Baseball’s sluggers hit more home runs thanks to global warming

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https://www.science.org/content/article/baseball-s-sluggers-hit-more-home-runs-thanks-global-warming

By Christian Elliott, Science. 

Excerpt: Climate change will affect essentially every aspect of our lives, climate researchers say, even America’s unofficial pastime, baseball. Because warmer air is less dense and exerts less drag on a batted ball, the number of home runs should in theory climb as global temperatures increase. And, sure enough, a new study shows that about 0.8% of the homers hit in Major League Baseball (MLB) since 2010 made it over the fence thanks to the extra distance global warming lent their flight. Other factors, however, from the explicit effort of players to hit more home runs to the design of the ball itself, play bigger roles in explaining why home run numbers have skyrocketed in recent decades. “From a purely baseball point of view, this is primarily an academic result, not a result that Major League Baseball should really worry about,” says Alan Nathan, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, who was not involved in the work.... 

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