Is there anything global warming can’t do?

Another Side Effect of Climate Change and El Niño Events? Shorter Kids – MoJo

The weather pattern known as El Niño could be stunting kids’ growth—even years after the extreme storms abate, a new study finds. Researchers at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, led by assistant professor of medicine and international health William Checkley, say they have conducted the first study on the long-term health consequences of El Niño weather systems. According to the paper published today in BioMed Central, children born around the time of the severe 1997-’98 El Niño living in coastal Peru, one of the regions hardest hit by the weather pattern, are significantly shorter for their age than children born before El Niño hit. […]

The team measured the height, weight, and fat, and muscle of a random sample of 2,095 children born between 1991 and 2001 in Tumbes, Peru—a city on the northwestern coast. A decade after the extreme ’97 El Niño, in November and December of 2008 and 2009, they found that, on average, the children born during and shortly after El Niño were shorter and had less lean mass, or body weight minus fat, than children born before the event.

HT: Twitchy