The Associated Press is freaking out about global warming threatening the future of the Winter Olympics. AP Sports Writers Andrew Dampf and Eric Willemsen contributed to a doom-and-gloom story -- run by USA Today Sports -- stating that warming weather conditions are hampering U.S. and foreign Olympic ski team training opportunities. Despite the AP's "exclusive" agenda-driven panic attack, world competition is underway in anticipation of the 2018 Games in South Korea.
The AP's dire take on the Olympians' desperate search for good powder schusses around inconvenient truths and implies they're practically having to re-route around Dante's Inferno. Notice the months mentioned below; they're summer months:
The hellishly named "Lucifer" heat wave that baked Europe in July and August wreaked havoc on teams' schedules. Canadian skicross racers had to cancel plans to train on Italy's Stelvio glacier that turned a sickly gray, rerouting to Mount Hood, Oregon, instead. Canadians endured issues elsewhere, scrubbing a planned summer training trip to Argentina because of hostile weather and extreme winds. ... (French ski team member Ben Cavet) was shocked by the visible deterioration of his regular venue for summer training .
Last year, the aerials team stopped water training at its headquarters in Park City, Utah, in mid-October, then sat and waited a month for snow that came late to the mountain that hosted the Winter Games 15 years ago. The World Cup season began in China, and the Americans were forced to travel there not having set foot on snow in months. The results, not surprisingly, were dismal: not a single podium and only one finish in the top 5.
Mild temperatures and lack of snow in Germany, Croatia and Michigan hit the 2015-16 season with multiple cancellations and venue changes. Last season began with events in Colorado and Alberta scrubbed because of lack of snow.
Last year? Two years ago? How bout we get back to this year and the powder Olympians and non-Olympians are finding.
Ben Cavet, a member of the French team and a global warming alarmist, says, "It is worrying, very worrying," he added. "What scares me about global warming is that you can see that the world is suffering in some of the most beautiful places on Earth."
Once more the reader is yanked back to summer: "Austria's Moelltaler Glacier closed from Aug. 15-Sept. 7 because of what its operators said were "water gutters in the ice" and other safety concerns." Does snow not normally melt in August? One bright guy gets it -- Umberto Capitani from an Italian ski area, who said, "Partly it was because of the heat."
It only gets worse for these alarmists, as global warming leads to additional problems. AP's report says, "Environmentally minded athletes are wrestling with the moral dilemma of contributing to atmospheric pollution with their widening search for snow. We take planes to go overseas. We take cars every day to go training," said French snowboard-cross racer Pierre Vaultier, gold medalist at the 2014 Sochi Games. "We are not examples about how to decrease global warming."
They aren't the first people to complain about global warming while leaving giant-sized carbon footprints. Think "Al Gore."
AP also frets over warnings "that worse is to come for winter sports, and that more warming will render proven Olympic venues unsuitable, even with greater use of artificial snow-making." The writers already fear that Winter Games between now and 2030 are in jeopardy due to global warming.
Scientists who haven't given in to fear and panic say warming and cooling climates are part of the Earth's history. The slight 20th century rise in global temperature is within the bounds of natural temperature fluctuations over the past 3,000 years. Also a 2013 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Boreas found that summer temperatures during the Roman Empire and Medieval periods were "consistently higher" than temperatures during the 20th century. (Leif Kullman, "Ecological Tree Line History and Palaeoclimate - Review of Megafossil Evidence from the Sweedish Scandes," Boreas, 2013).
And that was before there were cars and factories on the planet. Before Al Gore's many travels, too!
