This year's Winter Olympics will be back with the weather so cold that it brings tears to your eyes. The current temperature in PyeongChang is currently 1 degree Celsius but will get well below zero in the following days. However, the rest of the world is not having as much luck with their winters, as climate change rages on.

Are previous Winter Games locations dying out?

15 Winter Olympic sports rely on gliding on cold surfaces, but by 2050, many of the previous Winter Games locations may be too warm to ever host the Olympics again. According to a commentary written by UC Berkeley public health professors, only eight non-European cities and 25 European cities will be low-risk enough to host the Olympic games by 2085.

What do the athletes think?

Andrew Newell, an American cross-country skier told the National Geographic that in 2014, nearly half of the FIS (Federation International de Ski) World Cup competitions took place on artificial snow. He also told the magazine that in Sochi at the previous Winter Games, several pre-Olympic skiing and snowboarding events had to be canceled because of poor weather conditions. This has now become a consistent problem all over Central Europe and Scandinavia. How are athletes going to train and compete on a high enough level to prepare for the Olympics, when the snow in their own countries is melting right in front of their eyes?

"Snow conditions are becoming much more inconsistent, weather patterns more erratic, and what was once a topic for discussion is now reality and fact.

Our climate is changing and we are losing our winters," he said. Athletes are also being forced to travel longer and farther to find optimal training conditions. Just months before the Olympics, in December 2017, NBC reported how athletes traveled all the way to New England to guarantee off-season access to snow.

Jon Lillis, world champion in aerials skiing, told NBC, that he is terrified that the conditions are not as good as they used to be.

"You see videos of people skiing on glaciers back in the '80s and '70s, and half of that glacier doesn't even exist anymore," Lillis said.

How will this year's games compare to previous years?

Luckily, this year's Winter Games will not be too hot. On the contrary, locals in South Korea are saying that so far, "It's just too cold for outsiders." The local Choi-Jong-sik is saying he hopes it will be better in February, because if the weather continues as it is, there will be big trouble.

The previous games in Vancouver and Sochi had extremely warm temperatures and many complaints for being too warm, but this will be no issue for Pyeongchang. Beijing might have similar issues to Vancouver and Sochi, where ski jumpers were landing in puddles, but South Korea will shock spectators, athletes, and organizers with its bone-chilling bitterness. Nonetheless, that does not mean climate change can be overlooked, because it will soon become an issue again in 2022.
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