Fourteen years ago Nicolas Loris, writing for The Daily Signal, wrote, “Global Warming Ate My Homework: 100 Things Blamed on Global Warming.” Included in the list were such things as a surge in fatal shark attacks, tornado deaths among Boy Scouts, snowfall in Baghdad, an airliner crash, the Black Hawk Down incident, cougar attacks, different-tasting beer, heroin addiction, Earth spinning faster, insomnia in children, increases in crime, and—honest—global cooling!

Image: Creative Commons under Unsplash

A recent paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society offered yet another effect of global warming. It got big play—and exaggeration—in legacy media when it claimed that climate change was causing more home runs in Major League Baseball.

National Public Radio reported, “Global warming could be juicing baseball home runs, study finds.” The Guardian’s story was headlined “Climate crisis causing more home runs in baseball, study suggests.” Science News, which ought to have known better, was even more assertive, leaving out “study finds” or “study suggests” from its title: “Baseball’s home run boom is due, in part, to climate change.” CNN reported, “If temperatures continue to warm rapidly because of planet-cooking pollution, climate change could end up accounting for 10% of all home runs by the end of the century.” Forbes, NBC News, Bloomberg, Newsweek, Fox News, Smithsonian Magazine, and plenty of others joined the chorus.

The theory behind the claim is fairly simple: warmer air is less dense than colder air so offers less resistance, so a baseball hit with the same force will fly farther in warmer than colder air.

True enough. But the significance for home runs is far more complex, and Roger Pielke Jr., an expert both in sports statistics and in climate science statistics, made mincemeat of the original paper’s claims and, especially, of the exaggerations of those claims found in most report.

In his Substack column, Pielke pointed out that if the claim were true a similar increase in home runs should have shown up in statistics from Japanese, AAA, and NCAA baseball, but they didn’t, adding that “climate change is a tiny, even insignificant, factor in MLB home run trends, easily swamped by everything else that can affect home runs.” Further, Pielke wrote:

Since 2016 (minus the shortened pandemic season of 2020) MLB has averaged about 5,800 home runs per year. And the year-to-year variation is large, with a standard deviation of about 500 — with a low of 5,215 HRs in 2022 and high of 6,776 in 2019. The paper projects an increase of 467 HRs in 2100 — 77 years from now — under SSP5-8.5 (yes, that scenario, don’t even get me started!). The century-long increase is less than observed variability since 2016 and about 1/3 of the differences between high and low HR totals over 3 seasons. If you use a more plausible scenario (like SSP2-4.5) the projections are even smaller compared to variability.

Looking back 77 years, there were 1,215 HRs in MLB (among 16 teams each playing 154 games). Last year there were exactly 4,000 more — 5,215 (among 30 teams each playing 162 games). That represents an increase of more than 100% in home runs per game over 77 years. Even accepting SSP5-8.5 and the paper’s conclusions at face value, the projected increase in home runs due to climate change is only a few percent, which is tiny in historical context as well as compared to year-to-year and decade-to-decade variation and change.

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. And that should be OK, as not everything has to be reduced to climate. Yet, the paper concludes dramatically: “More broadly, our findings are emblematic of the widespread influence anthropogenic global warming has already had on all aspects of life.”

A lesson here 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 most 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.

These incentives help us to understand what gets published, promoted and clicked. These incentives are also 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.

People used to look to God as the Ultimate Cause of all things. Now, I guess the new god is Climate Change.