the results are in. lower seams on the baseballs led to more home runs . . . not carbon emissions since 1850. yeah, science! https://www.wsj.com/articles/mlb-st...ind-power-surge-11576095262?mod=hp_major_pos7 MLB Study Finds Lower Seam Height on Baseballs, Player Behavior Behind Power Surge Report dismisses theory that manufacturer Rawlings intentionally ‘juiced’ baseballs to generate offense By Jared Diamond Dec. 11, 2019 3:14 pm ET SAN DIEGO—Baseballs with a lower seam height coupled with a “change in player behavior” were among the primary causes of the power surge that resulted in players hitting a record 6,776 home runs in 2019, a panel of scientists commissioned by Major League Baseball to study the issue said Wednesday. The committee’s report attributed 60% of the spike to less wind resistance on the balls themselves and 40% to what it described as “launch conditions”—essentially differences in how batters swing. Throughout the 2019 season, pitchers across the sport questioned whether the league instructed Rawlings, the MLB-owned company that manufactures the baseballs in a factory in Costa Rica, to intentionally “juice” them to generate offense. The report dismissed that theory, saying that “no evidence was found that changes in baseball performance were due to anything intentional on the part of Rawlings or MLB and were likely due to manufacturing variability.” “We have never been asked to juice or dejuice a baseball, and we’ve never done anything of the sort,” Rawlings CEO Michael Zlaket said Wednesday at the annual winter meetings. The manufacturing of baseballs is a more complex process than it might seem. They are stitched by hand, using natural materials. This “creates a variability in the baseball performance that is, to some extent, unavoidable,” said Chris Young, MLB’s vice president of on-field operations and a former big-league pitcher. MLB has no interest in changing that tradition and devising a synthetic ball that might avoid some of the unpredictability that continues to frustrate players and general managers who just want to know what kind of ball they’re using. “One of the things we’re going to have to do as we continue this journey of discovery is accept the fact that the baseball is going to vary and the performance of the baseball is going to vary,” said Morgan Sword, MLB’s senior vice president for league economics and operations. This marked the second study into the mysterious rise of home runs in the last two years, after a similar boom from 2015 through 2017. The first study, released in May 2018, concluded that it was almost entirely because of the aerodynamic properties of the baseball, specifically decreased drag coefficient—the ease with which the balls cut through the air. At that point, the scientists then couldn’t pinpoint a reason as to why. The latest study comes closer to identifying an explanation: inconsistency in the height of the seams, which the professors said can have a dramatic effect on how the ball behaves. Newly developed laboratory techniques enabled the committee to show a correlation between seam height and drag. The average seam height in 2019 was lower than 2018 by less than one-thousandth of an inch. Still, that was enough to account for 35% of the change in drag. “This is something that escaped our observation in the preceding study simply because the equipment that we were using was not precise enough to determine that,” said Alan Nathan, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois and the chair of the study. The problem is that the committee still can’t figure out the other factors that contributed to the decreased drag. It did rule out certain hypotheses such as roundness, surface roughness and lace thickness. Further breakthroughs will require more study. Asked how long that might take, Lloyd Smith, the director of the Sports Science Laboratory at Washington State University, said, “We have no idea.” With fly balls liable to travel farther than before, batters, perhaps not surprisingly, adjusted their swings to drive the ball in the air and hit for power. The average launch angle of all batted balls in 2019 registered at 12.2 degrees, up from 11.7 degrees in 2018 and 10.1 degrees in 2015, the year MLB released Statcast, a radar system that tracks such data. Launch angle has risen every year since the creation of Statcast. The study was less conclusive about what happened during the postseason, when home-run rates unexpectedly plummeted, prompting players and managers to say that they thought that the balls had been “dejuiced” from the regular season. The report said there was no change in the seam height in the baseballs from the regular season to the playoffs, and the committee was unable to say why the balls in October had a greater drag coefficient. “It shows that there are things that we really do not yet understand about what are the contributing factors to drag,” Nathan said. The scientists also took a special interest in the rubbing mud that is applied to all new baseballs to make them less slick. They said that in their testing, the drag of the balls decreased after the mud had been applied, prompting the panel to recommend a more extensive study on the impact of the substance with a much larger sample. MLB is currently working on a tacky baseball that wouldn’t require rubbing mud. In addition to the mud, the committee said Rawlings should develop a system to track the dates on which balls are manufactured and shipped, and teams should log which batches are used in which games. It said that MLB should install atmospheric tracking systems in all 30 ballparks to help “facilitate determination of drag and other properties affecting performance from in-game data.” Additionally, the league should consider using humidors at all stadiums to reduce variability in storage conditions. Write to Jared Diamond at jared.diamond@wsj.com
One of the few things I still remember learning from college is that cities have this effect called an urban heat island. All the buildings, development and human activity causes the city to be warmer than the surrounding area, it's more noticeable at night, such as Vegas compared too the freezing night desert. I'd think that would buffer the temperature swings from the outside. Temperature might be a thing but the experiment needed to prove it would have to be run on each city, indoor v outdoor, etc...
