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You might think that choosing a city for the Winter Olympics is an easy task. It’s not hard to choose somewhere that has enough snow to support more than 100 events that are cold-related.
However, Beijing is hosting the Winter Olympics and the shocking truth is that the conditions are so bad for snow that there isn’t a single speck of the real thing.
The Winter Olympics snow is fake. Area athletes see an average of one inch of snow each February.
In addition, the creation of enough artificial snow for a Winter Olympics leaves a significant environmental footprint due to the enormous amounts of water and energy required to make and maintain an entire Olympic resort of fake snow.
This is the Winter Olympics in an era of climate change. This is the first winter games to almost exclusively rely on fake snow. It is snow-free in the hills outside Beijing so it took 49 million gallons and 300 snow guns to create it. pic.twitter.com/wYtB6qMGII
— XR Cambridge (@xr_cambridge) February 6, 2022
According to TimeThe Winter Olympics are experiencing an absolute shortage of natural snow, but this is not the first time artificially made snow has been used to make up the majority of what we see at the games.
98% of snow used at the 2018 Winter Olympics Pyeongchang, South Korea, was artificial. Around 80% of snow used at Sochi, Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympics was fake.
Artificial snow may be necessary in order to ensure that each event can proceed. However, it is concerning that the Olympic Committee chose a city that has ‘little or no natural snowfall in winter’ due to the environmental impact of creating artificial snow.
Critics of the decision to hand Beijing the 2022 Winter Olympics point out that the games are being held in a place where it barely snows and there’s not a lot of water — hardly a suitable pick for a host city.
Hosting the Winter Olympics has its problems. This is also raising concerns about climate change.
NBCReports indicate that unless man-made climate change is stopped, there won’t be enough places to host the Winter Olympics by the end of this century.
7 days agoResearch from the University of Waterloo, Canada, warns that on our current climate course, only one of the 21 cities that has hosted the Winter Olympics in the past — Sapporo, Japan — would be able to host the games by 2080.
The research showed that if we do manage to address climate change, the picture was much more positive.
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