A winter storm builds over Australia, as seen from the International Space Station.

(Photo: NASA/cc/flickr)

Last Friday, with this recent bomb cyclone, 53.7% of the nation was covered in snow; more than any time since record-keeping began—as the oil industry knowingly lies to us and rakes in profits.

THOM HARTMANN

Dec 28, 2022Common Dreams

William Clay didn’t realize this was the weekend fossil fuel billionaires’ intentional actions would lead to his death, but that’s what happened. Hedied in Buffalo on his 56th birthday, Christmas Eve, and was found frozen to death about a mile from his house, attempting to walk home from the store.

It seems Biblical: in Texas, bats are freezing and falling from trees; in Florida cold-stunned iguanas are raining down from palm trees onto unsuspecting pedestrians.

While Buffalo is famous for the intensity of its winter storms, this appears to be worse than anything in recorded history both there and across much of the rest of the nation. It seems Biblical: in Texas, bats are freezing and falling from trees; in Florida cold-stunned iguanas are raining down from palm trees onto unsuspecting pedestrians.

Fossil fuel industry barons win no matter what. They all know accountability for corporate executive decision-making is nonexistent in today’s America, corrupted as we have been by five conservatives on the Supreme Court legalizing political bribery. And as long as the GOP has anything to say about it, their hundreds of billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies will never end.

When extreme weather hits the US—be it extreme heat in the summer or extreme cold in the winter—more of their product is burned to create electricity and heating/cooling, earning them more profits.

When weather is “normal” they just go back to bribing climate science deniers and Republican politicians across the nation to block any action to hold them accountable for 60 years of intentional lies.

Last Friday, as the most recent bomb cyclone was blasting much of America,53.7% of the nation was covered in snow, more than any time since record-keeping began. Casper, Wyomingsaw its temperature drop to -42℉, the coldest ever, as similar records going back centuries were shattered across the US. In Denver, for example, temperaturesdropped by 47 degrees in a mere 2 hours.

Over 200 million Americans were under winter storm warnings as parts of Texas’ privatized, for-profit power gridfailed again, joining a dozen other states with deadly power outages. Dozens of people died.

Predictably, shills for the fossil fuel industry (and the suckers who believe them) were imitating Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe from February 2015 when, as Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee (taking money from the fossil fuel industry and thus dancing to their tune), Inhofe famouslythrew a snowball on the Senate floor to, pathetically, try to show there’s no global warming.

The twits this past weekend weresaying things like, “Love me some global warning.”

So, how does global warming produce record-breaking cold?

It appears to have a lot to do with global warming messing with the Jet Stream and the related walls of wind circulating around northern latitudes that in prior decades and centuries largely kept arctic air over the arctic. Now it’s ending up in our front yards.

Back in 2012, Rutgers’ Dr. Jennifer Francis and the University of Wisconsin’s Stephen Vavruspublished a hypothesis to explain the increasingly extreme variations in weather we’re experiencing in the northern hemisphere. While still the subject of scientificdebate, their hypothesis was both elegant and easily understood.

As long as the Arctic Ocean was covered with deep, hard ice it produced a permanent and cold plateau of stable-temperature air. That cold air dome, in turn, stabilized the temperature and pressure of the air above it so the circular flow of high-altitude winds around the Arctic—called the normal “polar vortex”—were largely kept in place at those high, northern latitudes.

We had summer and winter, storms and snow, fronts pushed through quickly by the Jet Stream, but extremes like we’ve been experiencing for the past decade were the stuff of science fiction disaster movies.

Extreme weather was kept at bay because the “gradient” or difference in temperatures between the cold arctic polar vortex air and the warmer air from our mid-latitudes produced a “wall” of sorts to keep the cold air over the arctic.

In addition to the polar vortex, there’s another river of air flowing in a circle around the north pole at a different altitude that largely controls our weather. Called the Jet Stream, it pushes along cold and warm air masses, producing the fronts and weather we experience.

You can see the dynamic in this graphicfrom NOAA:

North of the Jet Stream is the cold, arctic air; south of it is our warmer air. When parts of the Jet Stream dip down over North America, we often see that phenomenon of cold- and warm-front air-mass collisions producing “fronts” that provoke storms ranging from rainfall to tornadoes to derechos.