Houston had one of the worst heat islands in the country but it has improved quite a bit over the past 20 years. Any major city will be bad compared to it's suburbs, but it's much more noticeable in a city like Houston compared with a cooler area like Portland even though the increase % is actually higher for Portland. The top ten list has some obvious ones, but quite a few surprises... Las Vegas (7.3°F) Albuquerque (5.9°F Denver (4.9°F) Portland (4.8°F) Louisville (4.8°F) Washington, D.C. (4.7°F) Kansas City (4.6°F) Columbus (4.4°F) Minneapolis (4.3°F) Seattle (4.1°F)
Or you could have listened to the pitchers, who were telling you this same exact **** all season long.
Trump hates that climate change is no hoax so much and is so jealous of yet missing out again on being person of the year, he can’t help himself but to bully a child. The first lady and daughter must be very proud.
No ****ing way lmao. Melania was JUST flipping out about someone brining up their 13 year old kid Barron, and now Trump makes fun of a 16 year old girl. TOUGH, he's tough man folks! Girl born in 2003 had it coming, believe me !
some good news https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerp...-on-the-brink-of-a-long-plateau/#78a7a0e1338d Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions Are On The Brink Of A Long Plateau Roger Pielke Contributor Energy I research and write about science, policy and politics. With all the talk of apocalypse and catastrophe associated with climate change, it would be easy to miss out on an incredible change in expectations for future carbon dioxide emissions. Based on the projections just released by the International Energy Agency (IEA), it now appears that the world has a very good chance of seeing carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels plateau over the next several decades. Peak carbon dioxide may be on the horizon. The IEA, in its 2019 World Energy Outlook, is careful to observe that its scenarios are not forecasts. The scenarios are projections conditional upon certain assumptions. IEA explains, “a forecast would need to try to second-guess the future responses of policy makers. whether these are triggered by concerns about energy security or affordability, or by a reaction to rising emissions and their impacts. We do not give decision makers the benefit of the doubt on these future responses.” One of the scenarios produced by IEA focuses on projections based on what policies governments’ have actually adopted by mid-2019, and is called the Current Policies Scenario (CPS). A second scenario focuses commitments and plans that governments’ have announced, but not yet enacted, and is called the Stated Policies Scenario (SPS). IEA projects the consequences of these scenarios to 2040. Justin Richie, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, has identified a remarkable feature of the new IEA scenarios. Both the CPS and SPS have carbon dioxide emissions for 2040 that are lower than almost all of the scenarios reviewed in the most recent assessment (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Richie identifies an important reason for the difference in how the IEA treats coal use to 2040 versus how coal is treated in the scenarios of the IPCC: Coal use in the CPS “is lower than 90% of all the IPCC scenarios, and the IEA SPS is lower than 95% of the IPCC scenarios.” Less than a decade ago, conventional wisdom was that coal use would expand dramatically through the 21st century. But just last year IEA suggested that global coal use may have peaked in 2014. In an analysis published last week at Carbon Brief a team of energy analysts argue that, “Global electricity production from coal is on track to fall by around 3% in 2019, the largest drop on record.” Robbie Andrew, a scientist at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway, has published data indicating that coal generation for electricity in India is down 2.5% in 2019 from the year before. The new conventional wisdom is that for myriad reasons – climate, air pollution, economics among them — coal is on its way out. The end of coal won’t happen anytime soon, but it does appear that nightmare scenarios of unmitigated expansion of coal burning are far less likely that recently assumed. It is hard to overstate the importance of the shift in expectations for future emissions that is represented by the difference in the new IEA scenarios versus those of the IPCC. One significant implication of the shift in perspective is that it renders much of the climate impacts literature of the past decade, and the media reporting that accompanied it, as obsolete. The reason for this obsolescence is that thousands of academic papers projecting future climate impacts have emphasized a very high-end emissions scenario focused on the burning of massive amounts of coal throughout the 21st century. While policy makers in coming decades may yet chose to return to coal, at present that seems far-fetched. In technical terms, based on the CPS scenario, in 2040 the world would have emissions lower than RCP 4.5, and much less than RCP 6.0 and RCP 8.5 (RCP = representative concentration pathway, technically a “a scenario set containing emission, concentration and land-use trajectories” leading to “radiative forcing levels of 8.5, 6, 4.5 and 2.6 W/m2”). While many climate impact studies of the past decade also