From the correlation is not causation department, and Mother Jones, comes this absurdity:
A new study from researchers in California has reached some astonishing new conclusions. An interdisciplinary team composed of members from physics, physiology, statistics, and atmospheric sciences began with results from a metastudy of sperm concentration in men.
This study (chart on left) confirmed that sperm concentrations have been declining since the early 70s. At the same time, measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory show that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have been rising during the same period (chart on right):
After validating a parameterless model based on surprisingly common consumer software packages, the team derived a transformation equation based on τ = 1 at 1973 for the Mauna Loa data:
y = π +κx, where π = -238 and κ = -ln(11)
…
As the authors put it, “Our global manhood is being steadily shriveled into effeminancy by our huge and rising emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
Riiiighht….
The paper:
Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis.
- Published 2017 in Human reproduction update
-
DOI:10.1093/humupd/dmx022
BACKGROUND Reported declines in sperm counts remain controversial today and recent trends are unknown. A definitive meta-analysis is critical given the predictive value of sperm count for fertility, morbidity and mortality. OBJECTIVE AND RATIONALE To provide a systematic review and meta-regression analysis of recent trends in sperm counts as measured by sperm concentration (SC) and total sperm count (TSC), and their modification by fertility and geographic group.
You can correlate just about anything to CO2 and global warming:
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I’ve got HUGE hands. Believe me.
Er, it’s odd that they did not consider that men may simply be having more sex and thus less sperm build up. Makes sense to me. Just saying.
Charles Hugley
Are you implying that
having more s-e-x
caused D. Anderson’s
hands to grow larger?
They should haver claimed
man’s “favorite organ”
is shrinking from more CO2
— well, they are getting close,
but I’m very confident
they will say “that” someday,
as I predicted about
a decade ago.
You tell men their favorite organ
is going to shrink, and they’ll
listen to you — tell them it
will shrink and
“be stolen”
or “fall off”,
and they’ll do
anything you say
to prevent it.
See WikiPedia for details (really):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro_(medicine)
Hopefully this comment
won’t start a discussion
on the important topic mentioned,
or I’ll probably regret posting this
under my real name,
when I could have
used a moniker such as:
“Englebert Lipshitz”
Bollox!
Researchers from California, where marijuana is legal.
Living in California
causes the loss
of one IQ point a year,
so there is no need
for Californians
to smoke pot as a
“stimulant” to write
a stupid article
or study.
No it’s true HotScot and it’s all caused by lack of pirates any good Pastafarian knows this. If you don’t know the background google it. It’s probably more an in joke within the physics community as a reminder that correlation does not equal causation something that get lost in pseudoscience where the junk above belongs.
That was my thought, too. People publishing jokes like this is could be a sign that skepticism about the global warming bollox is actually widespread in academia.
michael hurt
Unfortunately,
leftists will believe
just about anything
preceded by:
“Scientists say … ”
and in the bad old days,
of O’Bummer,
they’d believe everything
preceded by:
“The Obama Administration announced … ”
That statement is based
on my own “experiments”
with people I know,
unfortunately almost all leftists.
“Scientists say there will be almost
no snow in the winter, twenty years
from now”, worked every time.
More warmth should lead to less shrinkage.
Try the relationship with HFCS.
Sounds like this observation might get any young men who are climate deniers to take notice. We are talking serious consequences after all.
Too many snowflakes in their sample ?
They probably have a count equal to their IQ …..
OK, the title is a groaner and the conclusion is preposterous. True, men-darling’s testicles need to be cooler than the rest of the body, but there would be approximately zero sperm reduction from air temperatures that we could survive in.
However, i keep pointing out that not all the CO2 rise is from fossil fuels. Some is from poison-based agriculture killing soil organisms, whose carbon gets oxidized to CO2. That reduces soil fertility. Total leaf cover is way up–but micronutrients–vitamins and minerals–are reduced. It is likely indeed that this has something to do with male (and female) reproductive problems.
Still, it is known and proven that plastics are messing with males throughout nature. There are also herbicides and other toxins. Many of these things have feminizing effects on everything from fish to frogs, alligators–and people.
Poison based agriculture???
Now that the know-nothing wing has been heard from, can we get back to science.
PS: It’s been postulated but there is no science that actually shows that plastics have any such impacts.
Ditto for herbicides and so on.
And the correlation between the contraceptive pill use & pregnancy rates is?????????? It has been “speculated” that sperm counts in younger generations of men & their mothers’ use of the pill could be significant in the long term!
If there’s one thing too sacred for a Leftist/Green to even whisper against, it is the Pill. But you are certainly onto something, as well as the estrogen pollution that passes through our sewage treatment processes
“There are also herbicides and other toxins. Many of these things have feminizing effects”
It’s well known that God created the Man first. God then used herbicides and toxins to create the Woman.
Careful calling all women toxic might bring you under the gaze of #metoo
Well it’s a long time since they “proved” the rainfall in the West of Scotland is directly related to the number of people riding bicycles in West Africa.
