Did you know that Chicago 2007 marathon was cancelled when the temperatures outside soared above 80 degrees Fahrenheit and the hospitals were filled by the heat-struck runners? The athletes who are working so hard and trying to push the physical limits of their strength, like the Olympians competing for the elusive Gold at the Rio Olympics, face an intolerable Summer heat. Even a pleasant summer day could be unbearably suffocating for these athletic competitors.
However, as the global temperature is on the rise, and the world undergoes the devastating changes owing to the Climate Change, the options for the host cities for future Summer Olympics are dwindling rapidly.
A research titled The Last Summer Olympics?Climate change, health, and work outdoors, has pointed out that only San Francisco, Vancouver, and Calgary may be considered as a viable option to host Summer Olympics 2085. None of the African or Latin American nations would be able to host the Games while only two Asian cities, Bishkek, in Kyrgyzstan, and Ulaanbaatar, in Mongolia, might be possible Olympics 2085 hosts.
The lead author of the research, Kirk Smith is a Global Environmental Health professor associated with the University of California who considered that the Olympics is a perfect way to draw global attention to the problem of climate change:
“Eventually, climate change gets so extreme that all bets are off. It’s very hard to talk about what’s happening late in the century. But it occurred to me that we do have things, the Olympics being one of them, that we expect to continue. And that that provides a way to think about things that are 60 or 70 years away.”
The research team decided to use 82.5 degrees Fahrenheit as the upper limit for the city to host their target event, the marathon during Summer Olympic 2085.
The study revealed that only eight non-European cities out the 600 examined, will qualify as low-risk cities. Quite a few of the Western European cities, mostly Scandinavian and Noth European, will be at low-risk. If the target time is moved from 2085 to 2100, the least risk-free cities will be Belfast, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Glasgow.
On a more sombre note, the research points out that in future, we may have to change our entire behaviour; it will be a choice between being safe or abandoning how we have worked outdoors for millennia.