Is it possible just to enjoy a long-cherished international sports tradition without injecting climate scareporn into the mix? Apparently not so for the Gaia-worshipping sub-optimal intellects at The Washington Post.
Post reporters Janice Kai Chen, Nick Kirkpatrick and Júlia Ledur apparently forgot it was winter when they collectively blurted out the following headline February 2, “Climate change is making the Winter Olympics harder to host.”
Kicking the doom-mongering into high gear, the authors cried that “Even with the intervention of machine-made snow, climate change will substantially shrink the number of locations able to host the Games.”
The 2026 games, which are being held in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, are being threatened by warmer temperatures, kvetched the Post reporters. “With the weather too warm to make snow during the day, the machines had to run at night to create enough snow for the upcoming competitions,” in the weeks leading up to the games, they exclaimed.
But weather is not always predictable. On Tuesday, KSL-TV reported the snow-makers got some natural help:
A long‑awaited round of snowfall has arrived in Cortina just as the city races to prepare for the upcoming Olympic opening ceremonies. The snow brought both relief and new challenges as workers push to finish construction.
Some regular visitors, like Elena Belagia of Milan, said the fresh snow brought a welcome improvement.
“All the trees are full of snow, and so it’s amazing,” Belagia said. “They are very lucky. I’ve never seen so much snow in this period.”
This winter in Italy hasn’t always fit the climate-ragebait model. Leading Italian news organization Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA) just reported January 8 that Italy was being “gripped by cold, temperatures drop as low as 23.1° in Veneto,” a region south of Cortina. “After being hit by violent winds, heavy snow and torrential rain over the last few days, Italy was in the grip of intense cold on Thursday,” the outlet summarized.
But Chen, Kirkpatrick and Ledur made it seem like this was the beginning of the end of the Winter Games:
By the middle of this century there could be fewer than 20 countries with the right conditions and infrastructure to host the Games, according to a study from 2024. A study published last month from the same authors examines how to make the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games more climate-resilient.
The reporters also cherry-picked the Rocky Mountains in the American West having a particularly warm winter as being another harbinger of the Winter Games’s death knell. But as USA Today conceded about the blisteringly cold winter season in the American Northeast and Midwest going into February, “Greetings from Ice Planet Hoth … Indeed, much of the eastern United States resembles the fictional frozen Star Wars world, and now folks there are now enduring some of the worst cold on Earth.”
What does all this mean? Predictions about future climate developments and conditions — particularly for something as niche as Winter Sports — is about as reliable as buying a lottery ticket for the $80 million Powerball jackpot, just refer back to former Vice President Al Gore’s conspicuously named climate Armageddon documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which was mocked on its 20th anniversary for much of its doom prophecies never coming to pass.
But leave it to The Post to turn anything and everything it can into a springboard for nutty climate politics.
