If Climate Change affects poor children’s brains, then the answer is fossil fuels and cheap air conditioning
By Jo Nova
It’s as if they’re trying to guilt trip people into installing some solar panels and catching the bus.
Climate Change, it seems, is linked to brain damage in children. Specifically poor children. It leaves them with lasting effects on brain development and particularly “white matter”. (And what kind of evil sod are you if you won’t buy an EV to save the brain of a kid in Barking & Dagenham? “Do it for the children!”)
The editors of the British Medical Journal review many recent papers talking about the dire situation:
Climate change has serious implications for children’s brain health
British Medical Journal
Emerging evidence suggests that factors related to climate change, such as ambient heat exposure, can affect the brain.5 Heat stress has been linked to disruptions in neurodevelopment, slow cognitive and emotional functioning, long term learning loss and memory deficits, worsening of neurological and mental disorders, and increased permeability of the blood-brain barrier.6 Early exposure to extreme weather events, including antenatal exposure, has also been associated with an increased risk of anxiety, depression, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, educational underperformance, diminished self-regulation, and psychiatric disorders in later life.78
They call for “Evidence Based Policy” and talk about “interventions” and screening, and public health campaigns, but what they don’t say are the words “fossil fuel” or “cheap electricity”. If the worst effects are found in children in poor socioeconomic groups, the answer surely is that the poor need access to air conditioning. Making the world a tenth of a degree cooler in 100 years (if that were even possible) isn’t going to be much use to them.
What if reckless experiments with electricity grids are causing brain damage and mental health issues with children? Would anybody care if pushing the price of electricity up was hurting reading scores and neurodevelopment now?
Oh. It’s not just heat, it’s cold too:
Weird connection found between temperature and brain development
by Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost, July 1, 2024
The study [by Granes et al] found that exposure to both cold and heat during early life was associated with significant changes in the microstructure of white matter. Specifically, cold exposure from the third month of pregnancy to the fifteenth month of life and heat exposure from the ninth month of life to 2.6 years of age were linked to higher global MD values at ages 9 to 12 years. Higher MD values indicate poorer white matter microstructure, which can affect neural connectivity and cognitive function.
Let’s give them air conditioning and heating too.
“It was interesting to see that there were some differences in the effects when we compared children living in neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status vs those who were living in neighborhoods with a higher socioeconomic status, as we could see more effects in the first group,” Granés said. “Our hypothesis/interpretation of these findings is that these differences could be explained by poorer housing conditions or energy poverty (but this should be further investigated).”
While this study provides valuable insights, it has some limitations. One key limitation is the lack of indoor temperature data. Since children, especially infants, spend significant time indoors, indoor temperatures could differ significantly from outdoor estimates, potentially affecting the accuracy of the findings.
Call me a skeptic that temperature could have such a detrimental effect on mammals that evolved in far harsher and more variable climates than anything we deal with today. Indeed, both cold and heat exposure are beneficial in short doses — almost like we evolved to deal with exercise in the heat and fishing in the cold. I make the point about air conditioning because it’s Kyrptonite to a pack of toady fashion-queens pretending to care about poor children. If they did care, they’d campaign for cheap electricity.
Airconditioners already save 20,000 lives in USA each year. And they reduce indoor air pollution too. Burn oil, and save the children!
REFERENCES
Climate change has serious implications for children’s brain health, BMJ 2024;386:q1588, doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q1588 (Published 22 July 2024)
Granés, L., Essers, E., Ballester, J. et al. Early life cold and heat exposure impacts white matter development in children Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 760–766 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02027-w