As MIT climatologist Judah Cohentold Newsweek last week:

“When the polar vortex is in its normal or strong state, there is a strong ribbon or river of air that flows rapidly from west to east…that acts like a barrier that separates cold air to the north over the Arctic and milder air to the south across the mid-latitudes.

“When the circulation around the polar vortex becomes less and less circular in shape, the cold air normally confined to the Arctic can expand southward to the mid-latitudes, including the U.S., Europe and East Asia.”

But two decades ago the ice covering the top of the world, that cap of arctic sea ice, hit a tipping point and began to melt so completely it was replaced by open water, which is both warmer than ice and, being dark, absorbs rather than reflects heat from the sun.

As NASA’s Earth Observatory scientistsnote:

“[A] pattern of steep Arctic sea ice decline began in 2002.”

The arctic is now warming several times faster than the mid-latitudes, in part because of this “dark water” phenomenon replacing reflective ice and in part as a consequence of the entire planet’s CO2-driven global warming.

As the air above the arctic warms, it reduces the gradient—the difference in temperatures—at the boundaries between the arctic and the mid-latitude air.

When that temperature gradient decreases, so does the strength of the “wall” of the boundary created by arctic air hitting mid-latitude air. As that “wall” which helps hold in place the Jet Stream weakens, the cold air above it can push through, past, or under the Jet Stream. It then ends up in your front yard as -42 temperatures.

This is apparently also why here in Portland we had 3consecutive 116℉ days two summers ago, killing hundreds of people and millions of trees: hot air from south of us that would normally have been kept to the south by the Jet Stream punched north all the way into Alaska and sat over us for days.

It’s also probably why Arctic air covered so much of the US this past week, punching as far south as Texas: air that’s normally confined to the arctic broke past its “wall” and drooled down over North America.

And global warming is driving the amplification of the entire process.

At the same time the fossil fuel industry—particularly the oil industry—is enjoying record-breaking profits, thousands of Americans are dying every year from climate change-amped weather ranging from droughts to floods to massive tornadoes and derechos.

Industry CEOs and executives have knowingly lied to us for a half-century about this coming disaster, and most also continue to fund lies andliars while stuffing their money bins fuller every day.

The politicians who take their money and lie about climate change are little better: it’s almost impossible to find a Republican, nationally or even at the state level, who’s not on the take, directly or indirectly, from this poisonous industry.

How to deal with these moral crimes will be the next challenge confronting both democracy and our criminal justice system as Millennials and Zoomers take political power.

And that reckoning can’t come soon enough.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

THOM HARTMANN

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream” (2020); “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.

Eckhart Tolle Dec 15, 2022 Are you experiencing a dark night of the soul? Eckhart shares that he has experienced it himself and discusses how this is a great opportunity for awakening.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Nychthemeron Clock in Snowshill Manor, Gloucestershire, UK

Nychthemeron /nɪkˈθɛmərɒn/, occasionally nycthemeron or nuchthemeron, is a period of 24 consecutive hours. It is sometimes used, especially in technical literature, to avoid the ambiguity inherent in the term day.

It is the period of time that a calendar normally labels with a date, although a nychthemeron simply designates a time-span that can start at any time, not just midnight.

Etymology

It is a loanword from Ancient Greek νυχθήμερον (nukhthḗmeron), which appears in the New Testament.^[1] This is a noun use of the neuter singular form of Ancient Greek: νυχθήμερος, romanized: nukhthḗmeros, lit. ‘lasting a day and night’, from νύξ (núx, “night”) + ἡμέρα (hēméra, “day”).

Look up nychthemeron or νυχθήμερον in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

In other languages

Some languages have a word for 24 hours, or more loosely a day plus a night in no particular order. Unlike a calendar date, only the length is defined, with no particular start or end. Furthermore, these words are considered basic and native to these languages, so unlike nychthemeron they are not associated with jargon.

