Gold medals. Split-second finishes. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Every two years, the Olympics are a huge global news story, as multitudes of people around the world follow the feats of amazing athletes competing for personal recognition and national glory.
Most news coverage rightly concentrates on the athletes’ contests, but reporters at these Olympics could not ignore the role of unfriendly weather. Downpours marred the opening ceremony (and may have contributed to an E. coli infection that caused Belgium’s withdrawal from the mixed triathlon). Then, searing temperatures assaulted athletes and spectators alike as a heat dome settled over much of Europe and North Africa.
Much less reported, though, was the fact that the super-hot conditions “would not have occurred” without man-made global heating. That’s the finding of a study issued July 31 by scientists at the World Weather Attribution group (WWA). “The extreme temperatures reached in July would have been virtually impossible if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels,” the group’s press release stated.
Since its founding in 2015, WWA has established a reputation for accurate, timely studies that calculate how much more likely global warming has made a given extreme weather event. WWA’s methods and studies are peer-reviewed, providing an answer to skeptics, in newsrooms and elsewhere, about the climate connection to extreme weather. Its latest study even came with an eye-catching sound bite from its lead scientist, Friederike Otto: “Climate change crashed the Olympics.”
Yet most of the world’s biggest media appear to have ignored the WWA study. Television, the medium of choice for a visual spectacle like the Olympics, was all but silent about climate change, much less the fossil fuel burning that was driving the extreme heat at these Olympics.
Exceptions to the trend — stories by the Guardian (which Mother Jones picked up), AFP (which the Times of India picked up), and Politico Europe — demonstrate that such stories could easily be produced. That so much of broadcast media didn’t do so recalled the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, when extreme heat melted snowpack, leaving bare mountainsides straddling strips of artificial snow — yet climate change went unmentioned in news coverage.
Covering Climate Now has long said that climate change is a story for every beat in every newsroom. A recent issue of our biweekly newsletter Locally Sourced shows how to make the sports-climate connection, and CCNow has plenty more resources to help do a better job going forward.
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