When the BBC passes on a climate change agitprop story doing the rounds of mainstream media, you might rightly suspect that the credibility bar is extremely low. But the notion that global ‘heating’ is behind a recent rise in U.S. Major League baseball (MLB) home runs had many fans in the legacy bleachers, including, needless to say, the Guardian.
The climate crisis is reported to be causing more home runs in baseball, noted the newspaper, citing recent research from a group of geographers at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The newspaper reported that global ’heating’ had led to an extra 58 home runs a year in the nine years up to 2019. In 77 years, by the end of the century, heating could lead to 10% more balls being hit out of the park.
Alas for the hypothesis, such crowd-pleasing moments only seem to apply to baseball in the major leagues. In the two AAA minor leagues and the NCAA college league, along with senior play in Japan, there are no rising trends. Across the board, home runs have declined in recent decades.
But the Guardian is never one to allow such inconvenient details to get in the way of the ‘settled’ climate narrative. Lead author Christopher Callahan is quoted as saying that at a certain point over the next two decades, it’s going to be unsafe to play baseball games in very high temperatures. Since temperatures across America have shown barely any warming since 2005, according to the U.S. weather service NOAA’s own specialist records, this scare seems somewhat alarmist. The Guardian helpfully tops up the doomsday factor by noting that baseball stadiums near water including Florida, California and New York “are vulnerable to risks such as rising sea levels and more intense hurricanes”.
Oddly, the Dartmouth paper claimed that “human-caused climate change decreased home runs between 1962 and 1995 and increased them thereafter”. But then, what would a modern climate scare story be without its hockey stick? In fact 77 years ago there were 1,215 home runs in MLB, with 16 teams each playing 154 games. Last year there were 4,000 more runs making 5,215 among 30 teams playing 162 games. In 2019, there were no less than 6,776 home runs recorded. Whatever the cause – climate change, global heating/cooling/pausing, take your pick – the recent totals amount to more than a 100% increase in home runs.
Of course, this story has some grounding in physics in that objects fly quicker through warmer, thinner air. The stretch occurs in applying this notion to some baseball grounds but not others. The economics professor and science writer Roger Pielke suggested that a more accurate reading of the paper’s conclusion is that “climate change is a tiny, even insignificant, factor in MLB home run trends, easily swamped by everything else that can effect home runs”. He noted that isolating a statistical relationship of temperature and home runs “does not allow for meaningful predictions or projections of future home runs”.
He added that climate research was “rife” with such studies and reporting. They confuse single-variable sensitivity analysis with meaningful projections – the effects of climate on crop yields is a textbook example of this, he noted. Pielke goes on to note that “no matter how you slice it”, even using the most extreme scenario, and taking the paper’s conclusions at face value, climate change is just not a big deal for home runs in baseball. In a memo that should be sent to the Guardian, he concludes: “And that should be O.K., as not everything has to be reduced to climate.”
For Pielke, the lesson of the baseball story is that we have created strong incentives in science, in the promotion of science and in journalism to reduce everything to climate. “If you are on the climate beat, you are certainly not going to be discussing steroids in baseball, seam size, humidor practices, or any of the other myriad factors related to home run production. The climate beat needs climate stories,” he observed. These incentives, he continued, help us to understand what gets published, promoted and clicked. They are “incredibly distorting” to both journalism and, increasingly, to research. “Baseball and climate might seem like a silly topic, but these dynamics can be found on far more important issues involving climate,” he added.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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This for the Guardian, et. al. is an easy sell for people who don’t know baseball and accept all such climate-is-a-disaster story.
Easy sell to the walking brain dead
Or Guardian readers, as their called!
Maybe better players, stronger players, bigger men in general, far better bats and technology, a lot more training? Hitting, or not hitting a ball, has nothing to do with plant food.
It really is a cult of idiots, with St Greta the Moron and others as the apostles all supported by the miracles of fake data, fake studies and endless bullshit, not to mention money, money, money. $cience.
Better results are all to do with the weather, eh? Who knew. What a total insult to all the dedicated sportspeople, coaches, trainers and specialist sports scientists out there who have been honing skills, techniques, diet & nutrition, even aerodynamic improvements to kit and clothing over the last few decades.
I hear Pigs will fart a semi tone higher by the end of the century because of global warming. —–We must “Act Now”. Scientists would like to keep pig farts from rising above F Major by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. ——–Lets all get a heat pumps to help reduce the pig pumps.
“The climate crisis is reported to be causing more home runs in baseball”. ——–Why speak of this “climate crisis” as if it is something we can all see in front of us like a pillar box or an elephant? I know pillar boxes and elephants exist because I have seen them. I have NOT seen a Climate Crisis. ——–By using that terminology, which is the language of political agenda’s, all we do is surrender to the narrative that a crisis actually exists, and we can all see that in front of us and by looking at the climate data. ———–But wait a minute. The IPCC themselves admit they see no human signal in the climate data at this time. There is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event. Not storms, not floods, not droughts not wildfires —NOTHING. So where is this “crisis”? —————- It exists entirely within speculative climate models full of assumptions that do not include many of the parameters, and others are simply guessed at. Is it any wonder that those models and real world observations continue to drift apart as each year passes? ———-But I can tell you where there is a genuine “crisis”. It is the Energy Crisis where politicians pandering to the UN /WEF /EU Sustainable Development agenda are taking away our affordable reliable energy of coal and gas and replacing it with unaffordable unreliable energy of wind and sun. This is a genuine crisis and as the UK seeks to pretend to save the planet harder and faster than every other country with it’s absurd Climate Change Act and NET ZERO policies that we are forced in law to adhere to, our standard of living is plummeting. Millions are being forced into energy poverty and having to be bailed out with monthly payments because they cannot pay the bills. Some may say this is only temporary and is because of the war in Ukraine, and that certainly has masked the negative effects of the silly green agenda, but prices were already rising year on year before that. The general public mostly do not understand how energy works and are being conned into thinking that they can save the whole planet if they only accept more and more and more turbines. There is currently a Hydrogen experiment going on in Fife in Scotland where residents are being asked to sign up to get Hydrogen heating fitted into their houses in Buckhaven instead of their current gas central heating. These people will likely have no idea of what hydrogen really is, how expensive it is, and how corrosive it is. They will likely not realise it is the most volatile element in the Universe and isn’t actually a fuel. It has to manufactured and this makes it very expensive. ——We are putting ourselves through all of this clutter at astronomical expense all based on this idea there is a “Climate Crisis” which real world observations do not show. —We CAN see a pillar box. We CANNOT see a “Climate Crisis”
Of course you can see the climate crisis – just count the home runs and it’s slam-dunk.
