i hope this helps...
March 12, 2007 Vol. 106 No. 11
Going, Going Green
As global warming changes the planet, it is changing the sports world. To counter the looming environmental crisis, surprising and in novative ideas are already helping sports adapt
By: ALEXAN DER WOLFF David Epstein;John Garrity
Edition: Category: COVER
Page: 36 Size: 3829 Column: Section: Environment /
SEA CHANGE As oceans get warmer and ice caps melt, the seas will rise and coastal areas, including parts of South Florida, will eventually be underwater.
AIR TRAVEL Temperature affects how far objects, such as baseballs, fly through the atmosphere. Would Willie Mays have caught this ball today?
GOLF LESSON They once wasted water, used pesticides and destroyed wetlands. Now courses are cleaning up their act and their parts of the planet too.
BEETLEMANIA With its habitat expanding, the emerald ash borer is eating its way through the Northeast timber that is used to make the big leagues' best bats.
MELTDOWN Diminishing snowfall and warmer temperatures have put some of the world's most famous ski resorts in an uphill race for survival.
NEW VENUES Arenas and stadiums will have to adapt to new design standards that incorporate conservation, sustainability and energy efficiency.
The next time a ball game gets rained out during the September stretch run, you can curse the momentary worthlessness of those tickets in your pocket. Or you can wonder why it got rained out--and ask yourself why practice had to be called off last summer on a day when there wasn't a cloud in the sky; and why that Gulf Coast wharf where you used to reel in mackerel and flounder no longer exists; and why it's been more than one winter since you pulled those titanium skis out of the garage. ¶ Global warming is not coming; it is here. Greenhouse gases--most notably carbon dioxide produced by burning coal, oil and gas--are trapping solar heat that once escaped from the Earth's atmosphere. As temperatures around the globe increase, oceans are warming, fields are drying up, snow is melting, more rain is falling, and sea levels are rising.
All of which is changing the way we play and the sports we watch. Evidence is everywhere of a future hurtling toward us faster than scientists forecasted even a few years ago. Searing heat is turning that rite of passage of Texas high school football, the August two-a-day, into a one-at-night, while at the game's highest level the Miami Dolphins, once famous for sweating players into shape, have thrown in the soggy towel and built a climate-controlled practice bubble. Even the baseball bat as we know it is in peril (page 42), and final scores and outcomes of plays may be altered too (opposite page).
Because of the melting of glaciers and polar ice, and because water expands as it warms, oceans are rising. Researchers expect an increase of up to a meter by 2100, enough to drown wetlands. In the last year and a half, scientists have noticed that once indestructible ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica have begun to creep toward the sea. If we continue to spew greenhouse gases as we are, the Earth could become five degrees warmer this century. The last time Earth was that warm, three million years ago, sea level stood 80 feet higher than it does now. Scientists don't foresee such a rise for centuries, but they agree that a damaging change in sea level will occur by 2100.
Global warming is also leading to more dramatic swings in the weather in some areas. Since the early 20th century, the amount of rain dropped in the biggest 1% of storms each year has risen 20%. A warming planet doesn't create hurricanes, but it does make them stronger and last longer. Tropical storms become more powerful over a warmer Gulf, turning a category 4 storm, for example, into a category 5, like Katrina, which transformed the symbol of sports in New Orleans, the Superdome, into an image of epic disaster. In addition to more intense storms, higher seas, and droughts and floods, ocean flow patterns could change, leading to the extinction of marine species. Warmer temperatures could devastate agricultural economies around the globe, and diseases such as malaria now confined to the tropics would spread to other regions.
Unlike many other pressing environmental concerns--pollution, water shortages, overpopulation, deforestation--global warming is by definition global. Every organism on the planet is already feeling its impact.
"There are many important environmental battles to be fought," says Bill McKibben, the Vermont-based writer, activist and passionate cross-country skier. "But if we lose this one--which we're doing--none of the others matter. It's crunch time."
Sports condition us to notice first those things that happen at scatback speed, and until recently climate change took place in world-historical fashion, the way a nil-nil soccer match unfolds. But that perception is changing fast, especially for skiers, whose season has endured a whipsaw of extremes: One day in November enough snow fell at Colorado's Beaver Creek to cause the cancellation of practice for the men's downhill at a World Cup event. A day later on the other side of the globe, officials at the French resort of Val d'Isère called off another World Cup event on account of too little snow, as well as a forecast of prolonged warm temperatures--one of seven World Cup events in Europe this season to have all races canceled for the same reason (page 43).
When the U.S. Nordic ski team returned home early from the European circuit after a December race was rescheduled four times in one week, it left behind resorts desperately trying to lure tourists with promises of spa weekends, Christmas markets and hiking to be enjoyed during this "extension of autumn."
