Last week, I beat the Augusta heat (and it is only March!) by heading up to Iowa to do a presentation. I can’t wait for Augusta in August, especially after all the lost tree canopy from Hurricane Helene!!!
Climate change is making extreme weather more common, including extreme hot and cold temperatures. Economists Kevin Kuruc, Melissa LoPalo, and Sean O’Connor wanted to determine how much people are willing to pay to avoid uncomfortable temperatures. They used attendance data from Major League Baseball from 1950 through 2000, a period with over 80,000 games and hour-by-hour temperatures.
They found that attendance dropped by 16 percent on days over 950F and 20 percent on days below 550F.
Teams in the south, such as the Texas Rangers and Atlanta Braves saw bigger drops. Braves attendance at the old Turner Field fell from close to 90 percent of opening-day attendance to less than 60 percent in August. Using ticket prices, they estimate that spectators are willing to pay between $1.50 and $2.00 to avoid extremely hot or cold temperatures for an average baseball game. This implies an annual loss to the economy of over $2 billion by the end of the century. This is actually quite small, remember the size of the current US economy is close to $30 trillion!
Nevertheless, in other research, economists Sylvain Leduc and Daniel Wilson at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco model population migration based on a similar dislike of extreme temperatures. They suggest the long-standing migration from the snow belt to the sun belt may be slowing and, in some cases, has reversed. The Mountain West and North Midwest may be the recipients of population demographic change over the rest of this century as they will have fewer extreme temperatures.
Saying that, my son said it was -450F with a wind chill a couple of weeks ago in Nebraska. Maybe, the Augusta weather is not so bad after all!
