Warming climate is helping human beings run faster, jump higher and throw farther through less dense air

Abstract

Understanding both positive and negative impacts of climate change is essential for comprehensively assessing and well adapting to the impacts of changing climate. Conventionally, climate warming is revealed to negatively impact human activities. Here, we reveal that human beings’ performance in anaerobic sports may benefit from climate warming. Using global weather observation and athletes’ performance datasets, we show that world-top athletes’ performances in nearly all athletics anaerobic events (i.e., sprints, jumps and throws) substantially improve as ambient temperature rises. For example, 100 m performance monotonically improves by 0.26 s as ambient temperature rises from 11.8° to 36.4 °C. Using Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 datasets, we further show that global warming can substantially improve world-top athletes’ performance in eleven of the thirteen Olympics athletics anaerobic events by 0.27%–0.88% and 0.14–0.48% under high-emission and medium-emission scenarios, respectively, during 1979–2100. Among them, the improvements for 100 m are 0.59% (0.063 s) and 0.32% (0.034 s), respectively. Mechanism analysis shows that the warmed ambient atmosphere can improve competitors’ performance through expanding the air and thus reducing the air resistance to the competitors and throwing implements for hummer throw and all the sprints, hurdling and jumps. Quantitative analysis estimates that this thermodynamic process is essential for the impacts of warmed ambient atmosphere on the performances in these events as physiological processes are.