Warming Up: How Climate Change Is Changing Sport

This humdrum debut from Orr, a sport ecology professor at the University of Toronto, studies how global warming is playing out on fields, courts, and golf greens across the world. Her visit to the French Alps serves as the occasion to explore the plight of ski resort towns, which are struggling to stay afloat amid declining snowfall. Athletes in hotter climes face increased risk of heatstroke, Orr warns, recounting how a football player at the University of Maryland died after overheating during practice in 2018. Elsewhere, Orr describes how droughts have made it almost impossible to maintain cricket pitches in India and how family relocations after the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California left Paradise High School’s once formidable football team in shambles. Unfortunately, Orr’s recommendations on how sports might adapt come up short. For instance, her suggestion that government subsidies for sports stadiums should be contingent on the public’s ability to shelter in the structures during emergencies is undercut by her own account of the terrible conditions at New Orleans’ Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. Other proposals are Pollyannaish, as when she suggests golf might embrace a more extreme mode of play by forsaking water-intensive greens for expanses of “rubble and bits of concrete.” The reporting highlights some less discussed, if also less consequential, effects of climate change, but the vision for a better sporting future fails to persuade. It’s a mixed bag. (May)