Climate change could lead to more hot days and diminish the frequency of sexual intercourse, a new study claims.
"Hot weather leads to diminished 'coital frequency,' according to a new working paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research,"
Bloomberg Businessweek reported this month. "Three economists studied 80 years of U.S. fertility and temperature data and found that when it’s hotter than 80 degrees F, a large decline in births follows within 10 months."
Alan Barreca, lead study author and associate professor of economics at Tulane University, said that his team's findings are not meant to be alarmist.
"I wouldn't say it is the end of human civilization, but I would suggest it is going to add to the cost of climate change," he said,
according to CNN.
"Temperature's role has probably been pretty negligible compared to other things like access to birth control (and) increasing labor opportunities for women . . . but it would suggest that, if anything, it's adding on to the other things going on."
Barreca's findings are based on climate-change models that predict the number of hot days will increase from 30 a year to roughly 90.
Those models were combined with birth data going back to 1931. When the temperature soars over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the data show that there are 0.4 percent fewer births nine months later.
Theoretically speaking, that means that each hot day eliminated 1,165 coital sessions that would have led to pregnancies and birth.
"Over a larger period, this could mean about 100,000 fewer births in the United States every year," CNN explained.