Words for 24 hours are listed in the middle column. For comparison, the word for day, in the meaning of daytime, the sunlit state, the opposite of night, is also listed in the rightmost column:

Language	Family	24 hours	Sunlit state
Danish	Germanic	døgn	dag
Norwegian (Bokmål)	Germanic	døgn	dag
Norwegian (Nynorsk)	Germanic	døgn, døger	dag
Swedish	Germanic	dygn	dag
Icelandic	Germanic	sólarhringur (“sun-circle”)	dagur
Faroese	Germanic	samdøgur	dagur
Old Norse	Germanic	dǿgr, dǿgn	dagr
North Frisian	Germanic	eetlem	däi
West Frisian	Germanic	etmel	dei
Dutch	Germanic	etmaal	dag
Esperanto	International auxiliary language	diurno,[2] tagnokto[3] (“day-night”)	tago
Finnish	Uralic	vuorokausi (“turn-period”)	päivä
Estonian	Uralic	ööpäev (“night-day”)	päev
North Sámi	Uralic	jándor	beaivi
Latvian	Baltic	diennakts (“day-night”)	diena
Lithuanian	Baltic	para	diena
Persian	Indo-European	rooz	روز
Polish	Slavic	doba	dzień
Russian	Slavic	сутки [ˈsutkʲɪ]	день
Hebrew	Semitic	יממה	יום
Bulgarian	Slavic	денонощие (“day-night”)	ден
Bengali	Indo-Aryan	দিবারাত্রি, দিনরাত	দিন
Sanskrit	Indo-Aryan	अहोरात्र	दिन
Tamil	Tamil	நாள்	பகல்
Ukrainian	Slavic	доба	день
Swahili	Bantu	siku	mchana
Indonesian/Malay	Malayic	hari	siang
Japanese	Japonic	日	昼
Korean	Koreanic	일	낮
Kannada	Kannada–Badaga	ದಿನ	ಹಗಲು
German	Germanic	Etmal	Lichter Tag
Welsh	Celtic	diwrnod; dwthwn (‘that day’)	dydd
Yiddish	Germanic	ֵמֵעֵת לְעֵת	טאָג

The word dag, as in the Nordic languages, is etymologically the same as day in English.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nychthemeron

(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

New Thinking Allo • Dec 27, 2022 Christopher Robinson is coauthor of a book about his own experiences, titled Dream Detective. He has been the subject of a documentary called Premonition Man. His work is also featured in the book, The G.O.D. Experiments, by psychologist Gary Schwartz. His ability to dream of future events has been the subject of both scientific and journalistic investigation. Here he describes UFO sightings in his early life as well as a near-death experience, during a heart attack at the age of 35, that seem to have catalyzed his unique ability to dream of future events – particularly terrorist attacks and other disasters. He describes his long history of working with British police and intelligence organizations. He also describes a number of specific, dramatic situations in which his premonitions proved uncannily accurate. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. (Recorded on November 7, 2022)

Eckhart Tolle Oct 22, 2022 Learn the different views Eckhart has on concepts from the Bible and the teachings of Jesus in this compilation. Subscribe to find greater fulfillment in life: http://bit.ly/EckhartYT Want to watch and hear more of Eckhart’s Teachings? Become a member today and join our growing YouTube community! http://bit.ly/ETmembership It’s not easy to initially “get” Eckhart’s teachings. After all (like so many of us), you’re probably still trying to grasp these concepts with your egoic mind. That’s why it’s so important to have guidance, support, and encouragement as you step onto the spiritual path. At Eckhart Tolle Now, you’ll find an entire community of like-minded seekers who can help you answer questions, face challenges, and smoothly journey towards Presence.

How the Doomsday Clock, a German Sci-Fi Film, and Dick Clark Got Us to ‘5-4-3-2-1’

NYE ball drop in Times Square. Courtesy of Flickr/gigi_nyc.

by ALEXIS McCROSSEN | DECEMBER 27, 2021 (zocalopublicsquare.org)

Few people counted down to anything until the 1960s and 1970s—and yes, that included the new year. Celebrations and midnight kisses on December 31, of course. Countdowns, no. How, then, did the countdown go from almost nonexistent to ubiquitous in the latter half of the 20th century? And why are we so drawn to them now, especially to mark one year’s end and another’s beginning?

Countdowns as we know them today serve many purposes. The New Year’s Eve countdown might be characterized as a “genesis countdown”: After time runs out, it starts over again. The wait for the new year—with its predictions, resolutions, and parties—is typically generative, optimistic, and hopeful. But there are also “apocalyptic countdowns,” in which after time runs out, disaster ensues. Today, we wonder how much time we have until the next COVID-19 variant, natural disaster, or terrorist attack. Both of these countdown types took form during the Atomic Age.

