Several House Democrats are calling on Congress to recognize that climate change is hurting women more than men, and could even drive poor women to “transactional sex” for survival.

This is the lead sentence in a story from the April 30th edition of The Hill.

Here’s how the reasoning goes: “the results of climate change include drought and reduced agricultural output. It says these changes can be particularly harmful for women.”

 Because of this Barbara Lee (D-Calif) and some other house Democrats are proposing a resolution that states:

[F]ood insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health,

So there you have it; extreme global warming will lead to more poverty and less food production which will force women into prostitution and (horrors) early marriage in order to support themselves. But here’s the rub, in all the most alarmist IPCC scenarios the the way you end up with large global temperature increases in through massive amounts of economic growth and wealth creation, especially in the underdeveloped world. Under the IPCC’s warmest scenario net GDP per capita in developing countries will be $61,500 per year by the year 2100. In other words, double that of the United States in 2006. The developing world will be over 60 times wealthier than it is today by 2100. Just to put this in perspective, between 1900 and 2000, the United states became 6 times wealthier. To carry the IPCC’s scenario out another century, in case one thinks this might be just a temporary blip, in 2200 the developing world per capita income would be $86,200.

So where does this leave Congresswoman Lee’s predictions? Well, either she has come up with a whole new socioeconomic analysis which argues that increased prosperity leads to more prostitution or that all this new wealth hypothesized by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is going to be generated by a burgeoning and massively growing prostitution industry.  Like her compatriots in NC’s green energy movement, I guess Rep. Lee is a big believer in multiplier effects.