Climate Change Is Speeding Up The Demographic Change of The USA!
Most Americans say they are very familiar with their roots, but the strength of their attachment to them varies by race and Hispanic origin, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted to explore themes of self-identity ahead of last year’s U.S. decennial census. Black and Hispanic adults were more likely than White adults to say their origins are central to their identity and that they feel a strong connection to their family’s cultural roots.
Overall, six-in-ten U.S. adults said they are very familiar with their origins, according to the survey. But not quite half (46%) said they feel a strong connection to their family’s cultural roots. And only a third said their origin is central to their identity.
However, Hispanic adults, especially immigrants, were more likely to be familiar with their origins than multi-race Black or White adults. A majority of Hispanic and Black respondents, but not of Whites, said they feel a strong connection to their roots. And about half or more of Hispanic and Black respondents said their origin is central to their identity, but only about a quarter of Whites said so.Whiteness is also at the core of understanding race in America. Whiteness and the normalization of white racial identity throughout America's history have created a culture where nonwhite persons are seen as inferior or abnormal.
This white-dominant culture also operates as a social mechanism that grants advantages to white people, since they can navigate society both by feeling normal and being viewed as normal. Persons who identify as white rarely have to think about their racial identity because they live within a culture where whiteness has been normalized. But what will happen when whiteness is not the norm.
Whiteness has changed over time, over place, and in the myriad situations of human ranking. Americans still struggle to understand that race is an ideology, not a biological fact, it seems, is the idea that our idea of one big white race, which you’re either in or out of, is less than a century old. Neither scholars nor ordinary people have been able to agree upon the definition of white people — who is white and who is not — nor on the number of races that count as white. Disagreement reigns and has reigned since the modern scientific notion of human races was invented in the 18th-century Enlightenment.
Enlightenment scholars started to classify humanity into groups that came to be called races, defined according to bodily measurements such as eye color, skin color, height, and skull dimensions. The most enduring classification came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), a professor in the German University of Göttingen. Blumenbach based his classification on skull measurements and divided humanity into five “varieties,” which he laid out according to his aesthetic preferences.
At the two extremities Blumenbach placed the skulls he considered ugly, the African and the Asian. Next to the African was the Tahitian. Next to the Asian was the Native American. In the middle was Blumenbach’s “most beautiful skull” — of a young Georgian woman who had been a sex slave in Moscow, where she died of venereal disease. Her beautiful skull became the basis for the name given to white people; a native of the South Caucasus (between the Black and Caspian Seas), she inspired the label “Caucasian. ”Analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a letter to investors last month that the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”
A growing number of mainly Caucasian people are reluctant to bring a child into a world that’s set to be ravaged by climate change in the coming decades. To support their argument, they pointed to surveys, academic research and Google data that shows climate change is directly and indirectly accelerating the decline in fertility rates. UCLA researchers showed that the number of births in the U.S. fell in the nine months after an extreme heat event while a study of 18,000 couples in China last year showed that climate change, and particulate pollution in particular, was associated with a 20% increased likelihood of infertility. Warmer temperatures wrought by climate change could put women at risk for giving birth early, according to new research.
Two new studies examined the link between high temperatures and premature birth. The first assessed almost one million pregnant women in New South Wales, Australia, from 2005 to 2014, of whom 3% delivered their babies before 37 weeks. The researchers found that those in the hottest 5% of places in the state in the week before birth had a 16% higher risk of premature birth. Previous research had found a similar effect in the warmer sub-tropical city of Brisbane, but this was the first in a more temperate region of Australia.
“The risk of [premature] birth is likely to increase with the expected increase in global temperatures and heatwaves – this is a potentially serious concern,” said the researchers, led by Edward Jegasothy at the University of Sydney. The second study analyzed 200,000 births from 2007-2011 in Harris County, Texas where people are accustomed to heat. The period included Texas’s hottest summer on record in 2011.
A quarter of the mothers were exposed to at least one very hot day while pregnant, days when temperature reached the top 1% of historic summer temperatures. The risk of any premature birth was 15% higher the day after these very hot days, the scientists found. But the risk was even higher for especially early births, tripling for babies born before 28 weeks, and was also higher for the most disadvantaged 20% of the mothers. view of harbor and opera house in bushfire haze
Doctors issue official guidance on effects of air pollution and bushfire smoke on pregnant people
“Public health warnings during heatwaves should include pregnant people, especially given our finding of stronger associations earlier in gestation when the consequences of preterm birth are more severe.
This new research adds weight to a 2020 review of 68 studies, comprising 34m births, that linked heat and air pollution to higher risks of premature birth, low birth weight and still birth. “We are already having generations weakened from birth.”
Even moderate levels of heat can affect the developing foetus, pregnancy complications, and children and adolescents. Although the risk to an individual is modest, because so many people are exposed, the total number of excess events, whether they be premature births or deaths, is substantial.” Hotter temperatures also increased the number of admissions of young children to emergency departments in New York City, another new study found. The scientists looked at 2.5m admissions over eight years and found that a 7C rise in maximum temperature led to a 2.4% increase in admissions in under-fives. Young children lose proportionally more fluids than adults and their ability to regulate their body temperature is immature, the researchers said.
The burning of fossil fuels drives the climate crisis but also causes air pollution and a new study in Denmark assessed the impact of dirty air on 10,000 couples trying to conceive naturally. It found that increases in particle pollution of a few units during a menstrual cycle led to a decrease in conception of about 8%.
A recent study in China also found that air pollution significantly increased the risk of infertility, but the average pollution level was more than five times higher than in the Danish study. Afro-Latinos’ views of race are also unique. When asked directly about their race, only 18% of Afro-Latinos identified their race or one of their races as black. In fact, higher shares of Afro-Latinos identified as white alone or white in combination with another race (39%) or volunteered that their race or one of their races was Hispanic (24%). Only 9% identified as mixed race.
These findings reflect the complexity of identity and race among Latinos. For example, two-thirds of Latinos (67%) say their Hispanic background is a part of their racial background. This is in contrast to the U.S. Census Bureau’s own classification of Hispanic identity – census survey forms have described “Hispanic” as an ethnic origin, not a race.
The multiple dimensions of Hispanic identity also reflect the long colonial history of Latin America, during which mixing occurred among indigenous Americans, white Europeans, slaves from Africa and Asians. In Latin America’s colonial period, about 15 times as many African slaves were taken to Spanish and Portuguese colonies than to the U.S. Today, about 130 million people of African descent live in Latin America, making up roughly a quarter of the total population.
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