by Max Frankel

Since its inception in the mid 1800′s, the sport of baseball has grown and evolved, both in its popularity and in the way the game is played.

Through the decades, new types of pitches have been developed, different varieties of wood bats have been used, the height of the mound has been altered, and the average distances of outfield fences have been normalized.

But there’s another major factor now being considered that could have a huge impact on the game: climate change.

As the world warms due to accumulating greenhouse gas emissions — changing the atmosphere, altering weather patterns, and impacting the quality of the field — ball players will be forced to adapt to new conditions. Here are three ways that a warming planet could (and in some cases already is) changing the game of baseball.

1. Increasing home runs. As a general rule, its a lot easier to hit in warmer temperatures. The sting from the bat on contact is greatly diminished and balls feel like they go a lot farther in the heat.

In 2004, University of Massachusetts researchers tested the velocity off the bat hitting baseballs cooled to 40 degrees Fahrenheit and heated to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. They found:

The lower the temperature, the slower the ball travel(s) after making contact with the bat. The 40 degree balls traveled at a velocity 2 percent less than the 120 degree balls. This means that a ball that would have traveled 400 feet at 120 degrees would instead travel 392 feet. That can be the distance between a home run and an out.

According to Hardball Times, a very reputable baseball website written by authors well respected in the baseball statistics and analysis world, “over 4% of batted balls leave the ballpark in 75 degree or warmer weather, but that rate drops to about 3.2% in … cold weather conditions.”

2. More difficult fielding. In addition to increasing the frequency and distance of home runs, heat and drought — made worse by climate change — wreaks havoc on baseball fields themselves.

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Kevin M. Gill, via Flickr

by Auden Schendler

Imagine that you are outside a house entirely engulfed in flames. Inside, you have been told, there are several children. But fire is pouring out of the windows and doors, and you can’t even approach the building due to the heat. This is a sad but unambiguous situation. The children will die, and you can’t do anything about it.

But let’s consider another scenario. As you look at the building, you notice that there’s one window that isn’t yet engulfed. In addition, because of a creek that runs beside the house, there’s a route to the window that would enable you to get to it without burning. And last, hanging out of that window is a young child who will die if you don’t grab her. In short, you have a reasonably good shot at saving the child. This situation is arguably as unambiguous as the first scenario. You have to save her.

This is the situation Mark Reynolds of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby found himself in when he visited Washington D.C. with organization founder Marshall Saunders. At the time, Saunders was trying to recruit Reynolds to help run the organization. But Saunders felt the project was impossible, a complex morass of a problem, and he had enough of those in his life. The two met with Senators and Congresspeople about the need for climate legislation, telling them that their position was wrong.  They utterly failed. But when they retooled their pitch, and started talking to elected officials about what might be a mutually agreeable strategy based on shared values—a revenue neutral carbon fee dividended back to taxpayers—combined with elimination of subsidies across the board for both fossil and renewable energies—it became clear that even Grover Norquist tax-pledge tea partiers could support it.

And Mark, who didn’t really want to get involved in this work, had a sinking feeling: Because there was a clear path to victory on the most pressing issue of our time, he had an obligation to act. And so he took the helm of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org/. Their vision: a structured effort to push elected officials to act, combined with a bill nobody could oppose, offers a clear path to climate legislation in the U.S., the first step necessary in solving the problem globally.

This moral case for action (if it’s possible to save a life, you have to) is similar to a story about Steve Jobs. As Walter Isaacson describes it in the April issue of Harvard Business Review, Jobs was urging engineer Larry Kenyon to reduce the boot-up time of a Mac. Kenyon said it couldn’t be done. Jobs asked if it could be done if it would save a person’s life. Kenyon said that perhaps it could in that situation. So Jobs demonstrated that an extra ten seconds spread out over all the Mac users in the world was 100 lifetimes a year. A few weeks later the Macs were booting up 28 seconds faster. Kenyon didn’t have to act until the moral case was obvious. Once it was, he had no choice but to try. Not to succeed, but to try. Read more

CNN has two dynamite pieces on Solyndra, “Romney wrong on Solyndra facts” and “Seven things you should know about Solyndra.”

The first one, by Steve Hargreaves of CNN Money, ends:

It’s one thing to spin something to one’s advantage. It’s another to simply make things up to make the other guy look bad. Romney’s Solyndra speech was an example of the latter. Disgraceful.

Hargreaves shows that Mitt Romney’s key claim — “An independent inspector general looked at this investment and concluded that the Administration had steered money to friends and family and campaign contributors” — has no basis in fact.

The second piece, also by Hargreaves, lists 7 key facts:

1.  It was started by Bush: The DOE loan program that funded Solyndra was actually started by President Bush in 2005. It was intended to provide government support for “innovative technologies”….

In fact, as Climate Progress reported back in September, the “Bush Administration advanced the Solyndra loan guarantee for two years” before Obama became President.

2.  Congress thought there would be more failures: Two companies have declared bankruptcy under the loan program so far, out of the 33 projects funded. Congress was expecting more….

Congress appropriated money to cover expected losses, and multiple independent reviews have confirmed that the actual losses will likely be less than Congress expected.

3. Solyndra wanted more: The company applied for another $468 million in funding shortly after its first DOE loan closed. The government did not award the second request.

4. Taxpayers aren’t the only losers: Private investors lost almost twice what the government did — nearly $1 billion.

While much has been made that the largest private investor was an Obama supporter, the second largest was a fund controlled by the Walton family — of Wal-Mart fame. Walton family members are noted Republican donors.

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