Posts
Global
Warming Is Melting Sochi
It's
hot in Sochi, the dystopian home of the Winter Games.
13
February, 2014
It's
hot in Sochi, the dystopian
home of the Winter Games. Temperatures hit
a
balmy 61˚ F on the slopes today,
presenting the Olympic media establishment with the most
obvious quip in sports news history: this weather's better
suited for
the summer games. The
warmth is ruining
the halfpipe, slushing
up the snow, and sending athletes
into the shade in bouts
of rage.
Human-fueled
climate change is almost definitely helping to crank up the
heat. Researchers
at Russia's Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics
synthesized 32 different climate models that included temperature
data for the Sochi region, and uncovered a distinct warming trend.
According to their projections, by the end of the century, annual
average temperatures will surpass 16 ˚C, or 60.8 ˚F—the same
as the anomolous, scorching temps causing so much
discussion today.
"In
this region the yearly mean air temperature increase amounts from 1.9
˚C to 2.5 ˚C," they write. That's a potential rise of over
4˚F. That's on average—we'll likely be seeing February days
hotter than this more regularly as a result, too—and it's probably
enough to wipe out Sochi's already flimsy Winter Olympics viability
for good in the future. In some regions, like the mountains
where Sochi's slopestyle sports are held, the rise in temperatures
are more acute: "The largest surface air temperature
increase by 2.6 ˚C for the selected scenario is obtained in the
north-eastern and south-eastern area of this region."
Sochi's
mountains will feel the heat most of all, but the fact is that
temperatures are rising across the board. Slushy, short-sleeved
mountain sports in the middle of February are apt to become more
common.
"The
fact is that this is part of a larger pattern," climatologist
Michael Mann writes me in an email about Sochi's heat, "one in
which we are breaking records for all time warmth at nearly
three times the rate we would expect from chance alone so far
this decade."
Indeed,
according to Russian climate data for the region stored at
Climatebase.ru,
the average temperature during the period from 1940-1960
was 14˚C. Since 2000, that's risen to 14.3˚C. According to a
temperature record
that goes back to 1898, the average temperature in February was 6˚C,
or 42˚ F. Today, the mercury is in the low 60s.
An
Olympic hopeful nordic skiier, Taylor Fletcher, described the
conditions on his course to the Denver
Post: “There’s
a section that’s brown,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s
snow or mud. If they keep salting it, it’s going to be nasty.”
Meanwhile, the slushy halfpipe notoriously led to a torrent of
complaints from athletes, and an unusual number of wipeouts between
jumps.
“It’s
not even slushy—it’s mushy and it’s very hard to ski on,”
another American skiier, Bill Demong, told the Washington
Post of
the conditions on his event. “There’s no structure to the
snow, and the person who can float the best wins.”
Organizers
aren't surprised by the heat; in fact, they planned on it. After
Sochi saw a hotter-than-average winter last year, officials hauled in
an extra 500,000 tons of snow and stored it on the slopes, just in
case. You can see the profound non-snowiness of Sochi in these NASA
satellite images.
Given the Russian climate models' projections for the region, we can only expect that white to continue to give way to red.
Again, you can't attribute these late-spring skiing conditions arriving in February directly to global warming, but climate scientists say they fit the trends they've been predicting for years. Many like to compare global warming's propensity to increase the chance we'll see extreme weather conditions to loading the dice.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.