Indeed, the world's signature dogsled race, Alaska's Iditarod, hasn't begun at its traditional starting point in Wasilla since 2002 because of too little snow there. The Elfstedentocht, an 11-city skating marathon that the Dutch stage whenever the canals freeze over, has been run only once in the past two decades. The highest ski slope on the planet, Bolivia's Chacaltaya (altitude 17,388 feet), will soon be unskiable for lack of snow, and the Swiss are wrapping an age-old glacier in an insulating blanket as if it were a foundling. Meanwhile backcountry skiing in North America and ice fishing in the upper Midwest are in jeopardy, and any ski resort below 4,000 feet is worried. Winter in Vermont is now the equivalent of winter in Rhode Island a generation ago.
Humans are accelerating global warming, and we can at least minimize its damage, if not reverse it. By acting quickly, the two countries that emit most of the world's carbon dioxide, the U.S. and China, might be able to avert that forecasted five-degree temperature increase, slowing the rise of the seas enough to allow for the development of new technologies to redress the problem. What would it mean to act? Decrease the burning of fossil fuels, improve fuel efficiency and conserve energy in our daily lives.
The good news is that stadiums and arenas, if built with green aforethought, can be more than symbolic Valhallas that remind us that we're all in this together (page 44). Site one near a public-transit line, and there's less need to build that most Earth-hostile of features, the vast parking lot. (The greenest ballpark in the country may be Fenway Park, because only an idiot would try driving and parking there.)
Turbines mounted on upper decks would catch the same wind that plays whimsically with pop flies, turning it into the source of power to offset at least some of the energy demands of a ball game. Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., features a water filtration and reuse system that collects and recirculates "black" and "gray water" to make the most of all that beer and all those flushes.
A very familiar sports facility is already poised to help the cause: A golf course is by definition conserved green space. If not turned into a repository for pesticides or a pretext for building strips of single-family homes along its fairways, it can serve as a huge filter, with the water draining from it cleaner than the water flowing in (opposite page).
Meantime, an eco-consciousness is leeching ever so slowly into the jockosphere. You'd expect environmental awareness among extreme-sport athletes like the snowboarders and BMX riders who belong to the Action Sports Environmental Coalition, or from surfers whose vocation and avocation depend on the health of the seas. But less likely candidates are thinking globally and acting locally.
• Saints safety Steve Gleason runs his Dodge Ram pickup on processed vegetable oil--biodiesel.
• NASCAR driver Ward Burton's foundation is pledged to habitat management, land conservation and environmental education in his home of Halifax County, Va.
• The Philadelphia Eagles may have some of the most discourteous followers in sports, but their management is a leader, having launched an environmental initiative replete with catchy slogans like Go Green and Time for Some Serious Trash Talk.
• Two years ago the men's lacrosse team at Middlebury College calculated its "carbon footprint" (the amount of global-warming carbon dioxide its daily activities generated) and raised money to purchase enough renewable-energy credits (investments in wind power) to offset those emissions. The team thereby became carbon-neutral--a status also claimed by last summer's soccer World Cup in Germany, cycling's Team Clif Bar Midwest and the Vermont Frost Heaves, this writer's American Basketball Association team, which rides in a biodiesel-powered bus.
• The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is working with the NBA and Major League Baseball to help their teams get greener. Scientists told the NFL that Super Bowl XLI would put one million pounds of carbon dioxide into the air--not counting air travel to Miami--so the league planted 3,000 trees around Florida in an attempt to pull at least that much of the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.
By going green, motor sports could have the quickest impact on public awareness of the planet's fate. The Formula One circuit has already discovered hybrids and biofuels, and Indy cars are mixing ethanol into their fuel. NASCAR is poised to phase out leaded gasoline, a neurotoxin. (The Clean Air Act of 1970 included an exemption for race cars even as the public was barred from buying cars that ran on leaded gas.) It's only a short jump from a NASCAR driver with a raised consciousness to a NASCAR fan with the same.
"In the environmental movement there's way too much preaching to the choir," says Ken Rakoz of Centralia, Wash., who built the first biodiesel-powered dragster. "There are people sitting on the fence, and Joe Sixpack doesn't really know about [biodiesel] until we do something like racing." Whereupon we'll be that much closer to a future in which we define a winner as not merely the team that holds a lead, but one whose arena holds a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
From his home in Ripton, Vt., McKibben, who sounded an early warning about climate change in his 1989 book The End of Nature, surveys this disfigurement of the world as we've known it with as much melancholy as indignation. "If I were a deeply moral person, I should be kept awake at night by the thought of hundreds of millions of Bangladeshis fleeing rising waters and dengue and famine," says McKibben, who's helping to organize a nationwide call to action on climate change for April 14 that will include iconic outdoor and sporting sites Mount Hood and the Key West coral reefs. "But at some level I feel this most acutely in the winter, when I realize I've had fewer and fewer chances to put on my skis."
