Sports Analogies and Climate Change

How much can human-caused climate change be blamed for Hurricane Sandy? Sports analogies to the rescue! One useful analogy is the use of steroids in baseball. No individual home run can be attributed to steroids, but their use was clearly linked to an increase in home runs. You can find that analogy frequently used on ClimateProgress.com, and also by the president-elect of the American Meterological Society yesterday on the radio program Science Friday. Instead of steriods, of course, it's all that harmless-seeming carbon dioxide and other climate-affecting gases our machines have been collectively injecting into the atmosphere for the past couple centuries--increasing concentrations in the air by an improbable 40%. (It seems entirely unfair that our collective power to unintentionally mess things up is so great, but on the other hand, it suggests that if we actually put our collective heads together, we might be able to achieve extraordinary change in a positive direction.) Relevant links showing graphs are here and here.

To better understand the impact of rising sea levels on the likelihood of flooding, consider that raising a basketball floor will increase the number of slam dunks--the slam dunks here representing massive flooding of coastal cities like New York. That metaphor I heard for the first time on Science Friday yesterday.

In an opinion piece I had published in the Star-Ledger this past Sunday (Hurricane Sandy supported my premise while thoroughly distracting all potential readers), entitled "Why government regulators matter: a sports analogy", I contrast the acceptance of strict regulation and enforcement in sports with the anti-regulatory ideology common in politics, and compare the NFL's reality-based response to the danger of concussions with the nation's irrational non-response to the dangers of climate change. (If the Star-Ledger link is no longer open, the piece can be found here.)