What what? Climate researchers from Dartmouth College, a US university, recently published a rather interesting study: climate change affects even baseball.
It turns out that after watching over 100,000 MLB games they found that Increasing temperatures increase home runs substantially.
A home run is when the batter hits the ball out of bounds in such a way that he can make the full circuit between the bases and win a run.
Climate change affects even baseball
We’ve heard a lot about global warming and its consequences: the extinction of species, changes in the climate, more frequent and stronger weather events, and now we know that climate change affects even baseball.
Recently scientists from Dartmouth College they published an investigation in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
They concluded that global warming is increasing the number of home runs in at least MLB games, the oldest professional baseball organization in the United States and Canada.
But how? Climate change causes higher temperatures on the planet thanks to greenhouse gases and other pollutants. When it is hotter the air is less dense since the molecules move faster and separate from each other.
That is why hot air balloons rise: there is a heat source heating the air that enters the balloon and, being less dense, it rises.
So the balls that are hit with the bat move much farther in the hot air because there is less resistance. The researchers revealed that if the temperature rises one degree the chance of a home run increases by 1.8%.
“We find that more than 500 home runs since 2010 are attributable to historic warming on the planet.“, reads the study, which could be calculated in more or less 50 moves per year.
Major League Baseball (MLB) has seen a long-term increase in home runs since the 1980s, but it was the increase between 2015 and 2019 that sparked red flags among officials.
In this graph we can observe the trends of increase in home runs, the increase in temperature in the playing areas and the density in the air of the areas.
