Dartmouth climate scientists say recent surge in home runs can partially be attributed to climate change
Dartmouth College researchers put in months of work to investigate and research climate change, not to predict when the next hurricane or tornado will hit, but how many homeruns can be attributed to human-caused global warming.
Dartmouth College researchers put in months of work to investigate and research climate change, not to predict when the next hurricane or tornado will hit, but how many homeruns can be attributed to human-caused global warming.
Dartmouth College researchers put in months of work to investigate and research climate change, not to predict when the next hurricane or tornado will hit, but how many homeruns can be attributed to human-caused global warming.
Dartmouth climate scientists published a study in April that proves fans could see more home runs in the future thanks in part to climate change.
“We’re able to see that when temperatures are warmer than average at baseball games. We see more home runs than average than we’d expect to see during those games,” said Christopher Callahan, a Dartmouth College doctoral candidate in geography. “This relationship is really strong, really robust across 60 years, 100,000 baseball games. We were able to tie, on a day-to-day basis, the number of home runs compared to temperature.”
Researchers attribute one percent of all recent major league home runs to climate change. Increases in temperature reduce the density of air, which leads to more balls being hit out of the park.
“We were also able to use climate models, these big computer simulations of the climate, to isolate the role of human-caused global warming relative to natural variations in temperature,” Callahan said. “And show that global warming has caused about 500 more home runs over the last ten years and potentially hundreds more per season going into the future if temperatures continue to rise."
Those same climate models allowed the researchers to rule out human-caused factors like steroids, the construction of the baseball and advanced data analytics.
Even though they looked specifically at the pros, they say the findings can be applied to baseball at any level.
“It absolutely will show up in other contexts as well, not just MLB,” Callahan said. “The physics are the physics. The warmer air is more dense, and that’s true in MLB ballparks, in minor league ballparks, in Japanese ballparks or anywhere else you’re going to go.”
Day games are the most affected, Callahan said. If teams want games to be less impacted by climate change, game time will need to move from day to night when it’s cooler, which fans, players, and staff might appreciate when they head out to the ballpark.
“Reckoning with the ways that climate change is going to alter our leisure and our activities for fun is just as important as reckoning with these more extreme events that we normally think about in the context of climate change,” Callahan said.
According to the study, baseball might be a perfect medium to see firsthand the effects climate change has on the planet.