The Olympics Are A Climate Story

My wife and I were thrilled by Olympic event after event, from the stunning women’s 4x400 to the powerful symbol of three Black athletes sharing an Olympic gymnastics podium for the first time in history. We were perched on the edge of the couch, from the glorious finish of the traditional road race (both of them!) to the vibrant creativity and joy of breaking. These Paris Olympics were deeply rooted in history—and a new beginning for the Games.

They were also an ending.

This CNN piece (“These cities will be too hot for the Olympics by 2050,” August 12) does a fabulous job of highlighting the serious threat that climate change poses to the future of the Olympics. It’s also a failure for climate journalism, and we need to talk about why.

Let’s start by highlighting what the story gets right.? It analyzes real climate data from multiple angles and with clear visualizations, helping to make climate modeling relatable for readers. It applies a health lens, a critical tool for understanding global climate impacts at a personal and community level. Finally, it mentions (briefly) the underlying cause of climate change: “fossil fuel pollution pushes temperatures and humidity levels up.”

From that promising start, however, the article misses key points and finishes far from the podium.

Despite citing data from CarbonPlan, CNN never once mentions “climate change”. Those two words do not appear together anywhere in the article. (At a time when climate deniers are strategizing to eliminate the words “climate change” across the entire US federal government, this is not an academic point—or a politically neutral choice by CNN.)

CNN relies on climate modeling through 2050, but it doesn’t mention that the trendline will continue long past 2050. Even if most nations take immediate and meaningful action to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C, dangerous heat impacts on the Olympic Games will intensify for decades beyond 2050. (And on our current trajectory, of course, we're nowhere close to achieving immediate and meaningful action in line with the Paris Agreement.)

The article also misses an opportunity to widen its aperture to the human experience of sports. The Olympics exemplify climate impacts on sports, and there’s a gut punch delivered by the fact that, because of dangerous heat, the Summer Olympics may never again be hosted around the Mediterranean—cutting off the Games from their roots. But CNN’s own analysis reveals that, in the near future, outdoor sports activities will frequently be unsafe for much of humanity. From our backyards, villages, and neighborhood fields, to national arenas like Paris’s Stade de France or Cape Town Stadium on the southern tip of Africa, sports are an integral piece of the unimaginably rich tapestry of human culture. Climate change not only jeopardizes a safe future for the Olympic Games; it threatens everyday social and cultural activities, vital pieces of our common human experience.

Most important, however, CNN never once acknowledges that climate change, and this darker future for the Games and for global sports, is a policy choice.

Yes, the pathways to that choice are complex and varied around the world. They’re constrained by vast disinformation campaigns waged by oil and gas companies, the global resurgence of right-wing nationalism, the short-termism of incumbent business and political leaders, and many other barriers to collective action. But those too are determined by policy choices in each of our communities and nations, even as they affect them in turn. CNN not only refuses to name “climate change” in this article—it largely treats climate change as a phenomenon that’s simply happening to us, a result of conditions already on the field.

CNN is hiding the ball here. The fact that climate change is a policy choice means that people are accountable, but it also means that we can choose differently.

By constraining its time horizon to 2050, the article offers no sense of alternative futures. The future of the Olympic Games isn’t set, however. We can choose whether dangerous heat will peak sometime between the 2068 and 2080 Games, then steadily improve for future Games, or whether it will continue to intensify through 2120, 2140, or beyond. We can choose whether dangerous heat and climate chaos will continue to warp our cities, our communities, and our cultures...and for how long.

The Olympics are a climate story. The centrality of climate is increasingly clear across topics, from public health systems to economic indicators, from children’s learning outcomes to urban infrastructure to global agriculture and aquaculture—but it’s obviously and powerfully true of the Olympic Games. With this piece, CNN is missing a crucial chance for storytelling and sense-making.

We can learn from that miss. As we sit down in corporate boardrooms and at dining room tables, we can lift up the real story:

The Paris Olympics were historic and inspiring, and we’ve each had deeply personal experiences of these Games. But the future of the Olympic Games is in jeopardy, as climate change continues to intensify dangerous heat around the world. And in communities around the world, climate change is already starting to affect outdoor sports for kids and adults. Our next choices—how we advocate and vote for political leaders and policy priorities, at both local and national levels—can lead us to a future in which the Olympics, and global sports, can thrive again.

The Olympic Games are an extraordinary global symbol—and a global indicator. If they can once again thrive in cities and countries around the world, that will happen because we’ve meaningfully tackled the root causes of climate change and are making progress toward a safer, more just, and more prosperous future for all of us.