March 5, 2012
Climate Change’s Latest Victim: Ice Hockey
Outdoor ice skating is deeply ingrained in Canadian culture. Image by Flickr user *myoldpostcards*
You’ve no doubt heard about the myriad effects of rising global temperatures: droughts, drying rivers, lowland floods, plummeting populations of polar bears and Emperor penguins, coastal storms putting Arctic villages in mortal danger. Now there’s a new victim: the future of Canadian ice hockey.
To those of us who don’t follow sports, it might seem like a silly thing to fret over. But ice hockey is actually quite important to the culture and economy of Canada. The first organized game of indoor hockey, in 1875, took place in Montreal. When the country sent its first astronaut into space, he took a hockey stick and puck with him. Every year, according to one report, more than one-fifth of the country’s adult population attends or plays in an ice hockey game.
Because a lot of this hockey fun takes place in outdoor ice rinks, the scientists behind the new study wondered if the sport has been influenced by the changing climate. Since 1950, average winter temperatures in Canada have gone up 2.5 degrees Celsius, while the duration and intensity of cold spells have decreased.
In their report, published today in Environmental Research Letters, the researchers analyzed historical data from 142 weather stations to calculate the length of the annual outdoor skating season between 1951 and 2005. (They based this simply on whether the temperature was cold enough to keep ice frozen in the rink.) For a few places, the skating season has crept up earlier in the fall. For most areas, though, the length of the season has become much shorter.
The prairies—which include Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan—and southwest Canada saw the biggest temperature changes. If these trends are extrapolated into the future, the researchers predict that by the middle of the century, some of these regions will no longer have days cold enough to sustain an ice rink.
The last sentence of their study is sure to tug at the heartstrings of any Canadian hockey fan: “Wayne Gretzky learned to skate on a backyard skating rink; our results imply that such opportunities may not available to future generations of Canadian children.”
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I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the 1960′s. From the second week in December, to the last weeks in March, we had large (300 ft square) outdoor ice rinks in a number of public parks. Everyone used them to skate for many hours after school and on the weekends.
Now, the only outdoor rink makes use of chilled floor technology to offer public skating for an hour or two at a time. This past winter, local lakes never froze deep enough to allow skating.
I can’t believe that people who who skated occasionally for an hour at a time on a paid rink as children can match the skills of people who skated all winter long on outdoor rinks and lakes.
Glowbull warming: A 3 minute penalty for icing the puck out of us for 26 years of needless crisis panic.Considering evolution, ancient climates, 5 billion years and tropical fossils under the melting ice, you remaining doomers expect us to believe this climate of today has never happened before? Just who was the knuckle dragging bible thumping neocon in all of this?
Melting proves cause? And no, ice cores were not some Harry Potter temperature dipsticks.
Exaggeration trumps consensus.
mememine–trying to see how many cynical, irrelevant denialist factoids you can cram into one comment? Yes, climate has changed over the 5 billion years. But that’s not what the relevant discussion is all about. You knew that already, right? We’re ramping up a different atmosphere than we’ve seen in 600,000+ years — that’s significant from a human standpoint, and a lot more relevant than going back through 5 billion years of earth’s history. I don’t really worry about what the atmosphere was like when cyanobacteria first formed ~3+ billion years ago, or how much CO2 was here in the Jurassic 150 million years ago. I worry about how our generation and our kids’ generation will adapt to changes in climate that are unprecedented in human experience. And I worry if we’ll be smart enough to use the massive amount of good scientific information to make informed, intelligent decisions. Including decisions to slow the rate of release of GHG’s into the atmosphere, and work toward a more sustainable “business model” for the human economy. This “hockey stick” article is way down there on the list of concerns, but it drives home the point that we’re living in a warmer climate than the one we grew up in.