The World's Winter Olympic Sites Are Warming, and We Have the Graphs to Prove It

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Over the course of the last 50 to 100 years, every single site where the Winter Olympics has ever been held has gotten warmer, seeing a 1.66 degree Celsius (2.98 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in the average February low temperature over a 50-year period.

There are 8 men swimming in Sochi in numb your feet kind of water.Give them a medal @CBCOlympics pic.twitter.com/o2IWn5RZz1
— ColleenJonescbc (@cbccolleenjones) February 12, 2014

It's been hard to avoid discussing climate change in the context of the Winter Games at Sochi, where temperatures have been balmy. (One week ago today, it was warmer than Myrtle Beach.) People are actually swimming in the nearby Black Sea. Sochi was always an unusual pick for a Winter Games site, given that it's a summer resort town. But it's not alone in being increasingly inhospitable to winter sports.

A report from the University of Waterloo in Canada has gotten a lot of attention, showing how average temperatures have increased at Winter Games sites since the 1920s. As the world continues to warm, and as the world sees less snow during winter months, snowmaking — a staple in Sochi — will become more common as a solution to allow the Games to be held. More than 100 athletes called for action on climate change, writing an open letter to world leaders. "Winter is in jeopardy," it reads.

The broad strokes of climate change are obvious: the world gets warmer. In specifics, it's harder to articulate. Its effects are different in different places and the extent to which it warms depends on how much greenhouse gas the world pumps into the atmosphere.

So we took a look at how it had already warmed in places where past Games had been held. Using data from the National Climatic Data Center, we found the closest monitoring station to each Olympic site, and tracked the average February low temperature as far back as the data allowed. In every case, the most recent decade was warmer than the first available decade; in nearly every case, a simple depiction of the long-term temperature trend (the blue line on the graphs below) shows an obvious ongoing increase. (In places where the sites were very close together, we used one set of data, as in the first grouping below.)

As for Sochi? Records from the NCDC don't go back very far and show that, of all the sites, it's warming at a slower rate. The average low temperature in February in Sochi was only 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher last decade than it was in the 1960s. Compared to the other venues, that's downright good news.