Essay by Eric Worrall
But childhood poor quality water, disease and nutritional deficits also contribute.
DEC. 9, 2025 / 10:12 AM
Climate change might slow intellectual development, experts warn
By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay News
Climate change could pose a threat to children’s intellectual development, a new study says.
Kids growing up under higher-than-usual temperatures — average temps above 86 degrees Fahrenheit — are less likely to meet developmental milestones for literacy and mathematics, researchers reported Monday in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
“Because early development lays the foundation for lifelong learning, physical and mental health, and overall well-being, these findings should alert researchers, policymakers and practitioners to the urgent need to protect children’s development in a warming world,” lead researcher Jorge Cuartas, an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University, said in a news release.
For the study, researchers analyzed data for more than 19,600 3- and 4-year-olds in the African nations of Gambia, Madagascar, Malawi and Sierra Leone; in Georgia, a nation on the Black Sea; and in Palestine.
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These effects were more pronounced among kids from poor households, those who lacked access to clean water and those living in urban areas.
Read more: https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2025/12/09/Climate-change-might-slow-intellectual-development-experts-warn/2241765292796/
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The abstract of the study;
Ambient heat and early childhood development: a cross-national analysis
Jorge Cuartas, Lenin H. Balza, Andrés Camacho, Nicolás Gómez-Parra
First published: 08 December 2025
Abstract
Background
Increasing evidence suggests that climate change, along with its cascading impacts on ecosystems, societies, and communities, has significant effects on both physical and mental health. However, less is known about how exposure to excessive heat early in life may influence the development of foundational skills that shape lifelong developmental trajectories. This study examined the effects of ambient heat on early childhood development across six countries, using geographic and time-stamped data on child development and ambient temperature.
Methods
Our primary outcome is the Early Childhood Development Index. We used linear probability models with geographic and seasonality fixed effects to account for baseline climatic conditions, as well as other individual and contextual covariates to address potential selection bias. The sample comprised 19,607 children aged three and four from Georgia, The Gambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and the State of Palestine, all participants in Multiple Indicators Cluster Surveys collected between 2017 and 2020. We merged these data with temperature data from the ERA5-Land Monthly Aggregated Climate Dataset, calculating the mean monthly maximum temperature children experienced from birth to interview.
Results
We found that children exposed to average maximum temperatures above 32°C were less likely to be developmentally on track compared to those exposed to cooler temperatures, even after accounting for baseline average climatic conditions and other covariates. Domain-specific models indicate that these effects were most pronounced in literacy and numeracy skills. Subgroup analyses revealed that the negative impacts were particularly severe for children in economically disadvantaged households and urban areas, and for those lacking access to adequate water and sanitation.
Conclusions
This study highlights the potential impact of excessive heat on early childhood development, emphasizing the need for policies and interventions that enhance preparedness, adaptation, and resilience to support human development in an rapidly warming world.
Read more: https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.70081
If heat is the major negative factor in childhood development, why is Singapore so smart?
The sample – “children aged three and four from Georgia, The Gambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and the State of Palestine” – for some reason excluded places like Singapore.
Singapore, which sits almost directly on the tropics, is a nation of high achievers, and consistently achieves high education rankings, and is frequently cited as an example other nations should try to emulate.
There is an obvious difference between Singapore and the nations included in the study: Singapore has a stable society, good food, clean water, and a high quality medical system.
Let’s just say I’m not convinced heat alone plays a significant role.
Get out the pink slips. The people who did the study should be fired, the head of the institution they work for should be fired, whoever approved the grant should be fired, the peer reviewer should be fired, the publisher should be fired. I am tired of my money being wasted on crap like this. There are useful projects that could really use the resources and money wasted on this pile of crap.
Somehow a lack of assessment of the educational systems in those targeted areas is absent.
Note how some of the key words in these types of studies are “could’ and “might”, but if we were to add “not” after each of them, the studies would make just as much sense or they might indicate there’s a chance but no guarantee of these occurrences actually materializing. In other words, since there’s no conclusive evidence either way, no one should lose sleep over the issue which is just another variation of the climate alarmism con-job.
