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

Understanding both positive and negative impacts of climate change is essential for comprehensively assessing and adapting to a changing climate. Here, we reveal that human performance in anaerobic sports may benefit from climate warming. Using global weather observations and athletes’ performance datasets, we show that world-top athletes’ performances in nearly all athletics anaerobic events (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 °C to 14.6 °C. Using coupled information from CMIP6 datasets, we further find that global warming can substantially improve world-top athletes’ performance in eleven of the thirteen Olympic 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 a warmed atmosphere improves performance by expanding the air and thus reducing air resistance to competitors and throwing implements (notably sprints, hurdles, jumps and hammer throw). Quantitative analysis estimates that this thermodynamic process is as essential as physiological processes in explaining the impacts of a warmed atmosphere on these events.

Shixin Wang, Tiexin Chen, Jing-Jia Luo, Meng Gao, Hongchao Zuo, Fenghua Ling, Jianlin Hu, Chaoxia Yuan, Yuanjian Yang, Lina Wang, Huaming Huang, Naiang Wang, Yaojun Li, Toshio Yamagata