A trio of academics, responsible for the paper “Temperature and Maltreatment of Young Children“, did not mention Lindsay Clancy by name, but you will forgive my lapse into clickbait titling when you realize they had women like her in mind. Here is their Abstract (with my emphasis):
We estimate the impacts of temperature on alleged and substantiated child maltreatment among young children using administrative data from state child protective services agencies. Leveraging short-term weather variation, we find increases in the number of young children involved in cases of alleged and substantiated maltreatment during hot periods. Additional analysis identifies neglect as the temperature-sensitive maltreatment type, and we find some evidence that adaptation via air conditioning mitigates this relationship. Given that climate change will increase exposure to extreme temperatures, our findings speak to additional costs of climate change among the most vulnerable.
So you see, it had to have been “climate change” that led to Lindsay Clancy to walk calmly up to her first child, brutally grip its throat and, well, you know the rest. Some TikTok ladies are suggesting Clancy’s husband was the real culprit, he being a man. But I think we can now agree that, if our authors are right, that “climate change” at least shares in his guilt.
Our authors are Mary F Evans, Ludovica Grazze, and Jessamyn Schaller, all ladies (one presumes: I did not check), and so bring that necessary female perspective to science. Well, it must be necessary, or so many wouldn’t be so keen on lady scientists.
Anyway, let’s look at how “climate change” is said to cause women—and men!—to mistreat their children.
Correlations. Which are sufficient proof in academia that cause has been discovered. Especially if those correlations can be blessed with wee P-values. Yes, indeed: a wee P means the correlation has been transformed—nobody knows how this magic works—into a genuine bona fide causation.
Here’s how they got their correlations from that equation above (again my emphasis):
Our research is the first systematic analysis of the relationship between temperature and child maltreatment in the United States. We use an administrative census of reports to state child protective services (CPS) agencies to create county-level measures of alleged and substantiated maltreatment of young children by semimonthly period from 2006 to 2016 for hundreds of US counties. We link those measures to modeled daily weather data, counting the number of days in each period on which the maximum temperature falls within each of nine bins.
You will, of course, have noticed that no individual child, or child abuser, was measured, and that not even temperature was measured at the time of the abuse, or alleged abuse, but was instead modeled. So we are well into the Double Epidemiologist Fallacy territory.
The very next paragraph begins: “We find that temperatures higher than 20 Celsius lead to increases in alleged and substantiated maltreatment of young children.”
I didn’t emphasize alleged again, because that joke has grown cold. As have their threshold temperatures, for 20 C is, in civilized units, a mere 68 F. At 67 F, the kids can sleep comfortably, but at 68F off come the gloves—did Lindsay Clancy wear gloves?—or out pops the exercise bands.
By the way, at what temperature do most people keep their homes?
Singapore ought to be a hot bed—a hot bed! get it? get it?—of child abuse, because days below this meager threshold are rare indeed. Singapore’s rate of child abuse is about 2.8 per 1,000 children. Sweden, which is a lot colder than Singapore, has “concern reports” for about 100 per 1,000 children.
A lot of that depends on all kinds of definitions, interpretations, nuances, methods of counting, and so on and so forth, such as whether “concern reports” are equivalent to abuse. Which rather is the point. How can you tease how much of a cause weather is in any real abuse? Well, you can’t. (See the Thursday Classes for more, because this is only one paper in a tsunami of them.)
But if you want a more consistent way of counting, according to our own beneficent government the top five states in child abuse (per 1,000 children) are:
- Maine: 15.4
- Massachusetts: 14.9
- Mississippi: 14.9
- West Virginia: 14.7
- Kentucky: 14.1
Maine and Massachusetts are a lot cooler a lot longer of the year than Mississippi or Kentucky. Yet their abuse rates are higher than temperatures which are hotter.
The states with the lowest rates were:
- New Jersey: 1.2
- Pennsylvania : 1.7
- Washington : 2.1
- Virginia : 2.4
- Hawaii: 2.6
The average temperature of Hawaii in winter is a full ten degrees warmer than the beating threshold, and a lot hotter in summer. Yet it’s right there at the bottom of abuse rate, way below colder states.
The claims in this paper represent a common failing in science: failure to make a lick of sense. They had their models, they had their booger man, they had their correlations, they got their wee Ps (in the equivalent form of confidence intervals here), all of which were sufficient to do science. Why bother to check if it makes sense in the world? It makes sense in academic practice, and that’s all that matters.
After all, they did rediscover Summer:
Our results suggest instead that child neglect is measurably responsive to high temperatures—parents are intentionally or unintentionally allowing their young children to be in dangerous situations on hotter days. Examples of such behavior could include …allowing children to play unattended in ways that could place them in danger…
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