global warming

Not much good comes to mind when you think about the effects of climate change.

Wildfires, floods, melting ice caps, heat waves, the bleaching of ocean reefs.

But then there’s baseball, and one possible silver lining.

Has global warming turned Dodger Stadium into a home run launching pad?

I was watching Monday night’s ESPN telecast of the L.A. game against Tampa Bay when the play-by-play announcer said that once upon a time, it was an article of faith that fly balls didn’t carry far in the heavy night air of Chavez Ravine.

However, the announcer continued, a Dodger executive had told him that over the last several years, “in general, the marine layer is gone, and the ball has started to carry at night, and you can see it now in the numbers. It is a great home run hitters park.”

This is statistically true. Between 2020 and 2025, Dodger Stadium had more home runs than any other major league park, although this year’s total is lagging behind last year’s pace. In all of Major League Baseball, home run totals have fluctuated but gradually increased over the years, with this year’s pace running slightly ahead of last year’s.

That can’t all be attributed to climate change, as retired Dodger great Steve Garvey is going to explain in a minute. When considered city by city and decade by decade, there are lots of factors in home run totals, from ballpark dimensions to playing strategies to the number of long ball hitters in each lineup.

But with Dodger Stadium, the marine layer angle jumped out at me because I’m always on the lookout for relatable ways to tell the climate change story. In the past, I’d written about the gradual demise of Joshua trees, the effect of receding fog and higher heat on the California wine industry, the growing nuisance of backyard bug bites and the gradual migration of juvenile great white sharks up the coast.

And now we have to ask ourselves: Is global warming producing more home runs than steroids did?

The warm-up is real, but it isn’t new. In Game 2 of the 2017 World Series, the temperature at Dodger Stadium topped 100 when the first pitch was thrown, and the ballpark was like a popcorn machine. The Dodgers and Astros combined for a record eight home runs, and The Times’ story quoted a NASA climate scientist who noted that the marine layer was a no-show.

While watching Monday night’s game, I emailed Dodger fan Edgar McGregor, the meteorologist who warned neighbors about the catastrophic weather conditions that resulted in the Eaton fire. I asked what he thought about this theory of a link between a diminished marine layer and the number of home runs.

“There is absolute truth to that,” said McGregor, explaining that “when oceanic temperatures are warmer, the marine layer is weaker.”

McGregor broke down the aerodynamics: “Cold air is dense, so a baseball has to push more atoms out of the way as it travels deep. Warm air has lower density, so balls travel farther.”

UC climate scientist Daniel Swain said this pattern will accelerate “for the rest of our lives as air continues to warm and baseballs continue to meet less and less resistance.”

This doesn’t mean that an infield pop-up will become a home run, but Swain said balls travel four inches farther per 1 degree Fahrenheit increase, “meaning that the average hit goes about 1-2 feet further than it would have in the early 20th century.”

That doesn’t sound like a staggering difference, but with thousands of batted balls over the years, that’s a lot of outs turning into doubles, triples and home runs. Swain sent me a 2023 study from the American Meteorological Society journal titled “Global warming, home runs, and the future of America’s pastime.”

Researchers reviewed data between 2010 and 2019, finding that “higher temperatures substantially increase home runs,” with about 50 per year “attributable to historical warming.” That adds up to about 500 more home runs.

The scientists concluded: “Each degree of global warming is associated with an additional 95 home runs per baseball season.”

Home runs bring fans to their feet, as in Monday night’s game, when Kyle Tucker pumped one that made it just over the right field wall and Miguel Rojas popped the game-winner with a shot that barely cleared the left field fence. So I don’t want to sound like a party pooper, but there is no bigger story in the world than the accelerating destruction of the only sandlot we’ve got.

If the right team hits a homer, feel free to go ahead and cheer. But if the wrong team hits one, you can remind friends and loved ones that each homer is like a fossil fuel bugle call signaling the end of the world as we know it.

Thankfully, the marine layer has not yet disappeared entirely. We still got some May gray this year and some June gloom as well. I wondered, though, if there were any retired Dodgers out there who might be thinking they’d have walloped more home runs if they’d had the advantage of warmer air.

“I do remember some balls just not traveling far, especially compared to day games,” said James Loney, who played first base for the Dodgers from 2006 to 2012 and had 106 career homers with three teams.

Today’s Dodgers hit a lot of home runs primarily because the lineup is stacked, Loney said. But he said he recalled players from visiting teams hammering a long ball and passing him at first base, thinking “they had a home run, and then making a right turn back to the dugout.”

Garvey, also a first baseman, slugged 272 home runs in his 18-year career and told me that if he were playing in this era, “I probably would have hit another 40 or 50 home runs.”

But Garvey, who started with the Dodgers in 1969, said weather is just one of many factors that have led to more home runs in today’s game, which has abandoned finesse in favor of brute force.

Garvey said the bats are harder, the balls are livelier, the pitchers throw harder (more velocity means more pop for batters) and launch angles are talked about more in baseball than at Cape Canaveral.

“We never heard the term ‘launch angle,’” said Garvey, who told me he went up to the plate trying to hit a line drive, not a moon shot.

“My goal used to be a .300 average, 200 hits, 100 RBIs and 20-plus home runs,” said Garvey, who hit 20 or more homers six times, with a high of 33 in 1977.

Today’s Dodgers have plenty of swat in their lineup, ranking behind only the Yankees in home runs so far as they chase a third straight World Series ring. They’re in first place even though one of their biggest bombers, Shohei Ohtani, is about a dozen homers shy of last year’s pace.

But Swain has good news for Ohtani, for Dodger fans and for manufacturers of short-sleeved shirts.

“This year, there is going to be exceptionally high humidity for most of baseball season in SoCal due to the developing very strong El Niño event and record warm coastal ocean temperatures,” he said.

