Will the climate cooperate for L.A.'s 2028 Summer Olympics?

Snoop Dogg carries the Olympic torch at the 2024 Summer Olympics.

By Paul ThorntonLetters Editor

Aug. 10, 2024 4 AM PT

Good morning. It is Saturday, Aug. 10, one day before the Summer Olympics in Paris close. With that in mind, let’s look at what we’ve been doing in Opinion.

Quite literally, the torch will be passed to Los Angeles at the closing ceremony of the Summer Games on Sunday. It will mark the symbolic start of our preparation for the global spectacle in 2028, but in reality we’ve been getting ready for years. Most of those efforts have to do with moving hundreds of thousands of visitors and athletes to venues and hotels across this vast region without relying on personal automobiles, a feat that will pay climate dividends. However, as The Times’ Editorial Board recently noted, we don’t want to go too far on climate frugality by depriving the athletes of energy-consuming air conditioners, something Paris did at its Olympic village to much chagrin.

That brings up another possible complication of the 2028 Summer Games, which are scheduled for July 14-30: It’s known to get hot at that time of year — sometimes dangerously so.

I thought of this as I first explored the mapping tool by researchers at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science that tells you what a city might be like in 60 years based on another location currently experiencing that climate. According to this tool, the climate in Alhambra, where I live now, will in 2080 feel like Fontana and Rialto do today if carbon emissions continue on their present path. That’s about 45 miles farther inland, where the high temperatures will hover around 100 degrees this weekend.

Now, I know the 2028 Olympics are four years away, not 60, and I have faith that humanity will summon the political resolve to get emissions under control. But as the editorial board noted in its A/C piece, Paris’ average July temperature is already 3 degrees higher than it was the last time it hosted the Games 100 years ago. Our climate is already “weirding” in ways that simple temperature increases might not make obvious, meaning it‘s a much riskier bet that L.A.’s climate will cooperate as it did during the 1984 Olympics or in 1932.

Imagine, for example, if the Santa Monica Mountains (or the San Gabriel Mountains, or the San Bernardino Mountains) are on fire as the athletes and global media arrive in Los Angeles. July typically doesn’t see major wildfires in our local mountains — but neither does December, when in 2015 the Thomas fire burned more than 281,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. Last month, the Vista fire burned close to 3,000 acres just down the summit of Mt. Baldy. Don’t forget the areas near there still recovering from cataclysmic fires in 2020, or the nearly 1 million acres that have already burned in California well before the height of fire “season.”

Which is to say, our traditional notions of a fire season and “normal” temperatures are fickle things to rely on when scheduling July sporting events in Los Angeles. Perhaps the aforementioned mapping tool can help us think of more ideal summer climates for the Olympics in 2080.

Because according to it, the weather in western Norway 60 years from now will be like northern Spain today — not ideal for running Summer Olympic marathons, but certainly better than Fontana or Rialto today, or Los Angeles in 2084.

Republicans’ “Tampon Tim” joke about Walz is already backfiring. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, signed a bill earlier this year to require that menstrual products be available in public school bathrooms. This has been done in 27 other states with support across party lines. So, asks Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, what did Republicans think would happen when they tried to make “Tampon Tim” stick?

Harris is avoiding the press and getting away with it. Columnist Jonah Goldberg suggests a reason why: “If this were a remotely normal time, reporters would be shouting questions like ‘When will you hold a press conference?’ every time Harris steps off Air Force Two. Admittedly, this isn’t a normal time. But that doesn’t excuse journalists from demanding more transparency of a candidate who sidestepped the entire primary process.”

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Nicolás Maduro’s landslide defeat hasn’t dislodged him. Is there still hope for Venezuela? According to a survey, the incumbent president lost his country’s recent election by a 2-to-1 margin, but he remains in power and has plunged Venezuela into full-blown totalitarianism. Whether he holds on or steps aside is largely up to how the presidents of Colombia, Brazil and Mexico — ostensibly his leftist allies — deal with Maduro, writes Will Freeman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hezbollah’s deadly rockets aren’t the most serious threat to Israel’s northern border. Matthew Levitt says it’s another Oct. 7-style assault: “The Israeli military has been actively training for years to counter a Hezbollah plot to overrun Israeli communities, kill and kidnap civilians, and undermine Israel’s sense of security. Part of what was unexpected about Oct. 7 was that it happened on the southern rather than the northern border.”

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