Could this be proof that climate change is a very good thing?

Probably not. There are plenty of other reasons to believe that if the Earth is indeed warming it will be a good thing for humanity, but alas this is not one of them.

This is a bit of pattern for NBC, Sam Brock on Saturday "found between 2010 and 2019, there were 500 more home runs directly attributable to climate change." They cite indoor stadiums having less HRs, but omit that those teams generally also have good pitching/bad offense (2/2) pic.twitter.com/tFqvJj35Hr

— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) April 13, 2023

As a non-baseball fan, I can’t speak to the home run issue, so I take it as a given that the increase in the number is real. It would be pretty easy to check, but why bother? The underlying premise that climate change causes increased scoring is so absurd on its own that it doesn’t merit much investigation, and I am too busy and too lazy to bother.

But I did look into scoring increases in basketball, which last I checked is played indoors and hence not subject to vicissitudes of the weather or climate.

And guess what?! Basketball scores have skyrocketed too! Is it possible that some other factor than the weather might influence scoring trends in sports?

What about the size of football players over time? They have gotten much larger and better toned over the years. Again I haven’t bothered to research the particulars, but even a casual fan of the game must have noticed that today’s football players are quite a bit bigger and stronger than in times past. The NFL has a nice story on “the evolution of the football player.”

None of these mundane facts actually matter, though, to the NBC news crew. They have a narrative they want you to believe, and they will put it out without a bit of remorse for spreading utter crap as the truth. And, as with many such ridiculous claims, this will become a “truth” that gets repeated endlessly because it is both an interesting “factoid” and convenient to the activists.

It’s like another state that I have written about in the past–the ridiculous claim that Americans use 500 million straws a day. It has been repeated endlessly despite the fact that it has no basis at all in fact. It was invented by a kid doing a science fair project and pulled out of thin air.

Al Roker and the 9-year-old kid are doing essentially the same thing. Start with a conclusion and then construct facts that fit the narrative that gets you there.

It works as a strategy. In both cases, the endless repetition creates an alternate reality that far too many people accept and actual facts become irrelevant to what people believe.

Statistics are very powerful tools to shape narratives. They have the gloss of science, and the more precise the statistic the more persuasive it sounds.

Notice how Roker says “Temperatures have risen 2.2 degrees since 1970?”

Not 2 degrees. Since when did a weatherman divide degrees Fahrenheit into tenths of a degree? But 2.2 sounds very precise (imagine how precise the actual data is–not good enough in reality given how it is measured), and hence is more convincing. Lots of other stats in the story, adding up to a big steaming pile of horse excrement.

The more you look the more you will see these tactics, and the more precision claimed the less likely something is to be true in news stories.

Beware the MSM.