VANCOUVER, B.C. — One morning last week, environmentalist David Suzuki looked across English Bay from his Vancouver home to Cypress Mountain, usually covered in snow this time of year but now left all but bare by a warm winter.
“I’ve watched in horror as the snow has just melted away from Cypress Mountain,” Suzuki said, referring to the 2010 Olympic Games snowboarding and freestyle skiing venue.
The view from Vancouver, Suzuki and others say, provides a glimpse into the future for the Winter Olympics.
“It’s certainly an early warning sign and I think and a wake up call to the Olympic movement,” said Ian Bruce, a Canadian climate change specialist.
Global warming has placed the future of the Winter Olympics and winter sports from the Sierras to the Alps in peril, according to interviews with environmental scientists, Olympic officials, historians and athletes in recent weeks.
As the 2010 Olympic Games open this week in Vancouver and Whistler, there is a growing concern within the Olympic and environmental movements that the Winter Games are in jeopardy of being significantly diminished if not eliminated all together by climate change.
“The tenuousness of the Winter Olympics has become increasingly more obvious with global warming,” said Derick L. Hulme, an Olympic historian at Michigan’s Alma College. “It (the International Olympic Committee) should be very concerned about the Winter Olympics. I think many people look out 20, 30 years from now and are concerned about whether the Winter Olympics will still be viable.”
Already the International Skiing Federation (FIS) is so alarmed by the number of cancelled World Cup events in recent years that it calls the situation “critical.”
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has made the environment one of its three pillars and environmental impact is a major consideration in awarding the Games, IOC officials said. IOC president Jacques Rogge acknowledges global warming “might effect in the long term the staging of Winter Games.”
“Everyone is concerned about climate change,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said.
But leading athletes and environmentalists argue that the IOC is not doing enough to take a leadership role against global warming or to ensure the Olympic Games reduce their carbon footprint.
Suzuki and others are also critical of the Canadian government, complaining about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration’s environmental record and saying with the spotlight of the Olympics on Canada, the Harper government has missed an opportunity to take a leadership role on global warming.
The Canadian government “reflects in the glory of the games but at the same time they’ve failed miserably to take action on something that could represent a threat to the Games themselves,” said Suzuki, who has been the host of an award-winning science television series for PBS, the BBC and Discovery Channel.
Athletes and environmental groups want the IOC to establish uniform minimum environmental requirements for future Olympic host cities.
“Climate change is too important an issue to be left to the discretion of (local) organizing committees, said Paul Lingl, a researcher with the David Suzuki Foundation, who authored a “Climate Scorecard” for the 2010 Games that awarded the Vancouver Olympics’ environmental efforts a bronze medal. The Vancouver Games, the report said, will generate 268,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of putting 54,000 new cars on the road for a year.
But a top official for the Vancouver Games organizing committee (VANOC) said uniform standards are not realistic.
“I think that would be tough because every Games is very different in terms of what their options are and the level of green building or what level of integrated waste management facilities are available locally,” said Linda Coady, VANOC vice president for sustainability. “So think every Games is different and it does fall a lot to the local organizers to deal with the specifics.”
But environmentalists and athletes disagree and argue the IOC and Olympic movement need to display a greater sense of urgency in addressing global warming.
“At the end of the day the Winter Olympics depend on snow,” said Ingrid Liepa, a former Olympic speedskater for Canada, “and it’s very important they do their part in protecting winter.”
The view from Suzuki’s home provides a window to what is at stake and an indicator that global warming’s impact on the Winter Olympics is already ahead of Rogge’s timetable.
VANOC is having to truck in more than 3,000 cubic meters of snow to Cypress from a location two hours east of Vancouver. Even that will not be enough and the snowboarding and freestyle skiing courses will be further enhanced by sand and hay underneath the snow.
“That’s a graphic illustration it seems to me that will become more frequent as we enter this global warming phase,” Suzuki said.
Cypress, however, is hardly an isolated incident. Substantial decreases in snow in the Northern Hemisphere have mainly been caused by the build up of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, according to a study by the United Nations Environment Programme. Five World Cup ski races were cancelled in 2006. This season at least six World Cup events in five sports have been cancelled. Others were saved by artificial snow.
“World Cup racing depends on snowmaking, where as 20 years ago snowmaking didn’t exist,” said Canadian cross country skier Sara Renner, a 2006 Olympic silver medalist. “It is common to race in green pastures with a white trail made from snow that was blown on a mountain top and then trucked down to the ski site.”
More than 260,000 cubic feet of transported snow was needed to hold a 2006 World Cup alpine skiing event in Austria.
At a recent international freestyle skiing event in Italy, U.S. World champion Heather Kearney said, “we literally skied on a pile of snow on a dirt hill. There was some snow and not much around it.”
Between 1980 and 2003, glaciers in Europe’s Alps shrunk by 20 percent, according to a study by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation. They shrunk another 10 percent during the summer of 2003 alone. The snow season in British Columbia and Alberta has shrunk by more than a month over the past 50 years, according to government statistics.
The shrinking winter could not only have a catastrophic impact on the Olympic Games but also on the economies of northern countries, environmentalists and government officials said.
Skiing and ski-related tourism makes up 4.5 per cent of Austria’s total economy. Skiing in Canada is a $839-million a year industry with the nation’s winter tourism bringing in $5-billion annually and creating 110,000 jobs. Global warming could have a $1.6-billion impact on Switzerland’s winter tourism industry by 2050, according to a Swiss government study. If global warming trends are not reversed, the ski season in the California’s Sierra mountains could shrink by 15 weeks by 2080, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated.
“I’ve traveled the world,” said Canadian skier Kelly VanderBeek, a 2006 Olympian. “I’ve visited glaciers and ski races and different ski hills and resorts from across the globe — Chile, New Zealand, Europe, Sweden, Finland. … And I’ve seen first hand the impact of the (climate change) has had on these ski hills. Lower lying ski hills are closing down. Valleys that I visited that were once thriving are decimated, no tourism any more, no snow, the winter has changed.”
Contact the writer: sreid@ocregister.com
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