Is there anything climate change can’t do? It’s making the world hotter, but it’s also to blame when climate protesters are left shivering in snowstorms. Climate change causes increased prostitution (but it also puts brothels out of business). Climate change is such a tricky beast that it makes Antarctic ice grow and shrink.
No doubt some ‘scientist’, somewhere, has managed to conjoin two of the biggest fairy-tales of modern times, and link climate change to the gender pay gap. But that’s just amateur-hour stuff.
What about the climate height gap?
Sky News host James Morrow says scientists have compiled a study which states that “climate change and hot weather” have been making people “short”.
“They just compared the average heights of people in different countries and they decided that, well because, according to the study this is what they said.
“The average Dutchman is six feet tall whereas in India the average height is five foot five inches tall – so they decided that must be weather … somehow that makes people shorter. Critical height theory is what’s happening here.“
The Australian
Perhaps there’s an opening here for the Goodies’ replacement for apartheid #8211; apart-height. Never trust short people, anyway. Randy Newman was right.
But, jokes aside, what did the study actually say? Turns out, Morrow was reporting it faithfully.
Climate change may cause humans to become smaller as the planet continues to warm, according to a new study.
Scientists used more than 300 fossils to track how human bodies have fluctuated in size over thousands of years.
They found a clear link that people living in colder environments were larger, while people in warmer regions were smaller.
This trend continues today, the scientists add, with people in colder parts of the planet tending to be bigger than those in warmer places. For example, the average Dutch man is 6ft tall, whereas the average Indian man is just 5ft 5inches tall.
The Telegraph
But, there’s just one teensy problem with that hypothesis: the Dutch have only got tall very recently.
A century or so ago, Americans were the tallest people in the world. It’s only over the last century that the Dutch — and other Northern Europeans — have really shot up.
What climate change has occurred in Northern Europe over the last century? It’s got marginally warmer. So the Dutch should have shrunk, surely?
It is also true that the children of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii grew to be markedly taller than their parents. Yet Hawaii’s climate is markedly warmer than Japan’s.
The Dutch have become so much taller in such a short period that scientists chalk most of it up to their changing environment. As the Netherlands developed, it became one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of cheese and milk. An increasingly egalitarian distribution of wealth and universal access to health care may also have helped.
Still, scientists wonder whether natural selection has played a role as well. For men, being tall is associated with better health, attractiveness to the opposite sex, a better education, and higher income—all of which could lead to more reproductive success[…]Yet studies in the United States don’t show this.
Science
All in all, it appears that the reasons for variations in average human heights are complex and poorly understood. Just blaming it on climate seems a pretty poor hypothesis.
Still, it’s surely just churlish to suggest that bias in funding leads researchers to link anything and everything to climate change, just because that’s where the grant money is.
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