College Football Has Started, So, We Need To Talk About ‘Climate Change’

You know how it goes at this point: something is happening so the doomsday cult must interject itself like a nosy Karen

New Realities Of College Football Have Climate Change Lessons Too

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for people like me. It’s the start of the college football season. My beloved Florida State Seminoles take the field this weekend, and my equally beloved Georgia Bulldogs play next week. I am a three-time FSU alumnus, and a long-time professor at UGA. I often have converging thoughts in my mind. This morning is one of those moments. The world continues to experience extreme heat domes, flooding, tropical cyclones, drought and wildfires. The tragic events at the China – Nepal border, a place warming extremely fast, are fresh on my mind. While coming out of slumber this morning, an analogy hit me. The changing landscape of college football is also an analogy for climate change realities.

It’s not the perfect analogy but go with me. If you follow college football, you know that it has changed. Fan bases, university leaders, players and families are adjusting to a “new normal” that includes NIL, transfer portals, and forms of player compensation. At the Orange Bowl a few years ago, I sat next to a woman at the Florida State – Georgia game. She lamented the current landscape and romanticized the college football days of the past. (big snip through several paragraphs talking about how things in football have changed)

We now experience a “new normal” climate system too. The analogy is rooted in normalcy, expectations, and natural cycles of events. People understand that weather and climate have natural cycles. It rains. Winter comes and goes. Ice Ages happen. El Niño, like the strong one we are in right now, appears every two to seven years. Hurricanes are features of late summer months. By the way, Tropical Storm Dolly is headed towards the Leeward Islands right now but is expected to eventually weaken as it nears Puerto Rico.

Even with these natural aspects, human activities related to carbon emissions, land surface changes, air pollution and urbanization are rapidly, relatively speaking, changing the climate. Studies continue to point to the signatures of climate change in downpours, heatwaves, tropical cyclone intensity, drought, wildfires, and reduced extreme cold events. A 2026 report by the National Academies provides the latest assessment of extreme weather linkages to climate change.