Though disaster has always been a part of American life, the threat of nuclear annihilation introduced pervasive existential fears. Notably, in 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists introduced the Doomsday Clock, which to this day provides a visual reckoning of just how close we are to apocalypse. In the years that followed, these same scientists were the ones who brought the term “count down” to the American lexicon. A 1953 San Francisco Examiner article reported on an atomic bomb test in the nearby Nevada desert: “a designated official on a loudspeaker and short-wave radio hookup announces at intervals the time remaining before the explosion. At the very end he intones ‘minus 10 seconds, minus 5 seconds and minus 4 seconds’ and so on down to the moment of the explosion.”

A few years later, Alfred Hitchcock domesticated the atomic countdown in the 1957 made-for-television movie Four O’Clock, transplanting it into the basement of a suburban home wired with explosives in the minutes and seconds before the eponymous time. The televised countdowns of the 1950s, whether real or fictional, were frightening temporal experiences, in which time was distended and stretched, and then extinguished.

But on May 5, 1961, the countdown got its first major positive association. Some 45 million Americans watching the national nightly news heard the countdown to the successful launch of America’s first manned space flight. The blast-off was followed by astronaut Alan Shepard saying, “Roger, liftoff and the clock has started.” Time did not end, as apocalyptic countdowns had threatened; instead, a new clock began.

The countdown associated with rocket launches had its origins in the Weimar Republic, where Fritz Lang’s 1929 film Woman in the Moon featured an extended countdown to a moon rocket launch. No one had ever heard of or seen anything like the launch before—or the countdown. The lavish science fiction multi-reel film had an outsized impact on Germany’s rocket scientists, who after World War II became central to the American space program. One of the advisors on the film was early space travel enthusiast Willy Ley, who later immigrated to the United States, where he worked for NASA, orchestrating its rocket launches.

Whether personal or public, the [countdown] clock’s goal is to mitigate impatience, to replace uncertainty with anticipation, and to fill empty waiting time with a quantified temporality.

With each televised rocket launch through the 1960s, the countdown accumulated more and more positive associations with the public, building up to the historic countdown and liftoff of Apollo 11, the spaceship that took a crew of three men to the moon. The elements of the genesis countdown as we know it today were etched in history on July 16, 1969, when at least 500 million people around the world tuned in to hear a loud and clear countdown give way to an exciting, daring, and transformative objective.

During the 1970s, the countdown moved beyond atomic test sites and space missions and onto radio and television shows—and away from the nihilism of a bomb blast toward the triumph of a rocket launch. “American Top 40” hit the radio waves in 1970, followed by the popular Australian music television show Countdown in 1974. By counting down to the latest greatest hit, this burgeoning genre of show slowed the rush of time and demarcated the recent past. Their terrain was not time, but rather “the top” or “the most popular,” organized sequentially and leading not to “zero” but to “number one.” Other kinds of countdown programs amplified the race against time. In the long-running British gameshow Countdown, for example, contestants try to complete number and word problems in a set amount of time. A very large analogue clock, reminiscent of the Doomsday Clock, hangs over the show’s set. In this iteration, the show’s triumphant contestants demonstrate that the race against time can be won—that is, that disaster can be averted.

The apocalyptic and the genesis countdowns eventually made way for the ultimate celebratory countdown: the one to the new year. Americans celebrated New Year’s Eve publicly in various ways beginning in the 1890s, including with the ringing of bells (mostly at churches) at midnight. The first ball dropped on the roof of One Times Square to mark the arrival of 1908, and in the 1930s and 1940s, commercial radio broadcasts heralded the arrival of the new year to rural and urban audiences alike at midnight. But the first countdown I have identified was in the late 1950s. During the last few seconds of 1957, broadcaster Ben Grauer proclaimed to a national radio audience from a perch overlooking Times Square, “’58 is on its way, 5-4-3-2-1. The ball is starting to slide down the pole, and it is the signal that ’58 is here.” He didn’t get much traction: The extant recording features a crowd making merry but definitely not counting down.

Through the 1960s, Grauer tried to introduce New Year’s Eve countdowns on television, presumably as a way to extend what was, after all, an extremely short-lived event. Still, while you can hear the crowd cheering on these broadcasts, they don’t join him in the countdown. Picking up on Grauer’s innovation, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, which debuted to welcome 1973, featured confected countdowns that were staged on its dance party sets, and sometimes were painfully out of sync with the Times Square ball drop.

