, in Climate Science Occam’s Razor dictates that if your predictions fail, you add more epicycles to excuse the failure, rather than just admitting you made a mistake.

As the UK MET office John Mitchell once explained to us, “People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful”.

The following is a Climategate Email from 2009 in which climate scientist Keven Trenberth responded to a BBC story “What Happened to Global Warming?“.

… where the heck is global warming? … The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The … data published in the August … 2009 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate. …

Source: Climategate Email 1255352257.txt (2009, Kevin Trenberth speaking)

Despite years of failure, with a few honourable exceptions the climate alarmist community seems determined to cling to blind faith that the pauses will end, that global temperatures will snap back to the trend line of their extreme hockey stick shaped warming predictions, and the only reason for current anomalies is that some hand waving excuse swallowed the warming. But rest assured, soon the frustration will be over, and that disappeared heat will re-emerge and smite us all. Any day now.

“… As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.” – Former CRU Director Phil Jones, Climategate Email 1120593115.txt

The only real impact the embarrassment of previous failed “end of snow” predictions appears to be that more cautious prophets have pushed the snowpocalypse date further into the future. But climate alarmists still can’t help making these silly predictions. The alternative, embracing the possibility that their models are a pile of junk, seems a step too far for most of them.