Tag Archives: blizzard

Verdict: very limited baby boom in Chicago due to Feb 2011 snowstorm

Posted on by

It is a common story that natural disasters lead to baby booms as residents have little else to do except spend “quality time together” (a perhaps unintentional euphemism from the story cited in the next sentence). But the academic research on the topic isn’t so clear – here is a quick review from Friday’s front page story in the Chicago Tribune:

Udry’s [negative] finding [regarding a lengthy 1970 New York City blackout] is frequently viewed as the final word in “disaster babies” — the popular debunking website Snopes.com cites it in declaring the phenomenon a myth — but more contemporary research suggests there might be something to the idea.

A 2005 study of birth rates following the Oklahoma City bombing looked at 10 years of data and found that the counties closest to the site had indeed experienced higher than expected numbers of births after the attack…

But perhaps the most intriguing evidence supporting the idea of disaster babies was published last year by Brigham Young University economist Richard Evans. He and his colleagues looked at hurricane-prone counties on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and compared birth rates that came nine months after the announcement of impending storms.

They found that while the rates went up after the mildest expected disruption (a tropical storm watch) they went down after the most serious (a hurricane warning)…

If Evans is right that the blizzard would only produce a 2% increase in the birth rate, this is not a huge jump. In fact, Evans is cited later in the story saying that this would only be a difference of a “few dozen births” throughout the Chicago region of 8.3 million people. So if there is an effect, it is minimal. But urban legends have lives of their own – another example is the recurring issue of tainted Halloween candy that sociologist Joel Best gamely tries to stamp out.

What about other data regarding the February blizzard like a rise in heart attacks or back injuries or other medical traumas? I can think we can be pretty sure that there was a lot of shoveling that took place.

Even with a small drive, it took quite a while to clear all that snow.

Meteorologists debate whether recent Chicago snowstorm was 3rd or 4th largest on record

Posted on by

Headlines after the recent Chicago blizzard suggested that the storm had the third largest amount of snow in Chicago history. But when this was later changed to the 4th largest storm, an argument erupted among meteorologists about what exactly counted as part of this particular storm:

After a brief drop to No. 4, the Blizzard of 2011 has now been put back in its rightful spot as the No. 3 worst blizzard in Chicago history.

Earlier in the day, the National Weather Service downgraded the Ground Hog Day Blizzard to 20 inches, taking away .2 inches of snow they say fell hours before the actual blizzard hit. At the same time, they decided that the 1979 storm lasted three days, not the two generally cited. That upped the storm’s total to 20.3 from the 18.8 inches generally credited to the storm…

But during a teleconference with meteorologists from Chicago area media outlets, there was such outcry over the weather service’s decision to lower the total snowfall from this year’s blizzard that the decision was reversed.

“You really are getting into hazardous territory,” WGN meteorologist Tom Skilling warned National Weather Service officials during the teleconference. “To downgrade this storm in any way shape or form is highly subjective. You guys are the arbiters of this, but I don’t agree with it.”…

Allsopp emphasized that these storm totals are more for the public’s benefit than for the record books. The official snow records are listed by calendar days.

Even the weather, data we might consider “hard data,” is open to different interpretations. It is interesting that the final decision went the way of the local forecasters. While Skilling is right to suggest that the decision to downgrade the storm was subjective, wasn’t ranking the storm 3rd also subjective?

Perhaps the key is the final statement in the article: this is for the public, not the record books. In the long run, does it make Chicago area residents feel better or more proud to know that the recent storm was the 3rd largest? If we went by the official snowfall by calendar day, this website suggests the record was 18.6 inches on January 2, 1999.

Blizzards do not lead to baby booms in 9 months

Posted on by

There is a story out there that suggests when a blizzard comes along, like the one that hit Chicago this past week, one can expect a rise in births in nine months. Experts say this story has little foundation in fact:

The commonly held assumption dates at least to the widespread blackout of 1965 that doused New York City in darkness. About nine months after residents spent hours together with the lights off, The New York Times reported an uptick in births. A sociologist quoted at the time offered this euphemistic explanation:

“The lights went out and people were left to interact with each other,” he said.

Over the years, blackouts, snowstorms, and even full moons have all been deemed natural aphrodisiacs. But for nearly as long, experts have sought to debunk the relationship between catastrophe and copulation, dubbing it mere myth.

“It is evidently pleasing to many people to fantasy that when people are trapped by some immobilizing event which deprives them of their usual activities, most will turn to copulation,” demographer J. Richard Udry wrote in a 1970 paper that showed there was no statistically significant increase in births that could be attributed to the 1965 blackout.

Tom Smith, director of the Center for the Study of Politics at the University of Chicago, agreed that most baby boom speculation following various disruptions has not proved true.

“First, these events are as likely to separate partners as they are to isolate them together with ‘nothing better to do.’ Second, most people are using contraceptives,” Smith said. “(And) third, these are hardly the type of events that make couples say, ‘Let’s start a family.'”

So why exactly does this myth still make the rounds? This one is fairly easy to disprove: just look at the records for birth nine months after any event.

Why we talk so much about the weather

Posted on by

The headline at ChicagoTribune.com: “Blizzard may be ‘life threatening.’” There were similar headlines throughout the day on the front page of Yahoo! (with the latest version of the story here). Yes, there are predictions for a big storm but why do we talk about the weather so much?

My own thoughts: for the average American adult, the weather is perhaps the only constant in our days that we feel we can’t control. With a certain level of income, most Americans can handle day-to-day matters pretty easily: food is easy to obtain, we have generally large and nice shelters, transportation (by car) is available to many, jobs are decent and give us something to do (even with recent higher unemployment figures). Wars are distant and we know that many in the world face much tougher conditions. But we can’t control the weather. A blizzard bearing down on us reminds us that there are some areas in life of which we can only respond. There is a Christian theme in here if we take a moment to ponder it: we are ultimately not in complete control of our lives, this is okay, and perhaps we should remind ourselves of this more often.

(Additionally, the weather is a common, safe topic that can pull people together. It is hard to be offensive or rude when bringing up the weather. Since we all have to deal with it, it can help bring about group solidarity if we have a neutral topic to fall back on.)