Preliminary results of an ongoing study published Friday in the journal Lancet warn that infrastructure and security issues could be dwarfed by another huge problem for potential host cities in coming years: it could become simply too hot and humid for many cities to host the games at all.
“The climate could be so bad in 70 years that the Games will change forever.”
The study, written by a group of U.S. and Australian researchers, looked at how global climate change would affect the viability of host cities in 2085. In less than eighty years, the researchers concluded, only eight cities in the Northern Hemisphere — outside of Western Europe — will have a cool enough climate to host the summer games. No cities in Latin America or Africa would be viable hosts for the games, and only three North American cities — Calgary, Vancouver, and San Francisco — would qualify.
“The climate could be so bad in 70 years that the Games will change forever,” Kirk Smith, a professor of public health at Berkeley, and co-author of the findings, told SFGate. “They might hold the Summer Games indoors, but can you imagine running an indoor marathon?”