….millennials drink a lot of plastic bottled water….they will become extinct
One can only hope so.
I believe ‘shrinkage’ is probably caused by turning men into soy boys and the feminists bashing toxic masculinity to the point that they don’t want masculinity period. Are you sure this isn’t another hoax paper that a bunch of wise guys tried to see if it could get through peer review?
The MJ article is a spoof. They say so (indirectly) near the bottom of the article. At least, that’s the way I interpret what they say.
IMPORTANT NOTE: My readers are mostly liberals, and believe me, I know what you’re thinking. Those are just two straight lines. The fancy Greek letters in the equation just change the slope and offset of one of them. Correlation doesn’t mean causation. And you’ve provided no causal mechanism at all.
Right. I get it. Now STFU. Do you want to fight climate change or not? If you do, there’s no harm in a little white lie that convinces men their balls are shrinking, is there? If you think about it, it’s one of the few things that might actually get a reaction from conservative white guys. So just go along, OK?
After all, we have to exaggerate the consequences to get the public’s attention. Wasn’t that what Dr P Jones sadi more than a decade ago? And it is up to each climate scientist, individually, to determine how far he or she will bend their personal and professional integrity. Think of the children, and the polar bears.
I wasn’t sure which makes it a bad one. I mean if your spoof and satire for reaction you need to offend everyone.
Progressive men, maybe.
Or maybe that’s a prerequisite.
Well, that one solved a mystery that has puzzled my wife greatly.
So, emissions are affecting emissions?
It’s the ever increasing chemical coctail folks.
When you compare dedicated long term organic farmers to the average comparable person buying supermarket stuff, the sperm counts of the “organic” group is way better off. CO2 is just a spurious correlation here. How toxic would CO2 have been on any kind of balls and sperms during evolutionary times. More CO2 means better conditions for organic farming and more viable sperms per volume unit. Go for it.
Can you provide a link to the mythical study that you are referencing?
PS: Have you accounted for any of the hundreds of other potential explanations? Such as those who are willing to pay more for organics are health nuts in general?
It’s the cold. Cold will do that to the male appendage.
Hi. Need some days to pick this up. As far as I recall this was a study on Danish organic farmers. I enjoy many a comment here, but some rway off into the dark conservative corner. The world is not as simple and relationships are often not as the simplest rednecks like them to be. More CO2 is good for you, your balls, your sperm’s motility (maybe not relevant when the gene line is developed in the early testicles of a male foetus) but clearly for plant growth and less use of chemicals when farming food items.
I am with MarkW people claiming something is what Snake Oil salesman and Con man do.
Proof or you are a Snake Oil salesman and liar.
This is really hitting below the belt.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is going to use this, and her personal measurements of old, white men for her next very important psychology research paper. It will of course be published by the NY Times.
Why bother doing research when you can pull data from “recovered memory”?
Well “DUH”, ……. SURPRISE, SURPISE, SURPRISE.
It was also in the early 70s that the teenage and 20-something females began “freely” giving teenage and 20-something male friends and 1st time acquaintances all the sex they desired ….. and then some.
So iffen researchers had been measuring/counting sperm concentrations during the past 48 years then of course it would/should have been declining simply because the male is not capable of producing great quantities of sperm and semen every 5 to 8 hours every day, ….. day after day for weeks or months at a time. To wit:
It’s probably got more to do with feminist activism than anything else.
…or recent “Cosmopolitan” cover-girls.
A natural correction to the overpopulation problem!
Just to be clear, MOTHER JONES is the publication making the absurd causal connection between sperm count and CO2. The study on sperm count itself says nothing about CO2 — it’s just a study about sperm count.
All ridicule, then, should be directed to MOTHER JONES.
That publication gives mothers a bad name.
There is a piece of New Zealand Urban Myth from the 1950s:
The NZ Govt Department of Scientific Research supposedly had the testicles of some rams (male sheep) wrapped in a tea cosies during the mating season to see what effect warmer testicles would have.
A teacosy is a woollen jacket to snugly cover a tea pot to keep its contents warmer by reducing the tea pot’s rate of heat loss. The ewes the treated rams serviced were tracked and number of progeny were compared with those of the previous year. The teacosy treated rams had a lower success rate of impregnation, from which the conclusion was drawn that increasing warmth lowered ram fertility.
A control experiment using teacosies loaded with ice cubes was not, according to the legend, considered.
Note: reproductive performance of both rams and ewes in a herd of sheep is closely tracked as it defined which animals were more likely to be culled.
The classic was … number of Rolling Stones hits vs oil production
I blame mainly overweighness/obesity, there’s a known mechanism for excess body fat to decrease testosterone. I am slightly suspicious that bisphenol A, in thermal paper and coatings on the inside of many cans, might have something to do with decreased sperm count.
So, I Guess they used the official IPCC proxies for testicle volume corrected for age and ethnicity.
So that’s what happened to me!
Here I thought it was age and prostate cancer.
I demand a monthly compensation check from Uncle Sam. /sarc
A desperate attempt by the AGW weenies to enlist the support of real men for their hoax.