And therein may lie the great value of sports. What happens in an arena so familiar and beloved may sound an alarm we will hear and heed. At a time when so much in our lives is linear and digital, from the economy to technology, sports still run in graceful cycles, marking time in rhythm with the seasons.
"It's the last of the semipagan calendars we keep," McKibben says, "and a lot of it is going to disappear. All that Bart Giamatti stuff"--the pastoral invocations of the former commissioner of baseball--"has a different valence if we're not going to Florida for spring training, but to St. Paul. We're still so used to the idea that we can deal with the forces of nature that we think nothing of naming our teams Hurricanes and Cyclones. In 10 years, that will be like calling a team the Plagues."
Ten years. That's two-and-a-half Olympiads--enough time for our teams and athletes to take the lead, galvanize attention and influence behavior. When they do, per usual, may we cheer and may we follow. But as we watch, let us remember that this game is different. We don't have the luxury of looking on from the sidelines. We must become players too.
FULL-COURT FLOOD
Scientists project up to a one-meter increase in sea level by 2100, which will alter the shape of the land in low-lying regions of the U.S.--including San Francisco Bay and South Florida--and swamp well-known sports venues
JUST AS the planet's air is warming, so too is its water. Almost all glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets are melting. Simulations by climatologists at the University of Arizona suggest that in less than 150 years, the Earth will be warm enough to eventually melt the 650,000-square-mile Greenland ice cap (assuming no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions). That would raise sea level by four to six meters. Even if we were to stop all emissions today, the rise in sea level could be a half meter by 2100.
In the U.S., where 150 million live along the shore, the hardest hit areas would be South Florida, the Chesapeake Bay region, New Orleans and San Francisco. Says Stephen Leatherman, director of the International Hurricane Research Center, "Miami is within 10 feet of sea level, and it's the Number 1 strike zone for hurricanes; it's a disaster waiting to happen."
Leatherman speaks from experience: He coordinated the major national study of damage done by Hurricane Katrina.
WHAT IF...?
A warmer day might have robbed Willie Mays of immortality
VIC WERTZ'S BLAST would have been gone in just about any other ballpark. But the Polo Grounds' expansive centerfield gave Willie Mays room to run down the 460-foot shot in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. As it happened, the Giants went on to sweep the Series. According to newspaper accounts, it was 76° on Coogan's Bluff that late September day when Mays made his over-the-shoulder grab. By the calculations of University of Illinois physicist Alan Nathan, had it been 77° (and according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Earth is on average 1.17° warmer than it was in '54) the ball would have traveled two inches farther in the less-dense air and thus might have glanced off the edge of Mays's outstretched glove.
GETTING UP TO PAR
Once criticized by environmentalists for their casual treatment of resources, golf courses are now places where biodiversity is encouraged, wetlands created, water purified--and a round can be played guilt-free
GREEN IS GOOD, RIGHT? So 150 acres of grass and trees should make everyone happy. (Except maybe the guy who just sliced his ball into the cart barn.)
Golf courses, however, have been criticized for being too green, for achieving a country-club aesthetic through a profligate use of pesticides, herbicides, water and energy.
Sometimes the critique rings true, but the recent trend has been toward creating courses that provide positive environmental effects. When properly designed and maintained, a course fosters biodiversity, supporting a wide range of greenery and animals. Water hazards can be hospitable aquatic habitats that allow for the storage and release of rainwater. On a small scale, plants even help combat global warming by taking carbon from the atmosphere and producing oxygen.
Golf courses, in other words, can be places where environmental science and recreation coexist. The course depicted here, Cooks Creek Golf Club in Ashville, Ohio--designed by Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry in partnership with Tour player John Cook--has an Audubon sanctuary and a blue-heron rookery within its boundaries.
CHINA CLEANS UP
The race is well under way to clear the air before the 2008 Olympic Games get started
MARATHONERS commonly need a few days to recover from a race, but the lingering effects do not usually include itchy eyes and acne. Those were two of the complaints from some of the thousands of competitors who ran in the Standard Chartered Marathon in Hong Kong in February 2006. The smog was so thick that day, it obscured the majestic Tsing Ma suspension bridge, and 22 runners were hospitalized with symptoms related to poor air quality.
