Elderly Black Americans are on the front lines of a coming spike in deaths from climate change, a new study has found.
11/06/2023
Do we call this Atmospheric Racism?
Heat attack: Black seniors bear unequal burden of cardiac deaths from rising temperatures, The Hill, October 30, 2023
Elderly Black Americans are on the front lines of a coming spike in deaths from climate change, a new study has found.
Between 2008 and 2019, extreme heat drove at least 1,600 Americans — disproportionately Black and elderly — to an early death from heart attacks
Without aggressive action on climate, that number could more than double by mid-century, according to findings published Monday in the journal Circulation.
Researchers found that if fossil fuel burning isn’t quickly reduced, the number of extra deaths could more than double, reaching more than 3,700 per year.
Even if current proposals to cut greenhouse gas emissions are met — still a politically controversial question — the study found deaths will likely hit 2,000 per year within a few decades.
These deaths will not be distributed fairly across the population, researchers wrote.
Black adults are about four times more likely to die of heat-induced cardiac arrest than white adults, the study found.
And seniors have around four times the risk of heat-induced heart attacks compared to younger adults.
According to scientists from the American Heart Association, the problem isn’t only rising temperatures, but the way heat interacts with how cities function.
Heat turns deadly as it intersects with the other defining inequalities of American cities: unequal access to air conditioning, exposure to pollution, and exposure to the “heat island” effects of large landscapes of asphalt and concrete, according to the study.
And another factor looms behind the data: an aging and increasingly isolated population that researchers found is both more vulnerable to the impacts of heat and more likely to slip through the cracks.
The study builds on months of alarming findings about the deadly intersection of heat and pollution.
A June study in the journal Nature of heart attack deaths in China found that more people died from heat waves when levels of ultrafine particle pollution in the air — a product of fossil fuel combustion — were high.
The presence of high levels of PM2.5, a form of such particle pollution, might even double the number of heart attack deaths from heart waves, according to a July paper in Circulation.
We are at a point in American life where any inconvenience that can be recorded negatively impacting black people is directly related to (and explainable by) white racism.
And now the atmosphere is racist.
Climate change is also inherently racist…
You have to ask yourself: if white people were all gone, who would black people blame their troubles upon?
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