The Heat and the Games: The Climate That's Coming

A handful.

We're talking about an institution that has 206 member nations, and the planet is eliminating its own venues.

Es un problema muy serio.

It's a very serious problem.

En España también hay mucho calor en verano ahora.

In Spain there's also a lot of heat in summer now.

Spain has been hit hard.

The 2003 European heat wave killed roughly 70,000 people across Europe.

Spain, France, Italy, Portugal.

And since then, the frequency and intensity of those heat events has accelerated.

How do you feel it in Madrid, day to day?

Antes, en julio, hacía calor.

Before, in July it was hot.

Ahora, en junio también.

Now, in June too.

Y en septiembre todavía.

And in September still.

The season stretches.

That's one of the clearest signatures of what's happening.

It's not just that summers are hotter, it's that they're longer.

Climatologists call it the "shoulder season squeeze," where spring and autumn compress.

Y el mar también cambia.

And the sea also changes.

El agua del Mediterráneo está más caliente.

The water in the Mediterranean is warmer.

The Mediterranean is warming faster than the global ocean average, actually.

About 20% faster.

And a warmer Mediterranean feeds more intense storms, more severe flooding in places like Valencia, which saw catastrophic floods in late 2024.

You had almost 220 people die in a single day.

Valencia fue muy triste.

Valencia was very sad.

Muchas personas murieron en sus coches, en las calles.

Many people died in their cars, in the streets.

It was a real tragedy.

And the science on that event is clear: the rainfall was made at least twice as likely by climate change.

That's not speculation, that's a peer-reviewed attribution study published within weeks of the flood.

¿Y los países pobres?

And the poor countries?

Para ellos es peor, ¿verdad?

For them it's worse, right?

Much worse, and that's the most important piece of this.

The countries that have contributed the least to carbon emissions are the ones absorbing the worst consequences.

Bangladesh, sub-Saharan Africa, small island states in the Pacific.

I spent time in Bangladesh years ago.

The delta region, where something like 30 million people live less than a meter above sea level.

Those people didn't build the industrial world.

Es muy injusto.

It's very unfair.

Los países ricos contaminan más.

Rich countries pollute more.

Los países pobres sufren más.

Poor countries suffer more.

That asymmetry is at the heart of every climate negotiation.

And it has never been fully resolved.

The wealthy countries committed at COP15 to provide a hundred billion dollars a year in climate finance to developing nations.

That pledge wasn't met until 2022, and even then, much of it was loans, not grants.

You're lending money to countries that are drowning.

¿Y los Juegos de 2028?

And the 2028 Games?

¿Los atletas de los países pobres pueden ir?

Can athletes from poor countries go?

That's a quietly devastating question.

The IOC has a solidarity fund for that, but the infrastructure required to train, to qualify, to compete at an elite level in extreme heat, that requires resources.

Heat acclimatization training is expensive.

Altitude camps, cooling technology.

Wealthier nations invest in that science.

Others are just showing up and hoping.

Mira, en los Juegos de Tokio, los atletas de África corrieron muy bien.

Look, at the Tokyo Games, the athletes from Africa ran very well.

Es que el calor no es nuevo para ellos.

The thing is, heat is not new for them.

That's a real point.

There was a study out of the University of Portsmouth that looked at marathon times in heat and found that East African runners showed more physiological resilience to high temperatures than European or North American athletes.

Whether that's genetic, environmental, or just decades of training in heat, the researchers couldn't fully separate.

But you're right that it complicates the narrative.

El clima cambia el deporte.

Climate changes sport.

El esquí también tiene problemas ahora.

Skiing also has problems now.

Hay menos nieve.

There's less snow.

The Winter Olympics has its own version of this crisis.

A study from the University of Waterloo found that by 2080, under current emissions trajectories, only one of the twenty-one cities that have hosted the Winter Games would still have reliably suitable natural snow conditions: Sapporo.

Every other historic venue, Innsbruck, Lake Placid, Chamonix, would be climatically unreliable.

En España, las montañas tienen menos nieve cada año.

In Spain, the mountains have less snow every year.

Es un problema para el turismo también.