Impossible as it is to believe, my research into extant radio and television broadcasts and newspaper reports shows that it was not until seconds before the arrival of 1979 that a Times Square crowd counted down to the new year. At that moment, it was clear that countdown culture had arrived and was here to stay.

By the end of the 1980s, countdown clocks were installed in Times Square, television graphics began to show the amount of time remaining until midnight, and television hosts guided enthusiastic audiences through the count. As the year 2000 approached, though, something different happened. Millennium countdown clocks proliferated across the globe (though 2000 was not the millennium), accompanied by apocalyptic fears about the end of time, or at the very least Y2K, the much-discussed epic global computer network crash.

The first two decades of the 21st century have careened between genesis and apocalyptic countdowns; take for example, the countdown clocks to Olympic Games and the latest Climate Clock, found online (and in New York City’s Union Square) exhorting action before it is too late. Countdown clocks for every conceivable event are everywhere today, from the personalized digital “Countdown to Your Big Day” clocks that can be embedded on social media feeds before your birthday to the bus and subway countdown clocks that tell everyone when their ride will arrive. Whether personal or public, the clock’s goal is to mitigate impatience, to replace uncertainty with anticipation, and to fill empty waiting time with a quantified temporality.

Today our countdown clocks and countdowns continue to oscillate between genesis and apocalypse. As 2021 gives way to 2022, it is hard to know what we are anticipating when the clock hits midnight. And so, I suspect that some countdowns this year will be inflected with a tinge of hesitancy and doubt. Still, many of us will want to join in the hopefulness of the genesis count, as did that Times Square crowd welcoming 1979 with their triumphant “Happy New Year” cheers—rejoicing when the clock starts again.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to include “American Top 40,” which premiered ahead of the Australian music show Countdown.

ALEXIS MCCROSSENis a historian on the faculty at Southern Methodist University who studies the history of timekeeping. Currently finishing a book about the history of New Year’s observances in the United States, she is also the author of books including Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (2000) and Marking Modern Times: Clocks, Watches and Other Timekeepers in American Life (2013).

BY YULIA LATYNINA, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR

12/22/22 (thehill.com)

On Nov. 24, the Russian parliament passed a law on so-called LGBT propaganda. New amendments banned anything that could be construed as a suggestion that homosexual relationships are normal.

This was happening right at the time Russian troops were fleeing from Kherson and the futile Russian attacks on Bakhmut were leaving several hundred dead on the battlefield each day.

Whу in God’s name are Russian lawmakers so agitated about gay marriages during a bloody war? Do they have nothing else to discuss? How is “gay propaganda” related to war with Ukraine?

Turns out, directly.

To understand the relationship, we must turn to a speech given on Dec. 1 at a forum in Sochi by one of the most mysterious and influential figures of the Russian court: Mikhail Kovalchuk, currently head of the famous Kurchatov’s institute and brother to Vladimir Putin’s closest friend, Yuri Kovalchuk, who reportedly spent the long months of total COVID-19 isolation with Putin.

So, what did this influential Russian “scientist” say?

Some pretty astonishing things.

He said that the Western elite — as represented by Roman, Bilderberg and Davos clubs — is dreaming of creating genetically modified people to serve the elites, “so that the current state of society will never be changed and they will rule forever.” He also said it’s not only technologically possible, but in fact is right now being implemented by the West.

“And you won’t need such a multitude of people any more,” Kovalchuk explained. “An artificial womb, an incubator, and it’s like chickens … and then you can produce the serving people by genetic editing in any numbers.”

This is where the gay propaganda kicks in: It’s all a part of a dastardly plan, he says, by Western elites to stop the natural propagation of humanity. “People are being indoctrinated in gay marriage so they don’t multiply,” Kovalchuk said, “and in a couple of generations there won’t be anybody.”

But what of the countries outside of pernicious Western influence, like Russia, China or India? Here, he said, the elites’ plan gets even more sinister: bioweapons. “A COVID with a 100 percent mortality will come to them and cut down everybody,” Kovalchuk predicted.

According to him, all this was a long-term plan crafted by the Dulles brothers — Allen, the former director of the CIA, and John, Eisenhower’s secretary of State — “together with their Rockefeller buddy.” Kovalchuk claims they created the World Health Organization “not for curing people. But to control the health of humanity in many parts of the world, to influence it with vaccination.”

So, did you get it?

