Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Daily Mail reports that climate change will result in more female births, tilting the gender balance towards women.
According to The Daily Mail;
Experts studied birth records and miscarriages in Japan between 1968 and 2012.
Overall, more girls were born compared to boys and temperature fluctuations – particularly from a hot summer to a cold winter – saw the sex ratio become temporarily more pronounced.
The study claims that temperature fluctuations have influenced the ratio, but makes it clear that climate change may not be responsible for skewing the number of girls and boys that are born.
…
If the world is getting hotter and rising temporaries do favour the birth of girls, a change to the global sex ratio may happen one day.
What a set of predictions – More beautiful young women running about, wearing less clothing, and a scorching beach friendly tropical climate. We must act now, before its too late!
With the way the Liberals are promoting gender fluidity, does it really matter what sex the babies are born as? 😉
Haven’t you learned?
in this brave new world gender is a choice, yet we’re born with our sexual orientation.
Got it?
(I don’t)
Um, yeah. I just discovered this new nuance, too. The claim now is sex is defined by physiology, and gender is defined by the group you identity with. So if you are born physically a man, but prefer book clubs, chick-flicks, and interior design versus bar-hopping, Die Hard, and construction, then your identify with the female gender.
I guess that is preferable to being called a pantywaist as in the old days. IMO, still nothing to brag about.
Explains how the 72 virgins will be located for every man
Yee Haa Brian A, that’s a good one! Wish Jimmy Fallon would have said that on TV.
Apparently race is a choice as well. Both are just social constructs.
They think we’re friggin alligators….
I don’t see why the gay community is embracing this..
They were promoting that it’s not a choice.
The AGW claims are getting more and more hilarious with each passing day…. the end must be near.
I am reminded of that scene in Independence Day when all the airheads get to the top of the skyscraper in LA to “welcome” the lovely aliens to earth …. and the the death ray zaps them like the mosquito brains they were. Metaphorically speaking of course I wait in hope.
You must see “Mars Attacks”. It’s hilarious.
You’ll acquire a new appreciation for Slim Whitman.
That’s one of my favorite sci-fi movies ever – hilariously subversive!
And the problem is….?
Is there nothing that climate change can’t do?
If this drivel is correct:
a)Does it have the same effect on other mammals?
b) Since the sex of the child is determined at conception then in the Northern Hemisphere there should be more girls born in March, April and May and more boys in September. October and November and vice versa in the Southern Hemisphere. This should be easy to prove or in all likelihood disprove, like every other supposed ill that AGW plagues us with.
More women are born if the sperm have to swim a long ways or wait a long time to fertilize the egg. More boy babies if sperm are delivered close to destination and at the fertile moment. (Y sperm are fast but not durable, while X sperm are a bit slower at the start, but go further and hang around longer.)
I doubt they corrected for this.
(I was on the Board of a fertility clinic for a few years and this stuff was frequently discussed. The amusing way to put it was that short tools ill timed tended to girl babies and big ones energetically on target to boys. Given that, what they found was a tendency to more metrosexual men in Japan. Not surprising given BIS- phenol A and other estrogen analogs… like soy beans…)
E.M. Smith
I thought it was the other way round – a longer journey for sperm meant more males, not females.
According to this article at least:
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/sexratio.htm
The claim here is that the difference is simply that female sperm are about 4% heavier than male due to the X chromosome being bigger than the short Y one, thus in a “female” sperm 4% more weight of chromatin.
Another implication regards sexual position – doggy style favours females while the missionary position means more males!
“And the problem is….?”
Quite, as Mark Twain observed:-
Nothing to do with CO2. It is stress! When the going gets tough more boys are produced.
That explains my four sons!
GREAT! BRING IT ON!
Come on you guys everywhere – go burn as much carbon as possible ASAP. You know it makes sense!
Stress causes mothers to have more girls.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/8830036/Stressed-women-more-likely-to-have-baby-girls.html
We have seen much more precarious employment. Companies like temporary, part-time workers because it gives them maximum flexibility and they don’t have to pay benefits. The trouble is that it is maximally stressful on workers.
The stress of precarious employment far exceeds that from any possible global warming effects. If we want more boys we should make precarious employment less beneficial for employers.
How can this be right, sex is determined by the sperm…?
IIRC (and I read this a long time ago) the claim was that the pH of the woman’s reproductive path affects whether or not the sperm of one sex or the other has an advantage. Content women have more males, stressed women more females.
Homonal responses determine both the production of sperm selection and traits that are to be passed (traits), and affect reception (changing the biology in the mother to favor/disfavor traits).
Environment cues can activate traits, responses, and biologically driven behavioral responses.
