Will climate change put women in the ascendant? - Julian Cribb

Surviving the 21st Century - Julian Cribb

AUTHOR Julian Cribb AM is an Australian science writer and author of seven books on the human existential emergency. His latest book is How to Fix a Broken Planet (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

In one of the more startling side-effects of global warming, the hotter it gets, the more babies are being born female.

The masculo-patriarchy are in for a fresh shock. 

Besides the massive decline in fertility, increasing gender confusion and loss of male identity that is roiling western manhood, there are now signs that one of the consequences of global heating will be a female majority human population.

That’s the evidence from a new study covering millions of births in 34 countries across India and Sub-Saharan Africa, places greatly affected by overheating. 

Essentially, UK scientist Dr Jasmine Ghany and team found that, the hotter it gets, the more the gender ratio at birth skews towards females.

As maximum temperatures climb above 20 degrees C, the tendency increases towards fewer male and more female births – even in societies that prefer boy babies.

The theory appears to be that extreme heat stress on the mother leads to a greater proportion of male babies dying in the womb. That these fatalities are natural, and not the result of sex selection by the parents, is supported by the strong preference for male offspring in the societies.

The irony in all this is that global warming, along with the other nine catastrophic threats to human civilisation and society, is almost entirely man-made. 

It is men who mine the oil, coal and gas, who fell the forests, clear the land, make and distribute the poisons that are disrupting human sex hormones, build the nukes and who lie, habitually and selfishly, about the consequences. 

Women tend to a somewhat more realistic view. 

Figure 1. Births per woman, 1950-2025. Source UN.

For example, women collectively have long understood or sensed the world is overpopulated, and have been methodically lowering the birth rate, almost universally (except in very poor societies), from 5 babies per woman to 2.2 over the past half century.

While superficially, scholars are inclined to ascribe the decline in female fertility to things like education, healthcare, careers and equality for women, it is hard not to suspect something is also happening at the species level – a Baby Bust reciprocal to the Baby Boom that followed the slaughter of 65-85 million people in WWII.

Simultaneously has come the near-panic among the aggressive males who form the modern pronatalist movement, largely led by men of business, (who seem not to grasp that societies with fewer children are richer and that business profit depends not on sheer numbers of consumers but on their ability to afford the goods and services on offer).

In the US, Donald Trump is offering a $1000 bribe to any US citizens who have a baby, while in Russia Putin – more thriftily – has revived an old Soviet custom by awarding a medal to any ‘mother-heroine’ who has ten babies. Hungary’s Viktor Orban is busy subtracting his citizens’ reproductive rights. In all, about 55 countries (of 196) have a strong pronatalist stance.

Figure 2. Total fertility rates, by country, 2024. Source: Population Reference Bureau.

The close identity of pronatalism with misogyny, coercion, religious patriarchy and female subjugation has disturbed many observers. 

 

Likewise, health experts argue it is “not only ineffective, but dangerous to the health and well-being of women and other populations and in direct conflict with modern reproductive goals, reproductive justice, and decades of efforts towards achieving gender parity.”

 

 This all raises the question whether pronatalism is, in reality, simply an emotional reaction by prominent males against their perceived ‘loss of manhood’ and ‘traditional’ male roles.

There are several ways to view the apparent decline in the male gender.

If one inclines to a Gaian perspective, one might be tempted to speculate that the Earth, as a Lovelockian biological meta-organism, is busy curbing the parasitic gender that causes the most harm to the natural balance of life. The hotter they make the planet, the fewer the human males it will tolerate.

Or, if the decline in male sperm counts continues at present rates, human male fertility may collapse globally by 2045.

One unanswerable fact is that males are the architects of their own misfortunes – not something the average male ego can easily acknowledge.

Take sperm counts and gender confusion, for example. There is very little doubt these are driven by the flood of toxic chemicals which a male-dominated petrochemical industry has unleashed over the past half century: plastics, pesticides, phthalates and hundreds of other endocrine disrupting substance are ubiquitous in modern industrial food, drink, clothing, homes and workplaces. But the men responsible seem neither to know nor care.

It is equally plain that global heating is driven by male-dominated industries such as fossil fuels, agriculture, forestry and construction. The fossil fuels sector, for example, is 86% male to 16% female in its composition, whereas women make up 32% of the renewable energy workforce.

From all of the above, it is hard not to conclude that women are better suited as leaders in a 21^st Century in which all of humanity is in peril from the 10 megathreats largely engendered by men.

As I have previously written in this column: “As a rule, women don’t start nuclear wars, dig coal, destroy landscapes and forests, pollute air and oceans or poison their children. They tend to think more about the longer term than do men, and about the future needs of their children and grandchildren. They tend to seek peaceful and constructive solutions to problems rather than fighting over differences in values and beliefs, or resources.”

For the past two centuries every war that ever got started was started by men, or by male-dominated governments – and not one of them by women, who have been among the chief victims among the 200 million dead, of militant manhood. 

Such a situation would be truly catastrophic for a humanity menaced by ten converging megathreats. Wars will not solve any of them.

In arguing that women should lead humanity in this century, it is neither a matter of gender nor politics. It’s one of the emerging rules of human survival. Left to male leadership the world will have autocracy, war, climatic collapse, environmental ruin and universal poisoning – just as it has over the past century or two. Despite this, only about 30 countries (15%) currently have a female head of state.

For humanity as a whole it is now a matter of choosing the kind of leadership which can best get us through the most dangerous emergency in all of human history.

Female thinking can save the planet, and humanity. And this means female thinking by men as well as by women.

But we also need a majority of wise women in positions of power if we are to escape the fate which male aggression, overconsumption and overpollution are building for us. And a majority female population, engendered by global heating, could just help to achieve that.

Julian Cribb Articles

• When the water runs out...
• The great dying
• Australia issues ‘terrifying’ climate warning
• 'Died of a delusion': the fate of modern civilisation?
• Collapse is near, scientists warn
• De-icing the Earth: a fatal human choice. 
• Rivers of Death
• Unlike politicians, thermometers do not lie
• Welcome to BunkerWorld: Home of the rich and fearful
•  Wisdom of the elders
•  The black work of Big Oil
•  Stealing the Breath of Life
•  The Earth Uncloaked - a catastrophe in slow motion 
  
•  Military experts warn of climate wars
•  Tackling the Earth Emergency
•  A distracted world marches steadily towards catastrophe