I have NEVER and I mean NEVER understood “climate crisis.”
We live – define ‘live’ – on a planet as a part of the cosmos. We are a function of the planet. Climate is a given. Accept what we have. Climate is Climate. That’s it.
Next thing we know some Next Tuesday will be telling us that we need to move 1.337 degrees further away from the Sun, to reduce fictitious ‘global warming’ and to achieve this huge tow ropes will be fixed to the planet and these will be connected to thousands of space rockets which will pull us to safety.
World is full of evil Nutters.
We wont need tow ropes. A carefully timed massed nuclear explosion somewhere like, I dont know, say, Ukraine, should shift the planet a few microns further away.
Fair point Neil.👍
Three things emerge from this story.
The message I take home from this is that climate change can have some positive outcomes.
It is shame that so many plants bought on the promise of a Med climate in Britain have died as a consequence of the cold snap late last year. My olive stick (formerly a tree) is testament to that along with numerous other casualties. Thanks, BBC Gardeners World, for your advice.
This ‘analysis’ by some no-doubt lucratively rewarded academics is so laughably weak and anti-scientific as to be almost not worth commenting on. It parodies itself (as does The Guardian’s uncritical and propagandist utilisation of it).
However, though I was already an emotional wreck after discovering that home runs in US baseball have apparently increased by 0.9% due to humanity’s evil industrial ways I couldn’t resist carrying out a fact check on another heart-breaking claim made in the report / article:
“Though the Texas Rangers’ previous ballpark opened as recently as 1994, the summer heat in the Dallas region proved so uncomfortable that the club moved to a climate-controlled $1.2bn new stadium with a retractable roof in 2020. Among the league’s 30 stadiums, eight have retractable or fixed roofs. More roofs on ballparks is going to be unavoidable. That is frustrating,” said Christopher Callahan, the lead author of the study. “One of the joys of baseball is sitting in the open air, sitting under the blue sky and the breeze.” However, he added: “At a certain point over the course of the next couple of decades it’s going to be unsafe to play baseball games in very high temperatures.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/07/climate-crisis-more-home-runs-baseball-study
Having looked at the relevant data I have to say it seems rather strange to link the Texas Rangers’ move to a new stadium in 2020 to temperatures in the Dallas region allegedly heading rapidly towards microwave levels (again due to that nasty polluting humanoid species) when the historic record summer temperatures of 113F (June) and 111F (July) were recorded in 1980 and 1954, 43 and 69 years ago respectively. Moreover the average date of the 12 monthly record highs is 1982, 41 years in the past.
https://dallascreates.org/locations-and-venues/dallas-area-information/historic-average-temperatures-in-dallas-texas/#:~:text=Dallas%2C%20TX%20%E2%80%93%20Monthly%20Averages%20%26%20Records%20%E2%80%93%20from%20Intellicast&text=The%20highest%20recorded%20temperature%20was,8%C2%B0F%20in%201899
It sometimes feels as if the whole ‘Climate Change’ scam is the greatest instance of mass trolling combined with ‘dupers’ delight’ in history.
Facts are such inconvenient things, especially when attempting to promote an agenda. Or as Mark Twain put it ———–“Ah yes science, One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of facts”.
There’s a word that springs to mind to describe theories like this, which also describes an essential part of the male anatomy.
Guardian: Climate change increases home runs.
In the Guardian every day is April Fools day
************************************
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Excellent piece on climate change by Matt Ehret
https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/an-earth-day-special-in-defense-of
I bet both of their readers were mortified. The Giddian is giving Private Eye a run for its money😁
Analytically adept at challenging climate orientated junk science ad always Chris. Sky has been peddling the narrative via the threat to football. Obviously any ground near the sea will soon be inundated. Carrow Road will replace seating with Greta designed Lilos. Seriously these people just make stuff up and very few journos challenge them. GB news had a Cameroon Climate Goon called Gemill on. Such a patronising bell end, he is heading up the Climate Party which is standing in the 100 most marginal seats to publicise the “emergency”. He is the nice (passive aggressive), middle class face of XR and he could have been manufactured in a laboratory
He boasts of being funded by rich donors and the City of course. Sadly both Bev Turner and Andrew Pierce though pushing back on this odious hack were way underpowered. He just steamrollered through with his ridiculous perspective that we should go further and faster to land green jobs. We need you in there Chris putting the case against this insane drive to impoverish the masses. We also need a guide to climate lies to counteract this narrative aimed at the few critical journos and for sceptics like us. If readers could think of three lines what would they be?