[.....] As our planet grows warmer over our lifetimes, the number of cities that will be cool enough to reasonably host the summer games is going to rapidly dwindle. And that doesn’t just mean Atlanta or L.A. According to an analysis published in The Lancet last week, The Last Summer Olympics? Climate change, health, and work outdoors, only three plausible host cities in the entire continent of North America may still be low risk by 2085 (or the summer games of 2088): San Francisco, Calgary, and Vancouver. There may be zero in Africa or Latin America, and only two in Asia (Bishkek, in Kyrgyzstan, and Ulaanbaatar, in Mongolia).

"Eventually, climate change gets so extreme that all bets are off," says lead author Kirk Smith, professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley. Smith’s research focuses on the impact of climate change and pollution in the developing world, but with Rio capturing the world’s attention this month, he and his co-authors saw an opportunity to contextualize climate change. "It’s very hard to talk about what’s happening late in the century," he explains. "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."..........Continue Reading

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