A lot of hot air

Last night I returned from a trip to the economic powerhouse that is India, to find this article on the SciDev.net site, about a study suggesting that the reason poor countries produce fewer scientific papers than others is that they're too hot.

I tend to steer clear of research that links temperature to a country's success. India and China dominated the world in science, technology and business centuries before Europe and the US took the lead... A bit of heat didn't seem to stop them back then. Conflating the two variables sounds a bit spurious to me.

Nevertheless, the US research claims that "Poor countries produced fewer scientific papers in hot years — a rise of one degree Celsius was associated with a nine per cent drop in the number of papers published... one possibility reaches back to the eighteenth century French philosopher Montesquieu's claim that higher temperatures directly weaken people's productivity."

Really? So scientists just put down their test tubes when it gets a bit steamy? The actual reason couldn't possibly be political hurdles or poverty? Next thing you know they'll be blaming the string of hot summers for Britain's recession.

Photo of the Mumbai skyline from Amsterdam.nl.