It’s not against Ukraine the Russian army is fighting. It’s against a New World Order of Bilderberg and Davos elites trying to genetically engineer a subservient humanity with gay marriages in the West and killer viruses in the rest of the world. With Rockefellers, Dulles brothers and WHO thrown into the mix.

It’s only natural that Russia, while waging such a war, has to prohibit gay couples. Far from being a diversion, they are at the crux of the matter!

You might think it’s a bit extreme to quote a speech by a single Russian looney as an explanation of current Kremlin craziness — but I remind you: It’s not a single speech.

Kovalchuk told the Russian Senate pretty much the same things back in 2015. Then, he was also talking about genetically modified service-people fed on cheap genetically-modified food. He also proposed a cure: Give him money to fight fire with fire. With more money — obscene amounts of money — he could develop convergent nano-bio-info-cogno-blah-blah-blah technologies that would presumably beat the West with righteous Russian countermeasures.

It’s like QAnon on steroids.

I also remind you: This guy’s brother was reportedly cooped up with Putin throughout the pandemic.

It’s no coincidence that Russian propaganda keeps discovering in Ukraine “NATO biolaboratories” and that Vasily Nebendzya, the Russian representative to the United Nations, is publicly talking about military modified mosquitoes.

This is the stuff Putin believes.

It’s no coincidence that as early as 2017 Putin started to talk publicly about the “genetic material of Russian people” being collected and exported abroad, presumably with the pernicious intent of creating a biologically selective bioweapon, to strike only Russians. (How such a weapon could be developed by Ukrainians, which are, according to Putin, the same people as Russians, beats me, but then, conspiracy theorists are not great on consistency).

And right now, Russian TV is straight on it. Commenting on Morocco’s recent soccer victory over Portugal, Russia’s main TV channel ran a segment that claimed: “The West is really disintegrating. … Children grown in laboratories and controlled by a smartphone is the new trend of progressive Western society. The Africans will soon appear to be the cutest creations as compared to cyborgs that will replace them. … The classical understanding of ‘Europe’ with its gay propaganda is losing to the traditional world.”

You still don’t get where the soccer comes in? Here it is: “And what happened at the World Cap, and what we are seeing across all of Europe, when Moroccans are taking to the streets to celebrate, not because they are savages, which is what the Europeans think, but because they want to prove to their white masters that they are equal, that they were able to defeat them fairly on the battlefield, on the football battlefield. But now Europe is saying: We’ll grow the footballers artificially, we’ll artificially grow the military, we’ll grow the scientists artificially and then you traditionalists will lose to us decisively.”

What’s a conspiracy theory without a good dose of racism thrown in?

Don’t be mistaken: This is not just a PR ploy. This is something Putin likely believes wholeheartedly, thanks to the Kovalchuks.

The public should be aware they are almost certainly not dealing with a sane person. They are dealing instead with a someone steeped in conspiracy theories, who believes he is fighting a crusade against gay marriages, genetically modified mosquitoes, and the Bilderbergs.

Yulia Latynina, a journalist, worked for Echo of Moscow radio station and the Novaya Gazeta newspaper until they were shut down as part of the current war in Ukraine. She is a recipient of the U.S. State Department’s Defender of Freedom award.

BY LAURA SILVER AND CHRISTINE HUANG (pewresearch.org)

Next year, China will no longer be the most populous country in the world, ceding the title to India, according to projections by the United Nations. China has had the largest population in the world since at least 1950, when the UN started keeping records. But it is now projected to experience an absolute decline in its population beginning as early as 2023.

How we did this

Here are key facts about China’s population and its projected changes in the coming decades, based on data from the UN and other sources:

Although China will lose its title as the world’s most populous country, the UN still estimates its population at 1.426 billion people in 2022. This is larger than the entire population of Europe (744 million) and the Americas (1.04 billion). It’s also roughly equivalent to the population of all the nations in Africa (1.427 billion).

Related: Global population projected to exceed 8 billion in 2022; half live in just seven countries

The UN forecasts that China’s population will decline from 1.426 billion this year to 1.313 billion by 2050 and below 800 million by 2100. That’s according to the UN’s “medium variant,” or middle-of-the-road projection. The large population decline is projected even though it assumes that China’s total fertility rate will rise from 1.18 children per woman in 2022 to 1.48 in 2100.

