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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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Fox baseball commentator Tim McCarver is a retired baseball catcher whose work as a TV analyst recently got him inducted into the announcers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He occupies the top TV perch in the sport, and fans either love him or hate him.
If McCarver truly wants to be loved and hated more, there's no better way to accomplish that than link climate change to America's pastime, on national TV, in the middle of a Cardinals-Brewers ballgame. Following two home runs that barely cleared the outfield wall Saturday afternoon, McCarver offered this:
"It has not been proven, but I think ultimately it will be proven that the air is thinner now, there have been climactic changes over the last 50 years in the world, and I think that's one of the reasons balls are carrying much better now than I remember."
McCarver's on-air partner, Joe Buck, offered peer review in the form of a half-hearted Al Gore joke. The game went on. And the blogs went wild.
A blogger for DeadSpin called McCarver's remark "one of the stupidest things ever spoken on a television broadcast today." Predictably, climate deniers' sites like Watts Up With That? lit up with comments. A search of dozens of web items found little support for McCarver, and Major League Baseball, which owns the broadcasts, appears to have quickly invoked its copyright privileges, yanking the video clip from numerous websites.
But could warmer temperatures and thinner air actually make more homers? Or is an old announcer pulling facts out of thin air?
Robert Adair, a retired physics professor from Yale University, gained notoriety a few years back when his book, "The Physics of Baseball," gave scholarly explanations for why a curveball curves and a knuckleball wobbles. He calculated that a two-degree temperature rise will add one foot to a 400-foot home run ball, increasing home run odds by about 1.75 percent. With that rise, Roger Maris's epic 61 home-run season might have been 62. And wispy Braves shortstop Rafael Belliard, who hit two home runs in a 17-year career, still would have hit two.
The National Academy of Sciences estimates that global temperatures have climbed about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century, with about two thirds of that increase coming since George Brett hit .390 for a season (that was 1980 for the general public).
Another scientist, Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia, noticed a dramatic rise in home run production during the particularly hot summer of 1998. But as it turns out the discernible human influence on sluggers like Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa is widely believed to have come from steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, not the weather.
This is nothing new to Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, author of "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars." He has lived through a combination of personal attack and scientific vindication for his climate work, which also invokes sports: Mann compares the recent sharp, upward turn of global temperature charts to a hockey stick.
As someone who has drawn fire for associating climate change with a large wooden sports implement, Mann said via email that he "did find this latest baseball/world climate change dust-up somewhat amusing."
Mann also threw a high, hard one at McCarver's theory, saying that the carbon emissions behind climate change may even lower home runs. "If anything, anthropogenic carbon emissions and global warming should make the atmosphere slightly heavier, because we're taking carbon that was trapped in the solid earth and releasing to the atmosphere (in the form of CO2), and a warmer atmosphere will hold more water vapor. Both CO2 and water vapor contribute (slightly) to the mass of the atmosphere."
A changing atmosphere may be a bit player in the myriad things affecting home run hitters. Several baseball bean-counters have crunched the height and weight listings between now and a century ago. In 1910, the average major league hitter was 5 feet, 9 inches and 170 pounds, according to the roster listings of the day. In 2010, those numbers grew to 6 feet, 1 inch and 205 pounds. Ballplayers have grown steadily bigger and stronger. Diet, training and playing conditions have improved, bats and balls are precision-manufactured, the pitcher's mound has been raised and lowered, the strike zone shrunk and widened. Before we even get to the steroids, there are enough variables to manufacture legitimate doubt about climate change and homeruns.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGlobal Warming Causal Attributions Massively Overstated.
Lol, this is almost as good as the SA article on how aliens from another galaxy will swing by and exterminate the evil CO2 polluting humans who obviously do not care enough about nature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI cant wait to read what is next. Lets see, how about bowel movements become less dense and cause toilets to stop functioning properly because of the extra floatation that would result from less density. All this caused by global warming because the air is thinner and results in .00000009111667888%(OMG a 40% decrease!!!) less air pressure allowing for the expansion of volume of the bowel movement and therefore more floatation.
I wonder if the warmists will add my theory to their computer models....
Your bias is showing
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnthony Watts is not a "DENIER" of either the holocaust or of "climate".
He disagrees that the effect of water vapour and other feedbacks will cause CO2 to drastically increase the global temperature (whatever that is - the means of measurement of temps is so inconsistent as to make it impossible to say 100% what the average temps have ever been.
In 1950 there were only 16 baseball teams and half were within 200 miles of NYC. There were no teams out west, no teams in the south, at high altitudes or in domes. Very few games were played at night when temperatures are much cooler (day-night temperature change is far greater than the average temperature change anomaly over the last century). The season now goes later in the fall. Ball players are taller, and stronger. The pitching game is different. Most stadiums are in urban areas so we have to account for the urban heat island effect. And wind speed and direction as a function of day night games adds even more complexity. While much attention is given to performance enhancing drugs less is given to Lasik surgery that lets a ball player dial in his vision.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes a ball go further in warm air than cool- yes. But this very small distance gets lost amongst factors- more important and confounding. There is absolutely no way any statistical meaningful conclusion could be drawn about home runs and climate change. This is just silly and so was McCarver's comment.
Pass around the purple kool-aid
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPole vaulter breaks world record...expect even more records in London this summer with rising temperatures.
This article forgot about how global warming is causing the players to seek out undetectable steroids. So yes global warming strikes again.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about because of all the extra CO2, trees will start growing larger and with denser wood as it was 50 to 100 million years ago. This denser wood will affect the bats made from the wood resulting in the transfer of more energy to the baseball because the wood itself will flex less.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOMG they are slipping up, something good is comes out of global warming (If hitting home run is a good thing)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisafter all you have to replace the ball in most cases. We all know replacing the ball more often is a bad thing with having to make, shipping it ect. Ha Ha
Such a silly inane article. It exemplifies anything and everything is now being linked to AGW. Idiotic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree with GarrettStrahan: Time to go looking for designer steroids, not more idiocy surrounding AGW.