I once read about a study that suggested something to the effect that women in certain populations use oral sex to improve the chance of conception from their prefered mate.
More boys? Don’t worry, the Chinese have that covered.
so nature is taking the steps to fix a mao-made imbalance, which means i have to go take a long drive in my truck
“Man-made global warming, but only caused by man?
Aren’t women also taking part in this scam?
By excluding women is there a bias I detect?
Could global warming not be politically correct?…..
From: http://rhymeafterrhyme.net/global-warming-is-not-politically-correct/
Some good climate news at last, at least for the men 😉
Agree what’s not to like!
The next study will say more ugly women. Always bad news.
“According to The Daily Mail” is never a good start.
Although, were this to be true, polygamy would be more common in cultures that develop in hot regions.
The B.S. never stops:
Hormonal treatment for cows could reduce global warming
Pick a subject; any subject. A “link” can be found with that and “climate change”, with the greatest “threat” in the future. And people get paid for this, using our money.
Quite a racket
How do you think they manufacture the consensus? Yes, Henry Ford would be amazed at the mass production efficiencies they have achieved.
So we can replace “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” with “Six Degrees of Global Warming”?
Akatsukami san,
Six degrees – by tomorrow lunchtime!
Unless that’s weather . . . .
Auto
So what’s the bad news?
It’s one of the curiosities of the climate wars that the gender demographics of either side are strikingly different. The skeptics have a normal fifty-fifty balance with equally strong female voices ie Nova, Curry, Laframboise et al. On the other hand, the role permitted to be played by women in the alarmist ranks is limited and quite submissive. They tend to be there only to wipe the brows of their heroic menfolk and cheer them on. Nobody is really interested in their opinion of the serious stuff like science. eg Niomi and her sisters.
I can only think it springs from the fundamentalist nature of climate alarmism. It’s no surprise they’re happy to bend a few stats to such a for them desirable outcome. Little boys, big egos.
Pointman
Interesting observation. For the climate worriers, the womenfolk are relegated to the marketing and communications side?
Fundamentally, we’re all “female” just after conception and when we are still a zygote (Single cell fertlised egg). What happens with males is a mutation and is largely governed by horemones in the mother. More testosterone leads to more males. It’s one reason why men have nipples, but no mammary glands (Breasts)
From a male’s DNA you could generate a female, but frI’m a female’s DNA you could not generate a male. Also during normal female development there is no need for two functional X chromosomes so one Is randomly shut off. This doesn’t happen at the single cell stage it happens later, so every female is actually a genetic mosaic where roughly half of her cells express one X chromosome and the rest express the other. I’m not sure that this has anything to do with the belief that women are of two minds about everything, but it’s an interesting genetic process.
Interesting. but then if we concider mDNA, we’re all African.
Who the hell taught you that?
Does the term “genetics” ring a bell?
IVF specialists?
No, it’s true. The SRY gene on the Y chromosome goes through and starts activating and deactivating various other genes with the intent of changing the current template (default: female) into the male form. The uterus is absorbed, the clitorus expands into a penis, and the gonads descend and produce sperm instead of eggs.
It’s about as close to mutation as you can get without going into The Fly territory.
Indeed Arsten.
Not so for mammals. Perhaps you are thinking about reptiles or insects?
Nope. Male humans are mammals too, males just do not have the glands females have.
The thing I love about science, is how many fields of science are sociopolitical activism dressed up in pseudoscience. Fetal development being yet another casuality in the kulturkampf.
1) Sex is determined by the chromosomes — full stop
2) The host hormonal environment plays a role in sexual dimorphic presentations, but does not determine sex.
3) The tissue differentiates for testes at 6 weeks, and ovaries at 8 weeks. By the arguments here presented, we all start as males, and females are just an unfortunate mutation.
4) The development begins with the Muellerian and Wolfmann ducts. A male fetus atrophies one, the female fetus atrophies the other. Consistent with the argument that a ‘male’ absorbs his uterus we can just as soundly say that the genetic defects known as women absorb their testes.
So if the weirdness presented here passes as legit argument, then we have proved that we’re all male to begin with. And that women are genetic defects. Or, I misunderstood the argument as badly as the people making it did. And it was all ‘social’ claptrap in which anything without balls is a woman. For which I give you the President of the United States of America.
“Overall, more girls were born compared to boys and temperature fluctuations – particularly from a hot summer to a cold winter – saw the sex ratio become temporarily more pronounced.”
What rot! It’s NOT temperature that determines sexes of babies in humans, turtles yes. It’s hormones! Utter gutter rot this article is.