“So, it’s indeed plausible,” Swain continued, “that the combination of long-term warming from climate change, plus shorter-term warming and humidity increase from El Niño and near-shore ocean warming, might increase the number of home runs this season.”

One can only hope the home team does the most celebrating.

Go Dodgers.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Environmentalists had something in their arsenal for Tuesday’s election they never did before: a billionaire benefactor willing to empty his pockets of tens of millions of dollars to bring climate change to the forefront of political debate and elect candidates committed to fighting global warming.

But California hedge fund titan Tom Steyer’s $74-million bet — most of it from his own wallet — yielded little payoff. On Tuesday, voters elected the most hostile Congress environmentalists have faced in years.

The Republicans who won control are already making plans to roll back President Obama’s signature emission reduction efforts, green-light the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that would transport Canadian tar sands oil to the U.S. Gulf Coast, and cancel subsidies for renewable energy.

Steyer says he has no regrets.

“I feel great,” he said by phone from his organization’s San Francisco office. “We set out to put climate on the ballot in a bunch of states, to build an organization and to build a relationship with a bunch of voters.”

He argued that all of that happened, pointing to hundreds of thousands of climate-minded voters newly enlisted in his organization, NextGen Climate, the emergence of global warming in the debate in several races, and the retreat by various GOP candidates from a platform of outright denial of climate science.

He chalked up Tuesday’s results to “that part of the world we don’t control.” Steyer said there was no approach that would have overcome the Republican tide that gave the party control of Congress and defeated several of the candidates NextGen backed.

But the election results raise new questions about the approach deep-pocketed, green-minded donors are taking toward electoral politics. Despite their best efforts, and the huge amount of money invested, they are failing to get voters to set aside other concerns and cast their ballots on environmental issues. This time out, the president’s record and the economy were the forefront issues, with all others receding.

“The take-away here is this was not a successful strategy,” said Josh Freed, vice president for clean energy at Third Way, a group that seeks a middle path between the two warring parties. “Candidate positions on climate do not move the overwhelming majority of voters to pull the lever for or against them. I hope these organizations take a step back and come up with a different approach.”

Steyer’s group saw its candidates victorious in U.S. Senate races in Michigan and New Hampshire, and in state legislative races, including in Oregon. But candidates they backed lost in hotly contested Senate races in Colorado and Iowa. NextGen also failed to unseat the governors of Florida and Maine, targeted by the organization for their outspoken skepticism of climate science.

The unpopular GOP governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, which Steyer’s group campaigned against, lost. But even in that race — won by NextGen’s candidate, Democrat Tom Wolf — global warming hardly was a factor, according to G. Terry Madonna, who directs the Franklin & Marshall College Poll in Lancaster.

Steyer’s impact was “Zero. None. Zero,” he said. Climate change “was not an issue at all. It has literally no salience with voters. It didn’t ever come up.”

University of New Hampshire pollster Andrew Smith said much the same with regard to the Senate race in his state, which Democratic incumbent Jeanne Shaheen won. “I don’t think anybody paid any attention to global warming this election,” he said.

In part that is because much of Steyer’s money was spent airing ads on issues his organization thought were more likely to turn out the Democratic faithful. But that too sometimes backfired.

In Colorado, independent pollster Floyd Ciruli suggested Steyer’s heavy TV advertising, which seized on a Democratic theme emphasizing abortion rights, may have actually hurt Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, who lost to GOP Rep. Cory Gardner.

“It was probably a net negative,” Ciruli said. “It turned out to be one of those things that threw Udall on the defensive. He was being parodied and mocked for it and criticized for it.”

Even Steyer’s strategists acknowledge that climate change is not a top-tier issue now. The question is whether it ever will be. Advocates such as Freed say the push seems to be futile, and well-funded green political groups should shift their strategy to more narrowly focused efforts with bipartisan appeal. They might start, he said, by being more open to such GOP-favored options as nuclear energy.

The green campaign efforts instead focus on getting Congress back to where it was in 2010, when it almost passed a California-style law that would have capped greenhouse gas emissions nationwide.

NextGen officials say they are confident in their strategy — and persistent. “This is a multi-cycle effort,” said Chris Lehane, Steyer’s lead political strategist. “If it was easy, it already would have been done…. Social change like this is not like switching on a light bulb.”

The GOP takeover of the Senate occurs as the science of climate change has grown more definitive and the predictions of widespread effects more detailed and dire. On Sunday, a panel of hundreds of climate scientists convened by the United Nations warned that climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels was already affecting life on every continent and in the oceans and that the window was closing rapidly for governments to avert the worst damage expected later this century.

Yet skepticism of climate science remains Republican orthodoxy. North Carolina Sen.-elect Thom Tillis said in a primary debate that climate change is not “a fact.” Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is expected to take the helm of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and dismissed the U.N. science panel “as a front for the environmental left.”

Obama moved to cut greenhouse gas emissions by issuing new rules for power plants and the nation’s vehicle fleet. The GOP-run Congress will not be able to nix the rules outright. But it could so thoroughly weaken or delay them through riders to key legislation that they’d be rendered ineffective, analysts said. Deeper cuts to the nation’s emissions would probably require congressional action, and the current GOP position on climate change makes such action improbable.

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune acknowledged there was a “copious amount of bad news” in Tuesday’s election. But he says there was “significant good news” as well.

“Candidates who formerly denied climate science are now saying they are not scientists and instead talk about clean energy and associate themselves with it,” he said.

“The money from Tom Steyer made a difference in elevating climate science and pushing all these lawmakers to move off a denial platform,” Brune said.

evan.halper@latimes.com

mark.barabak@latimes.com

Halper reported from New Orleans, Barabak from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Neela Banerjee in Washington contributed to this report.