Juicing The Numbers: How Temperature Data Got A Performance Boost

The Washington Post recently ran a Feb. 11, 2026, article titled “Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened.” As I read it, and as we move through this Adirondack winter, my mind couldn’t help drifting to the green grass of the ballpark. [some emphasis, links added]

And with the annual bombardment of “hottest year ever” rhetoric and spring training underway, it also drifted back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when home runs and performance-enhancing drugs ruled Major League Baseball.

It was a time when players used substances that disrupted the natural rhythm and record book of the great game. Human growth hormone aided recovery. Anabolic steroids boosted power and bat speed. Players got bigger, stronger, and faster.

Records fell. Balls were launched out of ballparks. In 1998, Mark McGwire hit three home runs estimated at more than 500 feet. In the 27 MLB seasons since, only two have been measured that far.

That era of baseball offers a useful analogy for how temperatures are presented to the public today.

First, consider NASA’s use of a baseline reference period, the foundation on which its temperature results are built. It is the same baseline the Washington Post used in its piece.

Reference baselines are subjective — they can amplify or mute the public-facing visual, and they are not anchored to any physical constant in the climate system. They are simply a choice.

NASA’s choice is to plot temperature values against a 1951-1980 baseline, and that choice matters.

Those three decades sit squarely in a period influenced by heavy sulfate aerosol pollution, when industrial emissions reflected sunlight and cooled the planet.

This mid-century cooling is well documented, and it temporarily offset earlier warmth, especially in the United States, where the 1930s remain the warmest decade in the instrumental record.

When you choose a cool, aerosol-suppressed era as “normal,” everything after it looks hotter by comparison. The public sees maps drenched in red and orange, labeled “1.2°C above normal,” without realizing that “normal” itself was shaped by aerosol-driven cooling.

It’s worth remembering that the cooling from the 1950s through the 1970s was once framed as a sign of an impending ice age.

And beginning around 1980, which happens to coincide with the start of the satellite era, clean air policies across North America and Europe triggered a massive reduction in sulfate emissions.

The climate narrative has since swung decisively toward warming, but the mid-century period remains an era of heavy pollution and intense atmospheric aerosol flux. Choosing it as a baseline reference period is, at the very least, difficult to justify.

Then there is homogenization. I wrote about this in more detail in my Jan. 30 Enterprise column. It is the practice of adjusting and blending data from different weather stations into a composite temperature value. Proponents argue that raw records are messy.

Stations move. Instruments change. Observation times shift. Surroundings get paved over. In principle, that sounds reasonable.

But to correct for these issues, agencies apply statistical adjustments that critics, including myself, find questionable.

And in practice, earlier decades are often adjusted cooler, while recent decades are adjusted warmer or left unchanged. The net effect is a steeper warming trend.

Add a third ingredient: urbanization. Cities are hotter than their rural surroundings. Asphalt, concrete, buildings, and waste heat all contribute to the well-known urban heat island (UHI) effect.

Many long-running stations that were once rural are now surrounded by development. Even small siting changes, closer to buildings, parking lots, or runways, can nudge temperatures upward.

This warming is real, but it is local, not global, and certainly not caused by carbon dioxide. Yet, when these stations are blended into global averages, they add heat to the record in ways the public rarely hears about.

So the final product, a temperature graph built on a cool baseline, adjusted through homogenization and influenced by expanding urban development, lands in front of the public as a single, authoritative curve. The complexity disappears. The choices disappear.

The uncertainty disappears. What remains is a simple story: the planet is warming faster than ever before, and the evidence is beyond question.

Temperature homogenization and selective baselines function much like a slugger juicing up on HGH and steroids. Each choice has a stated scientific purpose, just as every shot in the arm, or wherever else it landed, had a performance purpose. But the combined effect is hard to miss. Add urbanization, and it’s like putting a juiced-up slugger in a ballpark with a short fence.

The bottom line is simple: if you want warming, we can show that, and if you want it to look juiced up, we can show that too. And that 1951-1980 temperature baseline used by NASA and the Washington Post is a doozy, a real shot in the arm.

If I wanted to present warming in the strongest possible light for the public, that’s the baseline I’d choose as well.

Unfortunately, what the public rarely hears is a more measured framing: the Earth has been warming gradually since the end of the Little Ice Age (1850). Human influences, such as a century of sulfate aerosol flux, can affect temperatures, but natural variability remains the dominant force in shaping year-to-year and decade-to-decade swings.

This variability is led by the sun and is the backdrop against which all other influences play out. In addition, the planet’s energy balance is further shaped by volcanic activity, cloud behavior, powerful ocean-atmosphere oscillations, water vapor dynamics, and the diminishing radiative impact of CO2 beyond its first few hundred parts per million.

Yes, just as many late 1990s ballplayers were boosted by performance-enhancing drugs, today’s temperature products are enhanced by a mix of homogenization, urbanization, and selective baselines. Baseball eventually had to reckon with what those choices did to the record book.

Climate communication faces a similar moment. If we are going to talk honestly about a fascinating area of science, we need to separate the natural rhythm of the climate system from the statistical steroids we keep injecting into the data.

Until then, the annual temperatures will keep clearing the fence, but we should not pretend that the fences have not moved.

Top photo by Daiji Umemoto on Unsplash.

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