Photo: AP Photo/Ng Han GuanOn Friday, February 4, the 24th Winter Olympic Games will be opened with a solemn ceremony in Beijing. New research shows that the organization of winter sports competitions will become increasingly challenging due to global warming. This will be the first Olympics where only artificial snow will be used
38 years ago, the Olympic flame was lit on the ski slopes above Sarajevo, which marked the beginning of the 14th Winter Olympic Games. If we were to think about what would be missing today for a future Winter Olympics in Jahorina or Bjelašnica, the last thing we would probably think of would be the lack of quality snow, the portal writes. Air conditioning 101.
But this could be the main obstacle in the future. The results of a study conducted by an international team of researchers, led by the University of Waterloo, show that climate change threatens the hosting of the Winter Olympic Games and that many cities that once hosted them would not meet the conditions for hosting them in the future.
An international team of authors from Canada, the US, and Australia reviewed historical climate data from the locations that hosted the Winter Olympics from 1920 to the present day. The data clearly show that they are maintained in increasingly warmer conditions. Thus, the temperature rose from an average of 0,4 °C in the 1920s to 6,3 °C during the Games held after 2000.
The temperature is important for the quality of the snow, and a thick snow cover is a guarantee of safety on the ski track and fair competition, so the reduction of snow, due to warmer weather, directly affects the safety of athletes and the conditions for fair competition. The four risk parameters are: unacceptably high or low temperatures, rain, wet snow and poor snow coverage.
Looking at these four factors and future scenarios of climate change, the study showed that of the 21 cities that have so far hosted the Winter Olympics, if global greenhouse gas emissions are not sharply reduced, only one would meet these conditions.
Thus, during the Games in Vancouver in 2010, it was necessary to hire a helicopter to transport snow, and in 2014 in Sochi, which then set a record as the warmest host city of the Winter Olympics, the organizers had to store tons of snow from the previous winter in order to use it in emergency cases.
The negative trend of winter without enough snow will also mark the Games in Beijing. It will be the first Winter Olympics where artificial snow will be fully used. This will require more than 100 snow generators and 300 snow cannons.
But this solution creates other problems. The organizers could use about 49 million gallons of chemically treated water for the needs of snowmaking machines, which was highlighted as a special risk in the assessment of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) during the selection process for the host.
Beijing is located in a region that has a year-round water shortage problem, so endangering water resources would cause enormous damage to the population. The Chinese rely on a large underground storage network and hope that the use of artificial snow at the Olympics will have minimal environmental impact thanks to this system.
"Climate change is changing the face of the Winter Olympics and will unfortunately make it impossible for some cities known for their winter sports to host the Games," said Robert Steiger of the University of Innsbruck in Austria. "Most sites in Europe are predicted to be marginal or unreliable for hosting the Winter Olympics already after 2050, even in a low-emissions scenario."
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