Anyone, male/female, who has been through the IVF treatment cycle would know this.
It’s possible that temperature could affect the ratio of male to female sperm.
However, as someone else pointed out, if temperature did affect the ratio, then you would be able to see it in the ratios of males to females in cold vs hot climates and between one season and another year round.
Since no such difference has been detected seasonally or geographically, despite temperature swings 20 to 30 times greater than the 0.7C claimed by AGW advocates, that pretty well disproves the theory.
Right!
Well, if they were all looking like Nichelle Nichols, I would be happy!
If one is hot for Uhura, One is old.
zoe saldana?
I am guilty of being old. I had no choice!
Me too Patrick.
Yes and the alternative is worse!
I was thinking a few days ago about the list of things caused by alleged global warming, and was wondering if they would try the sex ratio next. Must be psychic eh.
I recall the ratio quoted in school biology in the 60s as male 104.x female 100. The teacher’s explanation went something like “boys are more likely to do stupid things, so it probably balances out.” As I and several others were experimenting with home-made bombs at the time, the comment stuck in my mind.
Bring them on, those women!
I think it’s too late for me, doubling of CO2 t yields doubling of women(IPCC6), what a bright future is awaiting.
With global cooling we can expect less women, so pent up frustration and increased competition over the dwindling number of females would boil over. This will lead to endless wars, similar to what we experienced last century before the place began heating up.
Yet again, CO2 does EVERYTHING…
Just out of curiosity I plotted sex ratio versus average temperature. Not really that satisfied with it (too many other factors that also correlate with a country’s average temperature), but there definitely ‘could’ be some effect on sex ratio from temperature. I’m sure there are thousands of papers on it, but a quick search didn’t give me anything satisfactory.
Sex Ratio data from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
Average Temperature data from http://lebanese-economy-forum.com/wdi-gdf-advanced-data-display/show/EN-CLC-AVRT-C/
http://i.imgur.com/jZthLm7.png?1
How much would this data be skewed by countries in which abortions are performed on “wrong-gendered” fetuses, like India?
Abortion in cultures that prefer males could be a significant factor. India’s sex ratio is abnormally high by a large margin (1.12). This works as a bias against the warm equals more girls trend. If we remove India and then the trend becomes stronger. So, good point!
I think the best way to do this would be to look at sex ratio for different months for the same country with strong seasonal temperatures e.g. Canada, Russia, etc.
I didn’t realize that Mathematica was not plotting the full range. Here is the plot against including all outliers.
http://i.imgur.com/a05KLmd.png?1
Here are the countries with the highest M/F sex ratios:
Liechtenstein 1.26
Curacao 1.16
Azerbaijan 1.13
China (Mainland) 1.12
India 1.12
Vietnam 1.12
Albania 1.11
Armenia 1.11
Georgia 1.10
Macedonia 1.08
Kosovo 1.08
What the heck is going on in Liechtenstein?
Liechtenstein has only abt 36000 members and a low fertility number, so I assume the imbalance is just a random fluctuation among a group of hundreds of newborns.
With such small numbers, it definitely could just be random. I think I read that sex ratio goes up (more boys) with the age of the woman at conception, which (if true) would bias developed countries towards higher sex ratios. Developed countries also tend to be those countries with lower average temperatures. There are too many factors really. Even a seasonal study of a single country would be susceptible to coincidental factors i.e. temperature is not the only thing that changes in summer.
No – something is going on in Lichtenstein.
Flip a coin n times and the variation in ratio will be the (square root of n) / n.
For 36,000 this comes to about 0.5%.
26% is much higher than this.
Except it’s not the square root of 36000. The sex ratio of 1.26 applies only to those born in last few years.
At birth – 1.26
under 15 – 1.09
15-64 0.99
over 65 – 0.76
Total – 0.94
Even given this it seems likely there is still something going on in Liechtenstein that occurred only in the last few years. Given your rule and a 1% birth rate, that is 360 babies a year or with an even coin flip, 180 males. The expected variation is then about 7.4 percent. 26% is way outside that so I agree, there is something going on.
Global warming causes an increase in the search for phenomena that are affected by global warming.
I see Exxon and BP being sued for damages by victims of climate-related gender dysphoria.
Bruce Jenner, call your attorney.
You beat me to it! Dammit!
AHA! Nature fights back against China’s “one child” policy.
I thought these social warriors types wanted to get rid of all men. If they have a way to clone humans then what could possibly be bad from this outcome? In progressive theory wouldn’t that solve all the world’s problems in one felt swoop?
Temperature affects sex ratio?
Hello, everybody!
We are mammals.
We are not reptiles.