The most dramatic economic boom in history has not been easy on China's environment. As part of its bid to win the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing committed to a war on pollution. Progress has been made, but it is too early to declare victory. In 1990 there were only one million cars in China; now about three million routinely clog the streets of Beijing alone. Satellite images of the capital city, which has a population of 15 million, reveal some of the world's highest levels of nitrogen dioxide--a toxic by-product of automobile exhaust and fossil-fuel-burning factories. With the Games approaching, the government is keen to avoid a public relations nightmare, such as the one after the Hong Kong marathon.
In an effort to meet its stated goal of 245 "blue sky days" in 2007, Beijing officials switched many businesses from coal power to natural gas and began moving factories that burn fossil fuels out of town. For instance, the Capital Iron and Steel Group is being relocated to an island 190 miles east of the city.
The 2012 London Summer Olympics promise to be the greenest of Games. Already, hydrogen-fuel-cell buses have made trial runs on the city's streets--and spectators will need them. Private automobiles will not be allowed near Olympic venues.
BAT BUGS
A warmer climate is inhospitable to ash trees but not to their enemy--the ash borer
MAJOR LEAGUERS come from all over the world, but the ash bats they wield have come from the same northeastern U.S. forests for generations. A cool climate and rocky soil have long made the area from eastern Pennsylvania to the Adirondack region of New York a geographical sweet spot for splendid splinters.
Now, however, a warmer climate threatens the quality of the ash, and of equal concern is the arrival of a tiny beetle, the emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis). The ash borer snips the tubes that carry nutrients through the prized trees. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is so concerned that it's collecting ash DNA should the tree be wiped out.
Bat manufacturers have been keeping an eye on the bug too. Until recently the ash borer, which probably hitched a boat ride from Asia to the U.S. in the 1990s, had moved state by state through the Midwest. But last August trees in Maryland started showing the telltale D-shaped holes made by the insect. The ash borer matures faster in warmer conditions, and according to Columbia University entomologist James Danoff-Burg, climate change will hasten the pest's spread.
Many professional baseball players have switched to maple bats for their rigid feel, but for hitters who want a thin handle and a big barrel, "[ash] just makes for a better tool," says Ron Vander Groef, manager of Rawlings' Adirondack bat factory. The only way to save a forest from the ash borer, Danoff-Burg says, is to "keep it from getting there in the first place." It may be too late for that.
MUDDY SLOPES
With less snow falling and warmer temperatures making artificial snow an expensive alternative, World Cup races are being canceled and ski resorts from the Alps to the Poconos are suffering
JULIA MANCUSO has been skiing since she was two, winning an Olympic gold medal last year in Turin when she was 21. Yet on Jan. 6, at the U.S. Women's Ski Team base in Kirchberg, Austria, Mancuso did something on a slope that she had never done--drive a car up one. "The hill was green," says Mancuso. "We were training on just a strip of snow." The team could not practice the giant slalom because the 20-foot-wide swath of white was too narrow to place the gates.
Two weeks later, at nearby Kitzbühel, more than 100,000 cubic feet of snow had to be hauled by helicopter, at a cost of $389,000, and dumped on verdant slopes so the world-famous Hahnenkamm downhill could be held. Skiers are hoping that this season--with its eight canceled World Cup events through Sunday--is an anomaly, but it is more likely a taste of Alpine winters to come.
Climate warming is most pronounced at high latitudes and over land. Since the mid-1980s, the temperature in the Alps has risen at about three times the global average. Over the last 500 years, 1994, 2000, 2002 and 2003 were the warmest on record in the Alps.
While there is considerable variability year to year, since 1970 the average amount of winter snow cover in North America has decreased almost 4%--205,000 square miles, an area larger than the state of Washington. More winter precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow. Ski resorts are making artificial snow earlier in the season, and warm nights make that an even more expensive exercise.
Some Alpine resorts have begun "wrapping" glaciers--draping football-field-sized foil sheets around them in the summer to keep sunlight out and cold in. Low-lying resorts are pushing their runs higher up mountains, or using more slopes that face north to avoid the sunlight, leaving skiers in the dark.
[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]
LOSING TIME How many days less will the average ski season last in the U.S. by 2025 and '50?
