Global warming will kill your sex life, according to a paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The study – called Maybe Next Month? Temperature Shocks, Climate Change, and Dynamic Adjustments in Birth Rates – examined how birth rates change over time in the US, depending on the weather.

What it found is that on days where the temperature exceeded 80 degrees F there was a large decline in births eight to ten months later.

Though the researchers found that the drop off was mitigated slightly by couples making up for lost time – as shown by a subsequent rise in the birth rate – this increase still wasn’t quite enough to make up for all the babies who would have been bred if the hot weather hadn’t happened.

This, the authors conclude, augurs ill for human populations if “global warming” ever seriously takes off:

The lack of a full rebound suggests that increased temperatures due to climate change may reduce population growth rates in the coming century. As an added cost, climate change will shift even more births to the summer months when third trimester exposure to dangerously high temperatures increases. Based on our analysis of historical changes in the temperature-fertility relationship, we conclude air conditioning could be used to substantially offset the fertility costs of climate change.

What the authors appear not quite to have grasped is that if things ever get as bad as the climate alarmists say it will then their final proposed solution won’t be an option.

That’s because, long before global mean temperatures reach danger point, frivolities like air conditioning (and ice and daily showers) will have been banned on pain of death by the enviro-regulatory elite. This in turn will reduce the birth rate still further which is, of course, exactly what the greens want.

As one of their most cherished texts put it: “The earth has a cancer and the cancer is man.” So maybe the cannier among them will come round to realising that global warming isn’t such a terrible thing, after all.