Bummer: Hotcoldwetdry Is Shortening Pregnancies

See, the whopping 1.5F increase since 1850 is doing Horrible Things

How Rising Temperatures Due to Climate Change are Shortening Pregnancies

It’s bad enough that adults have made a climatological mess of the world. It’s worse that the mess is having a disproportionate impact on kids—who did nothing to create the problem, but are more susceptible to health issues caused by rising temperatures than adults are. Now, it appears, global warming is doing its damage even further down the human age spectrum. According to a new study published in Nature Climate Change, rising temperatures may have a direct impact on human gestational time, increasing the risk of early delivery.

Babies are considered premature when they are born at 37 weeks or earlier. But delivery between 37 and 40 weeks is still not considered ideal, with late-term births correlated to lower birthweight and even potential cognitive development problems later in life. Many variables can cause an otherwise healthy pregnancy to come to term earlier than it should—one is extreme heat.

To study this effect, Alan Barreca, an associate professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environmental Sustainability, and economist Jessamyn Schaller of Claremont McKenna College, analyzed daily temperature and county-by-county birth rates across the U.S. in a two-decade window from 1969 to 1988. That is an admittedly old dataset, but the researchers had little choice.

“In 1989, the vital statistics system started to be more cautious about information it allowed out publicly in order to make it hard to identify individuals precisely by place or date of birth,” says Barreca. “They even began masking some counties. So 1969 to 1988 gave us the most thorough information.”

Um, OK?

In that dataset, the researchers found that on days when temperatures reached or exceeded 32.2ºC (90ºF), the birth rate per 100,000 women increased by 0.97, compared to dates in which the temperature was between 16-21º C (60-70º F). There was a smaller, but still significant, bump of 0.57 additional births per 100,000 women on days that were hot but not quite as sweltering, ranging from 26.7-32.2º C (80-90º F).

Aaaaaaand? That’s barely a blip. And all from a tiny increase in temps, since you had a slight cooling period from the 50’s to about 1979. Ready for doom?

Troublingly, the problem is only likely to get worse. The 1969 to 1988 period was merely the leading edge of the heat spikes the world has experienced in recent decades. As climate change grows more severe—with eight of the ten hottest years on record occurring just in the last decade—more and more babies are likely to be emerging too early into a too-hot world.

Actually, I’m not sure why they care, since most of them are supporters of abortion on demand. Of course, this “study” using old data  … heck, we were in the hippy to disco to big hair and questionable fashion colors eras then … is being breathlessly repeated across the Warmist news media.