An oldie but goodie, posted from Sports Illustrated, 3/12/2007. Written by Alexander Wolff.

As global warming changes the planet, it is changing the sports world. To counter the looming environmental crisis, surprising and innovative ideas are already helping sports adapt

The next time a ball game gets rained out during the September stretch run, you can curse the momentary worthlessness of those tickets in your pocket. Or you can wonder why it got rained out–and ask yourself why practice had to be called off last summer on a day when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky; and why that Gulf Coast wharf where you used to reel in mackerel and flounder no longer exists; and why it’s been more than one winter since you pulled those titanium skis out of the garage.

Global warming is not coming; it is here. Greenhouse gases–most notably carbon dioxide produced by burning coal, oil and gas–are trapping solar heat that once escaped from the Earth’s atmosphere. As temperatures around the globe increase, oceans are warming, fields are drying up, snow is melting, more rain is falling, and sea levels are rising.

All of which is changing the way we play and the sports we watch. Evidence is everywhere of a future hurtling toward us faster than scientists forecasted even a few years ago. Searing heat is turning that rite of passage of Texas high school football, the August two-a-day, into a one-at-night, while at the game’s highest level the Miami Dolphins, once famous for sweating players into shape, have thrown in the soggy towel and built a climate-controlled practice bubble. Even the baseball bat as we know it is in peril (page 42), and final scores and outcomes of plays may be altered too.

Because of the melting of glaciers and polar ice, and because water expands as it warms, oceans are rising. Researchers expect an increase of up to a meter by 2100, enough to drown wetlands. In the last year and a half, scientists have noticed that once indestructible ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica have begun to creep toward the sea. If we continue to spew greenhouse gases as we are, the Earth could become five degrees warmer this century. The last time Earth was that warm, three million years ago, sea level stood 80 feet higher than it does now. Scientists don’t foresee such a rise for centuries, but they agree that a damaging change in sea level will occur by 2100.

Global warming is also leading to more dramatic swings in the weather in some areas. Since the early 20th century, the amount of rain dropped in the biggest 1% of storms each year has risen 20%. A warming planet doesn’t create hurricanes, but it does make them stronger and last longer. Tropical storms become more powerful over a warmer Gulf, turning a category 4 storm, for example, into a category 5, like Katrina, which transformed the symbol of sports in New Orleans, the Superdome, into an image of epic disaster. In addition to more intense storms, higher seas, and droughts and floods, ocean flow patterns could change, leading to the extinction of marine species. Warmer temperatures could devastate agricultural economies around the globe, and diseases such as malaria now confined to the tropics would spread to other regions.

Unlike many other pressing environmental concerns–pollution, water shortages, overpopulation, deforestation–global warming is by definition global. Every organism on the planet is already feeling its impact.

“There are many important environmental battles to be fought,” says Bill McKibben, the Vermont-based writer, activist and passionate cross-country skier. “But if we lose this one–which we’re doing–none of the others matter. It’s crunch time.”

Sports condition us to notice first those things that happen at scatback speed, and until recently climate change took place in world-historical fashion, the way a nil-nil soccer match unfolds. But that perception is changing fast, especially for skiers, whose season has endured a whipsaw of extremes: One day in November enough snow fell at Colorado’s Beaver Creek to cause the cancellation of practice for the men’s downhill at a World Cup event. A day later on the other side of the globe, officials at the French resort of Val d’Isère called off another World Cup event on account of too little snow, as well as a forecast of prolonged warm temperatures–one of seven World Cup events in Europe this season to have all races canceled for the same reason. When the U.S. Nordic ski team returned home early from the European circuit after a December race was rescheduled four times in one week, it left behind resorts desperately trying to lure tourists with promises of spa weekends, Christmas markets and hiking to be enjoyed during this “extension of autumn.”

Indeed, the world’s signature dogsled race, Alaska’s Iditarod, hasn’t begun at its traditional starting point in Wasilla since 2002 because of too little snow there. The Elfstedentocht, an 11-city skating marathon that the Dutch stage whenever the canals freeze over, has been run only once in the past two decades. The highest ski slope on the planet, Bolivia’s Chacaltaya (altitude 17,388 feet), will soon be unskiable for lack of snow, and the Swiss are wrapping an age-old glacier in an insulating blanket as if it were a foundling. Meanwhile backcountry skiing in North America and ice fishing in the upper Midwest are in jeopardy, and any ski resort below 4,000 feet is worried. Winter in Vermont is now the equivalent of winter in Rhode Island a generation ago.

Humans are accelerating global warming, and we can at least minimize its damage, if not reverse it. By acting quickly, the two countries that emit most of the world’s carbon dioxide, the U.S. and China, might be able to avert that forecasted five-degree temperature increase, slowing the rise of the seas enough to allow for the development of new technologies to redress the problem. What would it mean to act? Decrease the burning of fossil fuels, improve fuel efficiency and conserve energy in our daily lives.

