TIME Claims Global Warming Making Gridiron Dangerous
Last week, Time published an article on their website saying how the ‘climate crisis’ is making it dangerous to play sports like American Football
It isn’t a hugely long article, so I’ve reproduced it in full, and added my own comments afterwards.
If you were among the 68,500 fans in the stands to watch the National Football League’s (NFL) San Francisco 49ers host the Arizona Cardinals on Oct. 6, 2024, you could be forgiven for forgetting that football is a fall and winter sport.
Temperatures at game time that day peaked at 98°F—hot enough that the 49ers swapped out their uniforms, switching from red jerseys and gold pants to red jerseys and white pants, to reflect more heat away. “Hopefully [that] helps a little,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan told ESPN before the game.
The two teams got through the day without serious injury, but athletic exertion in extreme heat can be dangerous—even deadly.
Players are at risk of heat exhaustion, characterized by symptoms including faintness, dizziness, fatigue, weak or rapid pulse, and low blood pressure; and heat stroke, with symptoms including high core body temperature, change in mental or emotional state, racing heart rate, rapid breathing, nausea, and headache.
In extreme cases, excessive heat can lead to organ damage, heart failure, and death.
The league’s Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles won’t face anything like that punishment during this Sunday’s Super Bowl, which will take place in New Orleans, where the forecast high for game day is 75°F. And, in any case, the game will be played in an indoor stadium.
Either way, there is no escaping the fact that the world is steadily—and dangerously—heating up. This year was the first to see the planet register average temperatures 1.5°C (2.7°F) higher than pre-industrial levels, the benchmark established by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which seeks to limit future warming to well below 2°C in the 21st century, with a preferred target no higher than 1.5°C.
The NFL might seem like an afterthought in an existential crisis like climate change, but the league is, all the same, feeling the pain.
In a new survey conducted by the research and communications group Climate Central, analysts used open source data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to track the temperature trends in all 30 NFL cities during football’s September to December regular season, from 1970 to 2024.
The result: over that time, temperatures have risen in every one of those cities by an average of 2.8°F. Las Vegas and Minneapolis warmed the most (5.1°F and 5°F respectively), and Los Angeles warmed the least at 0.4°F.
Every city but L.A. experienced at least 1°F of warming. Those cities are, of course, getting especially hot in the summer, often subjecting players to dangerous conditions not only during training camp, which begins in July, but into the first month of the season too.
“In some of these places it’s a minor concern,’” says Jen Brady, senior data analyst for Climate Central. “But in some of these southern cities we could have serious health issues playing in September. We’ve seen a pretty steady climb [in temperatures] everywhere.”
No surprise, it’s those sun belt cities that are experiencing things especially acutely. Phoenix, home to the Cardinals, saw an increase of 4.4°F. The Houston Texans and the Dallas Cowboys are feeling 3.5°F and 3.3°F of warming respectively.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are getting a 3.2°F bump. New Orleans and their Saints register at 3.8°F.
But some northern-tier cities, like Minneapolis, score high as well. Cleveland, home to the Browns, clocks in at 3.3°F. The Buffalo Bills are experiencing a 3.2°F increase, the Philadelphia Eagles 3.1°F, and the Green Bay Packers, in Wisconsin, are seeing 4.4°F of warming.
Detroit’s Lions play in an indoor stadium, but outdoors, things have gotten 3.8°F hotter.
“Upper Midwest cities are warming aggressively,” says Brady. “They are all seeing a lot of temperature increases in the winter.” Paradoxically, that can lead to more snow storms during games, like the blizzard that buried the Buffalo Bills’ stadium when they played the San Francisco 49ers on Dec. 1, 2024.
That, explains Brady, is because the Great Lakes aren’t freezing, leading to an increase in lake effect storms. Those are caused when the atmosphere picks up moisture from open water and then dumps it back on land in the form of snow.
Some cities, for the moment, have been less affected by the warming trend. Sunny Jacksonville, where the Jaguars play, has seen only a 1.5°F increase, as has mid-Atlantic Baltimore, home to the Ravens.
Washington, home to the Commanders, has nearly mirrored nearby Baltimore, with just a 1.6°F increase. Temperatures in New York, where the Jets and the Giants share a stadium, have risen just 2°F.
In Kansas City, the Chiefs’ home, the increase is a comparatively modest 2.2°F.
Climate Central tracks not just average rising temperatures, but extremely hot days, which are defined as days on which the thermometer hits or exceeds 91°F.
Here, the findings have been troubling. Among 242 locations analyzed around the U.S., 172, or 71 percent, now experience at least one more week of extremely hot days than they did in the early 1970s.
The 30 NFL cities exceed that, registering, on average, 14 more extremely hot days than in 1970.
“Heat is the number one weather killer in the U.S. and that’s often overlooked,” says Brady. “It can do a lot of things to your body—to your heart and your lungs and your breathing.”
All of this is just one more red flag that Earth’s climate is heading into new and perilous territory. “It’s definitely at a point at which you say, ‘OK, we’re getting to dangerous levels here,’” says Brady. “We’ve seen it with the hurricanes that have been so large and disastrous and with wildfires and high temperatures. It’s not a tipping point yet, but it’s a warning.”
The first thing to notice is that all the temperatures mentioned are in Fahrenheit, which being smaller units than Centigrade, make any increase appear significantly larger than is actually is, a standard alarmist trick.
The second thing to notice is that these temperature changes are from 1970 to 2024, which is 54 years. I would argue no-one would be able to detect a temperature increase of 4.4F (2.5C) above what it was 54 years ago.
It should be remembered is that Gridiron is primarily a winter sport, which sees reducing temperatures as the season progresses.
The claim that heat is the number one killer in the US is patently false, as the British Lancet magazine data shows cold weather kills at least 15 times as many people as does heat.
We should also not forget Tony Heller has shown conclusively that the 1930s remains the hottest period, by a long way, of the last century, as seen in the image below:
Image: Tony Heller
I played Gridiron in the UK at the amateur level between 1985 & 2003, and because we played on rugby pitches, our season was from April to August, and the playoffs during September.
Now although we don’t get summer temperatures as hot as some US states, playing that game in our hottest months of July and August can be equally as taxing on the body, as most teams here have far fewer players than the usual 53-man NFL roster, so many of us end up playing both ways, and on special teams.
Many thousands of jobs across the world depend on this monumental scam being perpetuated, and if it were shown to be just propaganda and lies, all those jobs would vanish.
This Time article is little more than standard alarmist propaganda, done in the vain hope the so-called ‘climate emergency’ lies can be saved from being exposed as the greatest scam ever purpetrated.
See the Time article here time.com
About the author: Andy Rowlands is a university graduate in space science and British Principia Scientific International researcher, writer and editor who co-edited the 2019 climate science book, ‘The Sky Dragon Slayers: Victory Lap‘
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