Of culture, sports and climate change. Or a story of your inner bubble.

When I came to study my masters in London, I was sure that great and unexpected things were waiting. For sure one of them is my recent integration into my University’s Ice Hockey team: The Yetis!

I, as a Mexican, have never experienced too much winter sports, since Mexico (in specific Mexico City) is a quite template region all year long. However, this is not the case for the rest of the team.

In a recent talk with the Ice Club President, Keir Ovington, told me how his father used to play hockey when he was a kid in an outdoor pond in Canada, which nowadays barely freezes. Moreover, David Persson, a new member of the Yetis, told me about his childhood in Sweden and how every winter he used to play hockey in a lake near his house with anyone who was there. This conversations made me think how ice hockey could lay very deep into some cultures and communities cohesion and how climate change could threaten things like this.

Canada is the place where frozen lakes gave place to ice hockey and it’s also there where winters are becoming warmer every year. The mean temperature has already rose 1.5ºC in the period 1950-2010 due to the well-known arctic amplification effect that exaggerates the mean global temperature changes in north regions of the world. Although ice hockey is now officially played indoors in climate-controlled facilities, most social scientist agree that outdoor practice is part of the imaginary and nationhood of whole Canada, and some say that if hockey was a religion then outdoors rinks would be the churches.

Pond Hockey. Source: canadapondhockey.ca

A study in 2015 that quantified and modeled the number of ice-skating days in Rideau Canal, the world’s largest outdoor ice-skating surface, found that since 1970 the skating season is reducing by 5 days per decade (see Figure 1). And in a business-as-usual scenario, the trend would imply only 14 days for ice-skating by the year 2090. 

Figure 1. Historical and projected season length and skating days at the Rideau Canal Skateway. Season length: opening to closure. Skating days: season days minus closure days. Source: Brammer et al., 2015.

The study mentioned above also found that the trends were mainly function of the mean temperature of the 100 coldest days of the year. Which I use here to ‘extrapolate’ the study – just as an illustrative exercise -  to a worldwide dimension, taking into account some data analysis presented in the last IPCC report. As shown in the Figure 2, the number of cold days is decreasing dramatically almost everywhere, which implies that the mean temperature of the 100 coldest days of each year is increasing. Therefore, we can infer that almost all the lakes in the world are suffering from the same shortening of frozen season.

Figure 2. Trends in annual frequency of extreme temperatures over the period 1951–2010. Black plus signs indicate places where the trend is significant. Source: IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group I.

So maybe you think, what does it matter if we won’t be able to play outdoors anymore? I mean, there are worst things like health-related problems or extreme events that will intensify with climate change.

The thing here is that climate change is taking away from us everything that we consider valuable as humankind, from material to spiritual and cultural assets. And in order to face this challenge we need to be complete as persons and we need to stay strong and together. And it is hope and our culture and our traditions a very important part of what make us stand strong.

So ask yourself, do you love the unique feeling of hiking a mountain? The adrenaline of surfing a wave? The passion of a soccer match down your neighborhood’s park? If you appreciate any of these, rise up and act now, don’t let climate change take this away from you.