The good news is that stadiums and arenas, if built with green aforethought, can be more than symbolic Valhallas that remind us that we’re all in this together. Site one near a public-transit line, and there’s less need to build that most Earth-hostile of features, the vast parking lot. (The greenest ballpark in the country may be Fenway Park, because only an idiot would try driving and parking there.)

Turbines mounted on upper decks would catch the same wind that plays whimsically with pop flies, turning it into the source of power to offset at least some of the energy demands of a ball game. Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., features a water filtration and reuse system that collects and recirculates “black” and “gray water” to make the most of all that beer and all those flushes.

A very familiar sports facility is already poised to help the cause: A golf course is by definition conserved green space. If not turned into a repository for pesticides or a pretext for building strips of single-family homes along its fairways, it can serve as a huge filter, with the water draining from it cleaner than the water flowing in.

Meantime, an eco-consciousness is leeching ever so slowly into the jockosphere. You’d expect environmental awareness among extreme-sport athletes like the snowboarders and BMX riders who belong to the Action Sports Environmental Coalition, or from surfers whose vocation and avocation depend on the health of the seas. But less likely candidates are thinking globally and acting locally.

• Saints safety Steve Gleason runs his Dodge Ram pickup on processed vegetable oil–biodiesel.
• NASCAR driver Ward Burton’s foundation is pledged to habitat management, land conservation and environmental education in his home of Halifax County, Va.
• The Philadelphia Eagles may have some of the most discourteous followers in sports, but their management is a leader, having launched an environmental initiative replete with catchy slogans like Go Green and Time for Some Serious Trash Talk.
• Two years ago the men’s lacrosse team at Middlebury College calculated its “carbon footprint” (the amount of global-warming carbon dioxide its daily activities generated) and raised money to purchase enough renewable-energy credits (investments in wind power) to offset those emissions. The team thereby became carbon-neutral–a status also claimed by last summer’s soccer World Cup in Germany, cycling’s Team Clif Bar Midwest and the Vermont Frost Heaves, this writer’s American Basketball Association team, which rides in a biodiesel-powered bus.
• The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is working with the NBA and Major League Baseball to help their teams get greener. Scientists told the NFL that Super Bowl XLI would put one million pounds of carbon dioxide into the air–not counting air travel to Miami–so the league planted 3,000 trees around Florida in an attempt to pull at least that much of the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.

By going green, motor sports could have the quickest impact on public awareness of the planet’s fate. The Formula One circuit has already discovered hybrids and biofuels, and Indy cars are mixing ethanol into their fuel. NASCAR is poised to phase out leaded gasoline, a neurotoxin. (The Clean Air Act of 1970 included an exemption for race cars even as the public was barred from buying cars that ran on leaded gas.) It’s only a short jump from a NASCAR driver with a raised consciousness to a NASCAR fan with the same.

“In the environmental movement there’s way too much preaching to the choir,” says Ken Rakoz of Centralia, Wash., who built the first biodiesel-powered dragster. “There are people sitting on the fence, and Joe Sixpack doesn’t really know about [biodiesel] until we do something like racing.” Whereupon we’ll be that much closer to a future in which we define a winner as not merely the team that holds a lead, but one whose arena holds a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

From his home in Ripton, Vt., McKibben, who sounded an early warning about climate change in his 1989 book The End of Nature, surveys this disfigurement of the world as we’ve known it with as much melancholy as indignation. “If I were a deeply moral person, I should be kept awake at night by the thought of hundreds of millions of Bangladeshis fleeing rising waters and dengue and famine,” says McKibben, who’s helping to organize a nationwide call to action on climate change for April 14 that will include iconic outdoor and sporting sites Mount Hood and the Key West coral reefs. “But at some level I feel this most acutely in the winter, when I realize I’ve had fewer and fewer chances to put on my skis.”

And therein may lie the great value of sports. What happens in an arena so familiar and beloved may sound an alarm we will hear and heed. At a time when so much in our lives is linear and digital, from the economy to technology, sports still run in graceful cycles, marking time in rhythm with the seasons.

“It’s the last of the semipagan calendars we keep,” McKibben says, “and a lot of it is going to disappear. All that Bart Giamatti stuff”–the pastoral invocations of the former commissioner of baseball–”has a different valence if we’re not going to Florida for spring training, but to St. Paul. We’re still so used to the idea that we can deal with the forces of nature that we think nothing of naming our teams Hurricanes and Cyclones. In 10 years, that will be like calling a team the Plagues.”

Ten years. That’s two-and-a-half Olympiads–enough time for our teams and athletes to take the lead, galvanize attention and influence behavior. When they do, per usual, may we cheer and may we follow. But as we watch, let us remember that this game is different. We don’t have the luxury of looking on from the sidelines. We must become players too.