Carbon Brief’s shamelessly tenuous Olympics Friday Five
- 27 Jul 2012, 13:30
- Christian Hunt and Ros Donald
Yes, it's Olympics
day! (Apparently it's actually going on for weeks.)
Despite the fact that our editor was generally picked last at
sports, if at all, a wave of Olympic fervour has swept the Carbon
Brief office.
Inspired by the games, here is our attempt to guide you through
the (tenuous) need-to-know links between the Olympics and
climate.
1. Might an Olympic deluge bring Team GB
victory?
Kenyans are good at altitude, Australians can cope with heat, and
we... play a lot of sport in the rain. Might UK athletes lose their
home advantage if the sun shines?
If so, climate skeptic weather forecaster Piers Corbyn has good
news - the astrophysicist's
secret forecasting formula has brought forth
dire warnings. Says Corbyn: "We're very confident that
there will be a lot of rain - a deluge, really - during the entire
Olympics period and we are 80 percent sure that the Opening
Ceremony itself will feature heavy rains, including hail and
thunder."
He's got potential future Prime Minister Boris Johnson
convinced, although our glorious Mayor is confident that Corbyn's
predictions of a new mini Ice Age won't dilute London's Olympic
spirit.
What does Corbyn's arch-nemesis the Met Office say? The UK
outlook over the next five days looks a bit mixed - with some
showers - but broadly pleasant. The Daily Mail sides with the Met
Office
for once, placing its bets on a
dry opening ceremony. The Met has actually gone
Olympics-tastic, with weather forecasts for almost every
sport - or check out the forecast for
weather at the 1948 London Olympics, which is almost guaranteed
to be right.
2. At moments of intense national pride, geoengineering is
totally fine
Perhaps we should mimic the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where the
Chinese government
simply ordered Zhang Qian, its 'head of weather manipulation',
to stop it raining using geoengineering techniques:
"… we use a coolant made from liquid
nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their
mean size … the smaller droplets are less likely to fall and
precipitation can be reduced."
It's not clear whether it worked, but inspired by this example
of central planning in action, the BBC have already asked: "Why won't the
UK make the sun shine for the Olympics?"
Unfortunately, actually reading the article makes the idea of
genoengineering away the rain seem less attractive. One expert told
the BBC that one downside is that the rain just gets shifted
elsewhere - to "Reading or Slough". Another noted:
"To stop rain spoiling the Olympics
would require a fleet of light aircraft, which could interfere with
commercial flights, and a vast quantity of chemicals … probably
best avoided."
As beloved British bard John Betjeman might have
said: "Come chemical Olympic rain and fall on Slough / it isn't fit
for
rowing now."
3. Extreme weather can slow you down
"The relationships between 'the
environment' and sports are wide-ranging and multifaceted …
Participants thus have to compete against the forces of nature just
as much as they compete against each other."
So begins
a comprehensive review of the effect of weather conditions on
past Olympics. The research was written by Dr Benny Peiser,
one-time sports science lecturer and current director of climate
skeptic thinktank the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Much of the paper is a gruelling account of how heatwaves cause
serious problems for long distance runners. But what causes the
changes in climate which affect marathon runners? Natural variation
in the climate gets a nod, as does the influence of the sun.
Manmade climate change does not.
4. The 2008 Olympics slashed carbon
emissions
China's drive to reduce traffic on its roads during the
2008 summer Olympics in Beijing dramatically cut the country's
emissions. That's according to an exquisitely-timed release
from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado -
just in time for the first week of London 2012. The data shows that
during the Olympics, when the amount of people allowed to drive in
town was restricted in a bid to cut air pollution, carbon dioxide
emissions reduced by between 24,000 and 96,000 metric tonnes.
That equates, says NCAR, to more than one quarter of one per cent
of the cut needed to restrict global temperature rise to two
degrees celsius or less - which is huge - and shows citywide
transport strategies can have a tangible impact on global
emissions. Good news from China, but we doubt this will do much to
combat the suspicions of some climate skeptics that
all greens are secret Communists.
5. Climate change is probably more of an issue for the
winter Olympics, to be honest
Where was the mini Ice Age when you needed it in 2010? A
snow no-show blighted Vancouver's Olympics two years ago, to
the extent that organisers had to have natural and man-made snow
brought in by truck and plane. The snow was then artfully
positioned on structures made of straw and wood and organisers
studded the artificial slopes with tubes of dry ice. Exhaustingly,
all this had to be done
every 12 hours.
Of course, the absence of snow was probably down to some
combination of natural climate cycles, local weather and the
warming planet. It's not simple to
attribute any single weather event - whether snow, a lack
of it, or rain - to
climate change. That doesn't stop
this piece suggesting carbon offsetting could somehow have
stopped the inconveniently temperate conditions in Vancouver,
though. Hmmm.