SCIAM jumps the shark again.
BTW, where are the articles on Svensmark's work or James Lovelock's repudiation of AGW alarmism?
Right.... not important. But some bozo baseball player on an as yet unidentified steroid is presented as evidence of AGW. Yeah.
How about steroid abuse killing more bats?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe we will have more cattle to create the extra leather needed to keep making new baseballs because the extra dry globally warmed air will cause the leather in the baseballs to crack and fall off sooner.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr maybe it is the baseball players risk getting some sort of mold because of all the extra moisture in the air, seeping under the stitching where a mold develops and then gets all over the players when the ball is hit or caught.
It is hard to say which effect on basesballs will occur because the global warmist predictions from their bible as written by their computer models has not really said if their Armageddon is from global warming created drought or global warming created flooding.
It would help if they could make up their minds and tell us how we are all going to die.
Guys, don't get your panties in a bunch. It's a light-hearted commentary on something silly a sportcaster said. Besides, if you read the article for comprehension, you'll find that the question is answered, 'No'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo it is okay for scientists to suggest on what seems to be daily basis a new causal impact of climate change on virtually everything bad (omitting any benefit what so ever) and now laugh at someone merely jumping on board.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. Mann's high, hard one flies to the backstop. I mean, really. A back-of-the-envelope calculation can easily demonstrate that moist air is always less dense than dry air, regardless of what's happening with CO2. I realize this article is partly tongue-in-cheek, but this is SCIENTIFIC American. You've quoted a key scientific proponent of the IPCC's case for urgency on climate change arguing something that could be debunked by an average second-year chemical engineering student.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, let's see. What you say is true, that moist air is less dense than dry air, but that is only true if the pressure remains constant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe pressure of the air is a function of the mass of the column of air above it. CO2 is the product of combining C and O2. O2 is already in the air; so, adding C must increase the mass, no?
Moisture content is the result of water evaporating. At a higher temperature, more water evaporates. So, more moisture again adds mass to the air.
So, why don't you run your calculations again and tell us if the density goes up or down when you add mass to the air column?
Air under ambient conditions is reasonably modeled as an ideal gas. Rewritten from it's more familiar form, it states:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisdensity = (mol. wt.) x P / (RT)
Addition of water vapor lowers the average molecular weight of air and thus lowers the density. The conditions that promote evaporation, namely low pressure and high temperature, also lower the density. The fact that one is taking mass out of the ground or oceans and adding to the atmosphere has nothing to do with the density (other than the impact of this release on the factors above), and it's local density (not total mass) that will influence the flight of a ball. Furthermore, CO2 is a trace gas, so even though its molecule is heavier than that of nitrogen or oxygen, its precise concentration will have a negligible effect on the air's density.
Would be much more interesting if somehow we could argue that global warming was reducting the number of home runs - finally the public might clamour for something to be done :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy comment relates to the simplistic fluid mechanics above. Air resistance to spheres flying through it a high velocity is a very complex phenomenon (ask any golfball designer - or look at a link like this one from NASA: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/dragsphere.html ). Increasing temperature increases the air viscosity, which may impact the transition between different boundary layer states, with a far from intuitively predictable impact on the flow.
In addition to this, increasing density might actually provide more buoyancy (albeit minimal!) and cause the ball to descend more slowly, and hence go further.
In other words, the soon-to-be-famous "Tim McCarver Climate-Homer" effect is probably going to help some balls go out of the park and prevent some others. And it will take someone with a very good computer simulation model to be sure.
Having said that - I love the article!
AGW in Baseball? Getting some full of ourselves, I see.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTheir juicing the ball. Have been since the early '90's.
Global Warming -- pish
Denisosu
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe above wasn't fluid mechanics, assuming you were referring to my post. I presented an equation of state, and one whose implicit assumptions are quite good under the circumstances. Although the fluid mechanics of air streaming around a sphere (especially with rotation and the existence of laces on the ball) can indeed be complex, in terms of the density effect, drag is much more important than buoyancy. It can be established by modeling, but real-world empirical data conclusively establish that balls fly further in "thin" air.
"The fact that one is taking mass out of the ground or oceans and adding to the atmosphere has nothing to do with the density"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy does air become less dense as altitude increases? Because there is less air mass above it.
What would happen to pressure near the surface if you took away some of the atmosphere? It would get lower.
Conversely, it would get higher if you added more atmosphere.
PV=nRT
Density increases when pressure increases. Your statement that adding mass to the atmosphere has nothing to do with density is just wrong.
OK. I learned 15 years ago to not do ping-pong on the internet with laterally-arguing people with who knows what kind of agenda. So, as soft advice, you may want to examine generally...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) cause and effect
2) local vs. global phenomena (what is your "system"?)
3) significance
Rest assured, since I've only "presented" stuff on a 101 level, I'm right. You obviously missed the fact that PV = nRT is the exact same equation I rearranged into a more useful form to feed discussion on the current article.
You obviously missed that n, the number of moles, is increasing, via the increase is specific humidity. Also, the mass is increasing via the addition of C; O2 + C => CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, the barometric formula is more appropriate for determining atmosphere pressure than the ideal gas law, and density is partly determined by pressure.
You should know that the barometric formula includes mass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometric_formula
Perhaps you should advance beyond the 101 level before claiming that someone else has made a fundamental mistake.