included projections focused on RCP 4.5 in addition to more extreme scenarios, often it was the more extreme results associated with higher forcing levels that were emphasized. To avoid a lost decade of impacts research, it will be important to revisit the literature with a focus on RCP 4.5, rather than RCP 8.5. The unavoidable conclusion of such a second look is that climate change will appear much less scary, and political strategies that are consistent with updated understandings will have to adapt accordingly. A second significant implication of the new perspective on emissions trajectories over the next several decades is that the IPCC is at risk of already being obsolete to the extent that its forthcoming 6th assessment report emphasizes high end emissions scenarios. Of course, carbon dioxide emissions are not the only factor that matters in projections of future climate. However, projected emissions play a role in not just climate and impact projections, but also in analyses of the cost effectiveness of various mitigation policies. Reliance on outdated scenarios that are out of sync with present understandings could badly bias the next IPCC assessment, potentially threatening its credibility or misleading policy makers. A close look at the new IEA analysis suggests that while the world may not yet be at peak carbon dioxide, the world looks to be entering an extended plateauing of emissions. Consider that the IEA says that its emissions estimates are accurate to about 5% for major economies and to about 10% for many other countries. That means that the projected emissions in 2040 of the SPS has uncertainty ranges for carbon dioxide emissions that overlap with those of 2019. In other words, if policy makers follow through with current stated commitments, the global carbon dioxide emissions two decades from now will be similar to what they are today. There is even greater reason for optimism that emissions have plateaued. The IEA projects that the global economy will grow at a rate of 3.4% annually to 2040, representing a per capita growth rate of about 2.5% per year. This rate of growth is higher than 95% of the projected GDP growth rates of the IPCC AR5 scenario database. As I have argued in this space recently, almost all of the IPCC scenarios overstated GDP growth over the past decade. The projected IEA global GDP growth rate also exceeds that recently projected by leading economists. There is thus good reason to believe that the IEA projection of GDP growth to 2040 is too aggressive. While forecasting economic growth is fraught with challenges, it is clear that an error of just a few tenths of a percentage point in the IEA projection of yearly economic growth to 2040 would be enough to turn the CPS from showing a modest increase in carbon dioxide emissions to a plateau, and turn the SPS from a showing a plateau into a modest decline. continued next post
conclusion: The final metric to look at is the implied rates of decarbonization in the IEA scenarios. Decarbonization refers to the rate of decline in the ratio of carbon dioxide emissions to GDP. For much of the past two decades, using IEA data, global decarbonization has typically been less than 2% per year, though from 2014 to 2016 it averaged about 3% annually, and from 2010 to 2018 it averaged 2.4%. The CPS implies a global decarbonization rate of about 2.1% per year to 2040, while the SPS implies a rate of about 2.8% per year. Neither of these values seems unrealistic, based on recent experience, and may even be conservative depending upon the degree to which policy makers act more aggressively than the stated policies they have already committed to. But these numbers remain far off from what would be needed if the world is to achieve deep decarbonization of 80% reductions or more from present levels. Achieving such a goal would require annual rates of decarbonization of 7.5% per year to hit a 2 degree Celsius target and 11.3% per year to hit a 1.5 degree target. The emissions reduction challenge remains as daunting as ever. But make no mistake, the change in perspective that is implied by current expectations for energy consumption and the mix of technologies that comprise it, along with expectations for economic growth, provide welcome good news on climate. The worst-case scenarios that have dominated discussions over the past decade or more are off the table, and will stay there unless we actively choose to follow them. That seems unlikely. Consequently, a new generation of climate impact studies is needed, along with new understandings of the costs and benefits of policy options to further accelerating decarbonization. We’ve reached the plateau. Now it’s time to figure out how to start running downhill. Follow me on Twitter @RogerPielkeJr
The disanalogy is that nobody ever attacked Barron trump, (not including the President, obviously) But, thanks for injecting him into this thread, boomer. Very relevant to climate change!
She is a public figure. The problem is that Trump's gripe was about Baron being a minor. Gretta's a minor too.
Barron is much taller though and has nicer clothes -- Don Jr. and Eric take him to Atlantic City on Airforce One to count cards.
That's great and true, but the ball still carries an extra foot for every 2 degrees warmer. That is probably why you saw less home runs in the postseason when temps cooled off from the records.
