“Climate change is altering the geography of where the Winter Olympics and Paralympics can be held. We see a shrinking and contraction of climate reliable locations,” observes Daniel Scott of the University of Waterloo in comments reported last week in The New York Times.

Published in the journal Current Issues in Tourism (there really is a journal for everything), a study co-authored by Scott delivers a TL;DR (per NYT) that “By 2050, of the 93 cities deemed suitable to handle the logistics of holding both the Olympics and Paralympics, just four would be able to host the events without snow-making.”

For anyone who thinks that climate change is a cocktail-party topic for Subaru-driving tree huggers, perhaps the idea of elite athletes bogged down in “wet, mushy snow surrounded by barren hillsides…entirely man-made and kind of brown on the sides” will offer a new perspective – and that would be a good thing, because stereotypes of “what an environmentalist looks like” are a hindrance to getting stuff done. For now, though let’s just talk about the Olympics, which I’ve used for almost twenty years as a way of making “the future” feel more real.

In an Olympic year, like this one, my talk track starts with “They’re about to light an Olympic torch in [this time] two places: Milan, and Cortina. Two years from now, they’ll light another one in Los Angeles. When you’re watching that Olympic opening in L.A., what would you like to be able to say you’d gotten done since 2026? And what would you be most embarrassed to have to admit you had not done in those two years? Can we agree that getting started on that, today, would be good?”

I think this works because it lets us talk about time in a way that makes it harder to postpone action. When we start with a certain future date (like 14 July 2028), and schedule back toward the present with realistic estimates of times required for tasks, we wind up with an urgency that we don’t get from “we’ll do that after we work today’s to-do list.”

For example, in a conversation I once had with an IT leader at a well-known university, he lamented that they were using a student information system that he felt was twenty years out of date. “How do you get twenty years behind?”, asked a peer from another institution; “One day at a time,” I said, without meaning to be either funny or cruel. Forward-moving time can get away from us; when we schedule from the future back to now, time hits us in the face.

The logic is similar to that of using a “countdown” before a rocket launch or other event, where reaching “zero” is an unambiguous moment of “now” – even if the original idea was purely dramatic, rather than being an engineering choice. Further, the idea of “schedule by subtraction” is not confined to rocketry: it’s also asserted to be the essential skill of “punctuosity,” a word brought forward from its 1700s obscurity by “Parkinson’s Law” originator C. Northcote Parkinson, who wrote that

The punctual person has substituted a process of subtraction for the simpler process of addition. The important meeting is at 11.45. Punctual Peter takes that as his fixed point and works backward; the less competent Steve did it the other way. Starting at 9.00 on the stuff in his intray, he worked forward from there, with so long for this and just time for that - which brought him, unbriefed, to the meeting at 11.48. He was adding instead of subtracting, which means being late and disorganized.

(Parkinson wrote this in 1962, in his business culture commentary In-Laws and Outlaws. The Huntington Library calls this a “Rare Book,” so I guess I had better take care of my two copies.)

For a painful example of people working forward from today’s concerns, instead of backward from tomorrow’s demands, we need only look at the conversations at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Four years ago, conversations there were focused on efforts like the Net Zero Banking Alliance, but at this year’s Davos gathering it was clear that “climate issues have taken a back seat to A.I. and geopolitics.” What had been a move toward “engineering a swift, worldwide shift away from fossil fuels and toward clean power sources like wind and solar” became a capitulation to “energy pragmatism.” How will we wind up being twenty years too late? One year, one quarter, at a time.

Of course I’ll concede that sometimes, we have to let time run forwards. For example, at the Olympics, measurement to standards limited only by physics is required when winners are decided by continually shrinking fractions of a second. (If I may offer a personal opinion on this: if it can’t be decided by a stopwatch, a tape measure, or a weighing scale, I don’t know how it even qualifies as a “citius, altius, fortius”—faster, higher, stronger—Olympic event, but enough about figure skating. [“You call this a sport?”, asks an incredulous former hockey player in the movie, “The Cutting Edge,” on his first encounter with “the judges have their favorites.”])

When we’re talking, though, about something with a lot more momentum than a skier—something like a planetary climate—then it’s not about stopwatches; it’s not about “we’ll get to that next quarter.” It’s more like “the L.A. torch will be getting lit in 2028: what do we need to have gotten done by then?” More on that to come.