It's a problem for tourism too.

The economic ripple effects are enormous.

Ski resorts are a whole ecosystem: hotels, restaurants, transport, local employment.

The Swiss Alpine resort economy, for instance, is worth billions and it's being slowly dismantled by warming temperatures.

Some resorts have started moving to summer mountain tourism instead.

Hiking, cycling.

But the transition isn't simple.

Y el vino también cambia.

And wine also changes.

En España, las uvas crecen antes ahora.

In Spain, the grapes grow earlier now.

El vino tiene más alcohol.

The wine has more alcohol.

I did not expect to find myself caring deeply about the sugar content of Spanish grapes, but here we are.

The harvest dates in the Rioja have shifted by something like three weeks over the past fifty years.

English winemakers are now producing sparkling wine that competes with Champagne.

The climate zone for viticulture has moved northward by roughly 200 kilometers.

Vino inglés.

English wine.

Qué horror.

How dreadful.

I've actually had some that were quite good, but I'll keep that between us.

The broader point is that climate change isn't an abstract future event.

It's already rewriting what can be grown where, what sports can be played when, which cities can host what.

It's a present-tense story.

¿Y Los Ángeles tiene un plan para los incendios durante los Juegos?

And does Los Angeles have a plan for fires during the Games?

The official line is: yes, absolutely, the city has invested heavily in fire prevention and early warning systems since the January 2025 fires.

And genuinely, the monitoring infrastructure has improved.

But fire behavior in extreme heat is not fully predictable.

The meteorological conditions that led to the Palisades Fire, strong Santa Ana winds during a dry winter, those are getting more frequent.

You can't fully plan for that.

El mundo tiene que cambiar.

The world has to change.

No solo Los Ángeles.

Not just Los Angeles.

Todos los países.

All countries.

That's the part that every climate scientist I've ever interviewed arrives at eventually.

Individual adaptation, city-level planning, those are necessary, but they're essentially building better lifeboats.

The ship is still taking on water.

The only thing that actually changes the trajectory is reducing emissions at scale, and that requires political will at a moment when the country that put the most CO2 into the atmosphere historically has just walked away from the Paris Agreement.

¿Y los Juegos de 2028?

And the 2028 Games?

Tú crees que van a ser buenos, ¿no?

You think they're going to be good, right?

I think they'll happen, and I think they'll be spectacular in many ways.

LA knows how to put on a show.

But I also think some athlete is going to collapse in the heat during an outdoor event and the conversation we're having right now is going to become the main story for two news cycles.

And at that point, the IOC's climate promises will face real scrutiny.

Espero que no.

I hope not.

Espero que todos los atletas estén bien y los Juegos sean una fiesta.

I hope all the athletes are okay and the Games are a celebration.

We all do.

Alright, before we wrap up, you said something earlier in this conversation, you said "es que el calor no es nuevo para ellos", and I want to ask you about that "es que" construction because I hear you use it a lot and I feel like it's doing real work in the sentence and I can't quite pin down what it is.

"Es que" significa "the thing is" o "it's that".

"Es que" means "the thing is" or "it's that".

Es una explicación.

It's an explanation.

Por ejemplo: "No como carne.

For example: "I don't eat meat.

Es que no me gusta."

The thing is, I don't like it."

So it's like a soft pivot.

You've said something, and now you're about to explain the reasoning behind it.

Not a contradiction, but a clarification.

"I arrived late.

The thing is, there was no parking."

Exacto.

Exactly.

Muy bien, Fletcher.

Very good, Fletcher.

"Es que" también puedes usar para una excusa.

You can also use "es que" for an excuse.

"No fui a la reunión.

"I didn't go to the meeting.

Es que tenía mucho trabajo."

The thing is, I had a lot of work."

So when I inevitably show up to your next dinner party an hour late and slightly confused, I can say "es que" and then invent something plausible.

This feels like an incredibly useful phrase.

Sí, pero en español, todos saben que "es que" a veces es una excusa.

Yes, but in Spanish, everyone knows that "es que" is sometimes an excuse.

Usala con cuidado.

Use it carefully.