OK, so the writers of this paper should go to Amazonia and explain to all those indigenous tribes how being born and growing up there makes Them Stupid.
Or perhaps they could try it in Indonesia.
Perhaps explain it to the Zulu or Tutsi or Hutu.
There are some wonderful Head Hunting tribes in Brazil that might like to hear how Stupid they are.
Wow, slurred everyone who grew up in a tropical country. Pretty stupid.
Singapore is full of intelligent Chinese People.
This explains why so many middle easterners act like retarded inbreds.
That is an immature comment. You can do better.
These people are delusional, the sky is green wherever it is they live.
It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.
said he, peering into his crystal ball.
/sarc
It’s obvious from the evidence that even though women are scientifically illiterate, but much smarter than Blacks. Just look at the figures – the Nobel Committee consists of intelligent, well educated people, who call on the greatest experts in the world to ensure that only the smartest people are awarded a Nobel Prize.
Mind you, Ahmed Zewail received a Nobel Prize for Chemistry, even though he is a Muslim. and an Arab. Luckily, not black (or female, possibly).
/sarc off
Where is the State of Palestine?
Still trying to figure out how the population of Gaza are Palestinian given Palestine was never a country and Hamas, the ruling class in Gaza, overthrew the Palestinian Authority some 20 years ago.
From the article: “Kids growing up under higher-than-usual temperatures”
Except, that is not happening. There are no higher-than-usual temperatures. The premise is wrong, therefore your conclusions are wrong that higher-than-usual temperatures cause stupidity. There is a LOT of stupidity in the world, especially in the Western world, but it is caused by something other than higher-than-usual temperatures.
My prime candidate for causing stupidity in the Western world is the lying, Radical Leftwing Media, who lie all the time as a means of getting Radical Leftists elected to office to carry out the destructive Radical Leftist ideology.
Temperature has nothing to do with it.
You are wrong. They do not lie to get anyone elected. They lie to get ad clicks having become profit centers for large corporations who only are valued by their revenue streams.
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
Nutrition has a much greater effect on brain development than a few degrees of ambient temperature. My father was a medical missionary in rural Nigeria in the 1950s. Persuading the parents to feed children one bantam sized egg per week to supplement the diet of mealie porridge transformed children. There are huge differences in diet between the communities studied which do not seem to have been accounted for.
Your evidence supports the hypothesis that the whole the analysis cherry picked a single factor and used it to explain a complex situation. Seems like CO2 as the climate “control knob” all over again.
Such propaganda needs consequences. If they want to write this stuff, then they need to be tried as a propagandist attempting to create political chaos.
I can think of 50,000 (COP30) defendants in that trial.
How bloody racist can they get?
Well, would you know that surveying dumbassed countries would reveal dumbassed conclusions. I’d proffer that poverty is their #1 reason for being dumbassed … same argument applies to the researchers who came up with this BS.
If we, as a species, were so fragile, then we would not exist today. There are points in time, during which we were wiped down to a few thousand specimens, and we would not have recovered from that. The problem here isn’t the environment, which we, and every other species, are continuingly adapting to, but rather universities that accept students with lower than average IQs, and then encourage them toward political activism cloaked as science, and allow them to receive PhDs for dissertations framed on ridiculous hypotheses.
But climate change, the temperature gradient, is greater at the poles, and less at the equator, so shouldn’t the polar areas show a greater impact? If you want to negate the effects of water, food, and shelter, then you first must choose, randomly, from societies in all regions that have similar qualities of water, sufficiency of food and shelter. Admittedly, it would be difficult to find cold regions with poor quality water, etc., but possibly Andes, bombed out regions in Ukraine, some parts of Siberia, or remote Native American tribes, which have not received government assistance. Now compare to your tropical hot spots with similarly bad characteristics. Right now, all that we know is that places with poor living conditions and lack of political stability (war zones) don’t do as well as people in Georgia.