Could Hockey Become an Endangered Sport?
WITH EVER MORE frequent droughts and floods causing food and water problems, rising sea levels pushing up property losses and infrastructure costs, and extreme weather and pollution increasing illness and death, hockey may be the least of our worries when it comes to climate change. But outdoor winter sports are important economically and culturally, and provide ways for people to stay active and healthy during winter.
Unfortunately, hockey could well be a casualty. Research from Montreal’s McGill and Concordia Universities shows global warming is having an effect on outdoor rinks in Canada.45 “Many locations across the country have seen significant decreases in the length of the OSS [outdoor skating season], as measured by the number of cold winter days conducive to the creation of rink ice,” states their 2012 study. “This is particularly true across the Prairies, and in Southwest Canada, which showed the largest (and most statistically significant) decreases in the calculated OSS length between 1951 and 2005.”
This echoes a 2009 David Suzuki Foundation report, On Thin Ice: Winter Sports and Climate Change.46 The McGill investigation looked at constructed outdoor rinks, whereas the DSF’s focused on frozen rivers, canals, and lakes, but the conclusions are similar. Both predict that, unless we rein in greenhouse gas emissions, outdoor skating in parts of Canada could be history within the next fifty to one hundred years (the McGill study’s authors now say it could happen within twenty to thirty years), and the length of the outdoor skating season will continue to shorten across the country.
Meanwhile, at Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University, geographers have launched www.RinkWatch.org, a website where people can record information about backyard or neighborhood rink conditions over the winter. “Our hope is that Canadians from coast to coast will help us track changes in skating conditions, not just this year, but for many years to come,” associate professor Robert McLeman said in a release. “This data will help us determine the impact of climate change on winter in terms of length of season and average temperatures.”47
According to the DSF report, one of Canada’s best-loved outdoor skating venues, Ottawa’s Rideau Canal, provides an example of what to expect. The report concludes that, with current emissions trends, the canal’s skating season could shrink from the previous average of 9 weeks to 6.5 weeks by 2020, less than 6 weeks by 2050, and just 1 week by the end of the century.
On Thin Ice noted that many of Canada’s hockey heroes got their start on outdoor rinks. “Without pond hockey, we probably wouldn’t have what has become the modern game of hockey,” the authors state. The DSF study says climate change could have a profound effect on many other winter sports, from skiing and snowboarding to winter mountaineering. But losing winter recreation opportunities, let alone our ability to produce food and keep our homes warm and people healthy, needn’t happen. Taking action to avoid the worst impacts of climate change will ensure that kids and adults alike can continue to skate and score goals and enjoy winter in so many other ways.
Chapter 3
OBSTACLES AND BARRIERS
AS WE SAW with the 2015 UN Climate Conference and subsequent Paris Agreement, experts and world leaders are taking the issue of global warming seriously. Although some may quibble over details around exact causes, effects, and implications, very few legitimate scientists and researchers deny that human activity is a major contributor to global warming. No peer-reviewed scientific study has overturned the prevailing theory of climate change. Scientific research has also found conclusive evidence for the causes, which include burning fossil fuels, damaging or destroying forests and other green spaces, and employing energy-intensive and methane-producing agricultural practices that contribute to rising emissions. Although the science of global warming and all its related phenomena—from feedback cycles to impacts on oceans, land, ice, and snow; animal migration patterns; and more—are incredibly complex, the major causes are not, and so the solutions are not as complicated as they seem. We know that to address the problem we must conserve energy and find cleaner ways of obtaining energy than burning fossil fuels, and we must protect and preserve the natural systems that absorb and store carbon, such as oceans and forests. And although excessive consumption in the developed world contributes as much or more to climate change than population growth in the developing world, stabilizing population growth must also be part of the solution. The best way to achieve that is by giving women greater rights worldwide, especially regarding access to birth control and family planning education, as well as the right to participate in society and political decision-making.
If we agree there’s a problem and we know what to do about it, why are we still pursuing activities that contribute to it? Why aren’t people around the world doing more to slow or halt global warming? The 2015 Paris Agreement was a start, but even it doesn’t put us on track to achieve the level of emissions reductions needed to avert disaster. A big part of the problem is that, for many reasons, we’ve failed to do enough for so long that it has become more difficult than ever to resolve what has become a global crisis. We’ve developed massive infrastructure for a fossil-fueled world, especially in industrialized nations. Fossil fuels have made possible much of our prosperity, technological advances, breakthroughs in agricultural methods and scientific developments, and increasingly convenient lifestyles. It’s not that easy to retool or quickly shift direction when fossil fuels have become such an integral part of human existence. Fossil fuels have also, in part, driven the world’s population boom. And as poorer nations with large and often rapidly growing populations come to expect the same benefits people in the industrialized world have enjoyed, they look to inexpensive and relatively easily obtained fossil fuels to help them catch up.
Politicians and the systems they operate within are geared more toward short-term than long-term planning. Immediate economic prosperity keeps people happier and, in democracies, wins more votes than long-term planning that might include sacrifices. And a country like China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, has a political system that allows it to say one thing and do another, with few ways for its people or the rest of the world to know what it’s actually doing in terms of increasing or reducing its contribution to climate change.
The fossil fuel industry, which is by far the most profitable industry in the history of humanity, has also spent enormous amounts of time and money to protect its interests. That has involved political lobbying, paying massive amounts of cash to politicians and political parties to further its interests, campaigning to sow doubt and confusion about global warming and its consequences—often through front groups with scientific-sounding names or bogus studies—and developing infrastructure that locks societies into fossil fuel use.
This chapter will examine some of the barriers to resolving the climate crisis, including many of the arguments used to downplay the problem and its severity.
The China Syndrome
THOSE WHO REJECT the evidence for anthropogenic climate change throw many slippery arguments onto the path of progress. Most of them are irrational, easily debunked, or disingenuous, but one contains a germ of truth. “Unless China and India stop emitting such high levels of greenhouse gases, nothing other countries do will make a difference,” they claim. It’s used as an argument against taking action on climate change, the assumption being that China and India will continue to increase emissions as their populations grow and industrialization expands.
Every nation, no matter how great or small its contribution to global warming, must do its part to resolve the problem, regardless of what other nations may or may not do. Arguing that we should give up because others aren’t doing their part is an immature and facile argument. But it’s true that if China and India refuse to do their part, we’re pretty much screwed.
China is the largest greenhouse gas emitter, accounting for one-fifth or more of the world’s energy consumption and close to one-quarter of emissions—and its energy