More specifically, we are not marine reptiles.
To the point, we are not sea turtles.
It is very well known that sand (or nest) temperature during the incubation of the eggs affects the sex ratio of green sea turtle hatching.
Us mammals have the property of homeostasis. In other words, we control our body temperature. We have freed ourselves from the tyranny of the random, ambient environment determining what sex we become during gestation.
*sigh*
we are doomed.
We aren’t sea turtles? Are you sure? Can you prove it?
Most days I vacillate between feeling like a sea turtle and an amoeba.
Trans-speciation
LGBTQSD = lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, species dysphoria:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_dysphoria
Cogito ergo furry? 🙂
As usual, they get a two-fer; what “global warming” doesn’t do is covered by “climate change”.
Could have something to do with the fact that dudes is cool and chicks is hot…
Bring it on is what I say!
I know it works for chickens, great to know it works for chicken-littles as well.
I wonder what the femail to male ratio was in the Roman and Midieval warm periods?
That’s “fepersons”.
I sure hope that someone is keeping this list of all the things caused by Climate Change updated. When the world ends it would be a shame not to know what happened
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html
Well damnation. This is very bad news. I am selfish and don’t like to share. However, I did my part to balance out the ratio just as the temperatures were heating up. Two boys, one girl in the first half of the 1980’s. Grandkids: not done yet. The jury is out.
I’ve definitely noticed the increase in attractive women as I was passing through my 60s.
If the sex ratio really has changed, then perhaps this is a real and serious problem. However, the effect may be caused by pollution or something like excess estrogen in the environment or diet. For example, all the eels in the Hudson River, for some reason are female. It could be from PCBs, phthalates, or estrogen in the urine of women taking birth control pills that is flushed down the toilet and into the river. Also there is a large amount of soy in our modern diets. To blame global warming shifts attention away from the real culprit. Similarly coral bleaching may be caused by certain sun screen products not warming. In other countries some types of sun screen are banned. Why do we still allow these types of products in the US? Because the global warming hype shifts attention away from finding a real solution to real environmental problem.
I think, for the US at least, the environmental factor is less of a factor than stress of our hyper-legislative culture.
It’s more the prevelance of our busy-body, worry-wort, constant need of a dire-problem culture. That jacks up our hormones more than a little BPA and pesticide.
To paraphrase your point then: A free society is discrimination against women.
Sure, or a female dominant and male oppressive society is self-reinforcing, socially and biologically.
(If you buy the male/female anti-boy society narative.)
“climate change will result in more female births”
This is good news, women are smaller, they eat less, they’re prettier and they smell better.
Whether they’re smarter or not is debatable.
Smell better? Hummm…
One of the best compliments you can pay to a woman is:
“Your not as dumb as most women I know.”.
Back to the topic at hand – we are now temperature dependent, just like sea turtles and alligators.
I don’t understand these claims. A rise of 8.5 degrees lowers birth weight? So babies conceived in the winter in the UK (or say the East Coast of the US) have lower birth rates than those conceived in the summer?
As for the sex ratio, they don’t seem to be claiming more miscarriages as temperature rises, so how do you get fewer male conceptions because of temperature?
[Birth date? Or gestation date? Or average-in-womb-period-date temperature? .mod]
In terms of serious heat problems, I’m sure the UK hasn’t reached a threshold yet.
This is entirely true and I have personal, first hand experience to prove it. May I start by stating that I am known for making some bad lifestyle choices – but I blame that on AGW. Anyway, my liver decided to rebel, and in consequence I received a prescription for spirinolactone. For brevity I’ll just call it spiro – no, I won’t. Anyway, I’m one of these anal people who actually reads the information that comes with a prescription. And, one of the side effects of spiro…oops, spirinolactone … is that it causes the nipples to become sensitive, enlarged, and also for breasts to begin to develop. Well, guess what? I began to realize what an adolescent girl goes through except in my case it was 180 degrees opposite: Can’t you guys get smaller, can’t you guys get smaller? Thankfully, I didn’t start lactating. But, when I woke up in the morning with one of my hands gently caressing my chest I figured it was time to take action. (I won’t tell you where my other hand was.)
So, in a follow up appointment I mentioned this side effect of spirinolactone to the nurse and she told me it was common for men to complain about it. Ya’ think?
Anyway, this was a few years back and the unenviable appearance of grape tomato sized breasts, and erect, swollen nipples, on a 50+ year old man are now resting peacefully in the graveyard of global warming catastrophes. And it all seemed to sort of, kind of, correlate to the hiatus in global warming. So it must constitute proof, eh?
Quality, not quantity.
