Global warming would make most cities too hot, humid to host summer Olympics

The findings assumed that any venue with more than a 10 percent chance of having to cancel a marathon — one of the summer Olympics’ signature and exclusively outdoor events — on short notice would not be a viable host city.

“If you’re going to be spending billions of dollars to host an event, you’re going to want have a level of certainty that you’re not going to have to cancel it at the last minute,” Smith said.

The 10 percent criterion is currently used to evaluate potential sites of the winter games. If a potential host city is too unlikely to produce enough snow or cold enough temperatures, the chances of its bid winning decreases.

The findings indicate that by 2085, Istanbul, Madrid, Rome, Paris, and Budapest – all cities that are or were in contention for either the 2020 or 2024 Summer Olympics – would be unfit to host the games. Tokyo, the city that has secured the 2020 summer Olympiad, would also be too hot to ensure athlete safety, should these projections come to pass.

According to the findings, eight out of 543 cities outside of Western Europe would qualify as “low-risk” sites, including St. Petersburg, Russia; Riga, Latvia; Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

In North America, Calgary and Vancouver would join San Francisco as the only three suitable sites. Both Canadian cities have hosted Olympics before — but the winter games, Calgary in 1988 and Vancouver in 2010. San Francisco explored the possibility of hosting this year’s summer games, but ultimately withdrew the bid in 2006.

Latin America and Africa combined would fail to provide a single viable city.

Western Europe is home to twenty-five cities that would be “low-risk” sites in 2085, according to the calculations.

But by the twenty-second century, if their projections play out, the scientists concluded that only four Northern Hemisphere cities would be left on the list: Belfast and Dublin, Ireland; and Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland.

While these findings are concerned with the more distant future, being able to ensure athlete safety in the face of spiking temperatures is already an issue in outdoor summer competitions. In October 2007, the Chicago Marathon was canceled mid-race as hundreds of runners succumbed to the heat and sought medical attention. High temperatures also wreaked havoc this year during the U.S. Olympic Team trials marathon in Los Angeles, where 30 percent of the Olympic hopefuls failed to finish as the temperature on race day pushed 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Should the findings reported in this commentary bear out, obvious work-arounds exist, such as running the Olympics indoors entirely or eliminating heat-sensitive endurance events like the marathon. Both solutions, however, would require a dramatic reimagining of how the modern Olympics are constructed.

“Climate change is going to force us to change our behavior from the way things have always been done,” said Smith. “This includes sending your kids outside to play soccer or going out for a jog. It is a substantially changing world. If the world’s most elite athletes need to be protected from climate change, what about the rest of us?”

— Read more in Kirk R Smith et al., “The last Summer Olympics? Climate change, health, and work outdoors,” The Lancet 388, no. 10045 (13 August 2016): 642–44 (doi: org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)31335-6)