RESORTS (with days lost) 2025 2050
Heavenly, Kirkwood (S. Lake Tahoe) El Dorado, Calif. --26 --29
Taos Taos, N.Mex. --23 --48
Breckenridge, Copper, Keystone Summit, Colo. --20 --20
Steamboat Routt, Colo. --17 --19
Alta, Snowbird, Solitude Salt Lake, Utah --17 --30
Deer Valley, Park City, The Canyons Summit, Utah --16 --23
Winter Park Grand, Colo. --14 --13
Jackson Hole Teton, Wyo. --12 --15
Aspen Highlands, Aspen Mountain, Snowmass Pitkin, Colo. --11 --15
Vail, Beaver Creek Eagle, Colo. --11 --16
Sun Valley Blaine, Idaho --10 --15
Big Sky Gallatin, Mont. --10 --15
Crested Butte Gunnison, Colo. --10 --16
Angel Fire Colfax, N.Mex. --6 --38
Big Mountain Flathead, Mont. --6 --11
Squaw Valley, Northstar (N. Lake Tahoe) Placer, Calif. 3* --14
Mammoth Mountain, June Mountain Mono, Calif. 13* --6
*The season at high-elevation California resorts may temporarily get longer as precipitation increases while it is still cold enough to fall as snow. Data and analysis courtesy of J. VanDorn, K. Hayhoe and E. Maurer, ATMOSrearch
[BOX]
WHAT YOU CAN DO >>
A WORLD AT RISK Read more about the latest science and how to combat global warming, including which products are greenest, which cars are most efficient and which organizations can keep you informed about the changing planet ONLY AT SI.COM/environment.
THREE ILLUSTRATIONS: Illustrations by Slim Films
THREE PHOTOS: N.Y. DAILY NEWS (MAYS); MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PHOTO/AP (ASH BORER); COURTESY OF SMITHGROUP (ARENA)
MAP: Slim Films
• land contour as it is today
• with one-meter sea-level rise
• with six-meter sea-level rise
ORACLE ARENA
NBA Warriors
OAKLAND
MCAFEE COLISEUM
MLB Athletics
NFL Raiders
OAKLAND
PROPOSED STADIUM
NFL 49ers
SANTA CLARA
AT&T PARK
MLB Giants
SAN FRANCISCO
MONSTER PARK
NFL 49ers
SAN FRANCISCO
MAP: Slim Films
San Francisco Bay
PHOTO: N.Y. DAILY NEWS
MAP: Slim Films
Data provided by the University of Arizona's Dept. of Geosciences; mapped by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)
RAYMOND JAMES STADIUM
NFL Buccaneers
TAMPA
TROPICANA FIELD
MLB Devil Rays
ST. PETERSBURG
ST. PETE TIMES FORUM
NHL Lightning
TAMPA
ORANGE BOWL
Miami Hurricanes
MIAMI
AMERICAN AIRLINES ARENA
NBA Heat
MIAMI
DOLPHIN STADIUM
NFL Dolphins
MLB Marlins
MIAMI
BANKATLANTIC
CENTER
NHL Panthers
SUNRISE
JACKSONVILLE MUNICIPAL STADIUM
NFL Jaguars
JACKSONVILLE
MAP: Slim Films
• COOKS CREEK GOLF CLUB Ashville, Ohio • GETTING AROUND The course is a great testing ground for vehicles powered by newly developed fuels such as hydrogen cells and biodiesel. • USING THE SUN Solar panels on the roof heat water and generate electricity. • LAWN CARE Organic products replace synthetic fertilizers, water additives and soil supplements. • FAIR WAY One hundred acres of turf produces enough oxygen for a family of four for four years. • SAVING ENERGY Irrigation pumps and the recharging of cart batteries are programmed for off-peak hours. • PESTS AWAY Pesticides are used as a last resort--only after exhausting nonchemical measures (such as introducing natural pest predators and mechanical traps and improving soil aeration). • WATER HAZARD? Ponds with shallow slopes create an environment for flora and fauna. Shoreline grasses stabilize banks and prevent erosion. • IRRIGATION Using partially treated wastewater keeps the course green while conserving potable water. • RECYCLING The maintenance crew recycles grass clippings, wood debris, water, petroleum products and scrap metal.
PHOTO: RICHARD CASTKA/SPORTPIX INTERNATIONAL
PHOTO: MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PHOTO/AP
MAP: NE US SNOW DATA: J. VANDORN, K. HAYHOE AND E. MAURER, ATMOSRESEARCH
NORTHEAST RETREAT
The area in white has had at least a dusting of snow on the ground for at least 30 days of the average winter. By the end of the century, even light snow figures to be confined to the area in blue.
• Snowcover by year 2100
• Historic area of snowcover
CHART: EUROPE SNOW DATA: ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT
EUROPEAN SKI REPORT
Number of ski areas
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
As average winter temperatures rise by 1°, 2° and 4°C, more resorts, especially those at low altitudes, will not have enough snow to operate.
Resorts operating under current conditions
+1°C
+2°C
+4°C
Austria
Switzerland
France
Italy
Germany
Total
© Time Inc.