I used to grow Lychee, every year the ratio of superb to good to rubbish and finally rejects stayed the same. I hope it’s the same in this case as well……
So it’s the same story as global-warming-making-babies-smaller story using “a Satellite-Based Spatiotemporal Resolved Air Temperature” bollocks.
Also, I’ve heard of the five mile high club but just how many babies are actually born in the lower troposhpere where satellites take their measurements?
When scientists tested the responses of crested newt (Triturus cristatus) larvae to extreme temperatures, they found that a percentage of the animals – which normally differentiate into males or females based on genetic factors – changed sexes. When the temperatures were at the high end of their acceptable range, about half of the females became male; at lower temperatures, the reverse occurred, and about half of the males became females.
I agree with the stress aspect. Society is getting more stressed … demands more females, as just a few very happy males will suffice for nature’s purposes.
A dirty job……but SOMEBODY has to do it!
The last and final climate change headline might read, “Climate change causes the climate not to change at an alarming and frightening rate”
Great. More women. That’s what got us into this mess, in the first place. If it weren’t for women, do you think we’d have built all of those skyscrapers and stuff? No. Except for women, we’d have been down on the river, taking a nap under a shade tree, waiting for a fish to bite.
Rofl……my wife agrees with you….
Biologicaly, we probably have adapted to produce more girls to increase the population growth rate after/during stressfull times.
Fortunately, I think they may end up being right for the wrong reasons. As our society and economies develop and climate change makes our lives easier and more productive, the pressures that invigorate the social counter, the cultural preference for boys, will drop off.
This had me convinced of global warming before I found WUWT.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/26464539@N04/8534998968
definitely a hockey stick in there somewhere!
Fellow travellers, we were born too soon!
I prefer somewhere left of centre…
They studied miscarriages is Japan? Why not study gender of births in tropics vs cold climates? Otherwise why even mention climate? Summer vs winter doesn’t matter as far as climate change, because slight warming does not abolish the seasons. And they are called “experts”…ha!
Well, this is good enough for the Climate Nobel Committee. Just ask Al and Mann.
OH NO! That picture. That bathing suit. Is it proof that all the downward adjustments to past temperatures are accurate after all?!
It’s BETTER than we thought!
😎 …… But I’m sure my wife would agree. 😎
Excise me.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima.
I have been to Japan many times over the years.
Japan is not a microcosm of Earth. And the girl in the colorized 1920s art deco photo, very nice, but she is not Japanese and if she had visited Japan, for long enough, she would not want to live there either.
Too bloody late. I’m 69 this year. By the time there is a massive desperate surplus I’ll be dead.
(Yawn) Get back to me when we’ve achieved Dr. Strangelove’s optimum ratio of one male to ten females, each with sexual characteristics of “a highly stimulating nature”.
“Overall, more girls were born compared to boys and temperature fluctuations – particularly from a hot summer to a cold winter – saw the sex ratio become temporarily more pronounced” There we go again! I’ll have to change religion now! The other mob allows you to have 3 wives and 15 concubines!!!! I’ll need another job or two……
Makes me wish I was much younger. Good thing there are pills for men to help with that, though.
But what about their birth weights?
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/06/does-global-warming-make-your-baby-smaller-800-years-from-now-babies-may-be-17g-smaller/#more-43060
And will they eat chocolate?
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/06/chocolate-is-the-fountain-of-youth-eat-blocks-live-long-be-slim/#more-43067
Global warming NOW!
This will only partly make up for the missing millions of female births in China during the other grand policy mistake and over reach.
Is that Bruce Jenner in the picture?
If it is, he’s going the wrong way.
I thought it was Frank Maloney
I assume that by the exacting standards of modern climate science, this claim will have been checked by confirming that male to female ratio is low in hot countries and high in cold ones? Which figure was that in the article?
Likely the Chinese will be pleased.
Nothing to do with increased estrogen-like substances in the diet.
I guess you could hypothesise that as the population became denser, the danger of alpha males getting warlike might increase, so adaptive evolution would favour creating more women and more wimps.
But I’d go with biochemicals in the food personally. Clearer lines of evidence, clearer biochemical mechanisms. Sperm counts dropping etc etc.
Oh, good, says red-blooded male person Keith.
Need to balance off the killing of female babies in places like Communist China and Iran/Iraq (where boys were bred as cannon fodder for the war between them).
Last I heard baby gender was heavily influenced by diet. So stop eating ice cream, watermelon, …
… Keith is silly on Wedne_S_day.
Re : r says: June 16, 2015 at 6:41 am
Well, we’d have to know the life cycle of eels.
In some species the female eats the male after he has done his part in procreation?