A New Explanation For the Plight of Winter Babies

Ant passes along a Wall Street Journal report on research that turned up a new explanation for the lifelong challenges experienced by winter babies. "Children born in the winter months already have a few strikes against them. Study after study has shown that they test poorly, don't get as far in school, earn less, are less healthy, and don't live as long as children born at other times of year. Researchers have spent years documenting the effect and trying to understand it... A key assumption of much of that research is that the backgrounds of children born in the winter are the same as the backgrounds of children born at other times of the year. ... [Economist] Mr. Hungerman was doing research on sibling behavior when he noticed that children in the same families tend to be born at the same time of year. Meanwhile, Ms. Buckles was examining the economic factors that lead to multiple births, and coming across what looked like a relationship between mothers' education levels and when children were born." Here's a chart in which the effect — small but significant — jumps out unmistakeably.

Comments

Re:Correllation is Not Causation

[Iron Condor]

And don't think there a correlation so profoundly stupid that someone won't publish a "scientific" paper on it.

Sunspots influence the global weather in a measurable (and well-understood) way. Grains grown in a climate either at the upper or lower end of the temperature scale at which they thrive (wheat in Britain, for example, or corn in Arizona) can be pushed into (measurable and predictable) lower harvests and even complete mis-harvests. Why and how global economic measures like the total GDP and the DJA can be sensitive to such things as the global success of food production is left as an exercise to the reader.

Can you find it in your heart to read up to these things? One of the very real, very measurable and very predictable dangers of global warming is the well-studied, well-known and well-understood link between just a degree or two global temperature change and the measurable economic penalties going with it. These things have been measured, tested and modeled for years. (Amongst a myriad of other things, this is one of the ways we know that sunspots are NOT responsible for the drastic global average temperature rise in the 20th century. Because their effect on the global energy budget is measurable.).