Using the UN’s “high variant” scenario – in which the total fertility rate in China is projected to be 0.5 births per woman above that of the medium variant scenario – the country’s population is still projected to fall to 1.153 billion by 2100. And in the UN’s “low variant” scenario – where the total fertility rate is projected to be 0.5 births below that of the medium variant scenario – China’s population is projected to fall to as low as 488 million by 2100.

For comparison purposes, the U.S. population of 337 million in 2021 is expected to grow to 394 million by 2100 in the UN’s medium variant scenario. The UN’s high variant scenario projects a population of 543 million Americans by then, while in its low scenario, the U.S. population would shrink to 281 million.

Other groups and academics differ somewhat from the UN in their forecasts of China’s population, but nearly all still predict a decline. Some demographers, for example, think the country’s population might have already peaked in 2021 or even earlier. These other estimates sometimes rely less on official Chinese population data (which researchers say is inflated because of financial incentives for local governments) and instead use other data, such as the number of mandatory vaccines administered to newborns in China. Still, regardless of the precise timing of China’s population peak or the magnitude of its projected decline, there is near-universal consensus that the nation’s population is on a trajectory of decline.

China’s 2022 total fertility rate is estimated to be 1.18 children per woman – down substantially from earlier decades and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman. This is despite the relaxation of the country’s well-known one-child policy, which was introduced in 1980 but amended to allow two children beginning in 2016 and three children beginning in 2021.

Notably, fertility rates in China were already falling prior to the introduction of the one-child policy, as they often fall alongside economic development and urbanization. And aside from a brief one-year increase following the allowance of a second child, fertility rates have continued to fall in China.

The YuWa Population Research Institute, a Beijing-based think tank, has concluded that China is among the most expensive places to raise a child and that these economic concerns – rather than governmental policies – are tied to women not wanting to have more children these days.

In addition to having fewer children overall, women in China are choosing to have children later in life. Since 2000, the mean childbearing age in China has increased by three years, rising from 26 to 29. By comparison, the mean childbearing age has gone up by just one year across all middle-income countries (which China is part of).

The mean age of first marriage has increased alongside the childbearing age in China. Based on data from China’s 2020 census, the mean age of first marriage for women in 2020 was 28, up from 24 in 2010. Some have cited China’s zero-COVID policy as a contributing factor to delayed motherhood.

China is among the countries with the most skewed sex ratio at birth, according to a recent Pew Research Center study of UN data. In fact, China accounted for 51% of the world’s “missing” females between 1970 and 2020, due to sex-selective abortion or neglect, according to a 2020 UN report.

While China continues to have a skewed sex ratio at birth – 112 male births per 100 female births, as of 2021 – this is down slightly from a high of 118 male births per 100 female births between 2002 and 2008. Still, as of 2021, China had a huge overall sex imbalance of around 30 million more men than women. China also has among the highest abortion rates per 1,000 women ages 15 to 49 of any country, according to estimates from the Guttmacher Institute.

China has a rapidly aging population. According to Chinese state media, China is already approaching a “moderately aging” scenario, in which 20% of its population is ages 60 and older. By 2035, that percentage is expected to rise to 30%, or more than 400 million people.

By 2100, China also appears poised to roughly double its “dependency ratio” – the proportion of its population that is outside working age (either ages 0 to 14 or ages 65 and older), compared with the proportion that is working age (15 to 64). This is even true in the UN’s “low variant” projection. In fact, based on the UN’s middle-of-the-road estimate, there will be more Chinese people outside the working-age population than in it – a dependency ratio of 101.1 – by the year 2079.

More people migrate out of China per year than into it, further decreasing the population. Since at least 1950, when the UN began compiling statistics, China has had a net negative number of migrants – meaning more people are leaving the country than arriving. In 2021, for example, the country experienced an estimated net out-migration of 200,000 people. Still, this is down from a higher point in the early 1990s, when around 750,000 or more people per year were leaving China. As part of its medium variant projections, the UN forecasts that China will continue to experience net negative migration through at least 2100, with estimates hovering around 310,000 people leaving the country per year.

CORRECTION (Dec. 15, 2022): A previous version of the chart “China has long had more male than female births, but its skewed sex ratio is projected to change” misplaced the line indicating the start of China’s two-child policy in 2016. The chart has been replaced. This change does not substantively affect the findings of this report.

Topic

 Birth Rate & Fertility

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Laura Silver is a senior researcher focusing on global research at Pew Research Center.

Commentary

BY CHARLES M. BLOW

Dec 15, 2022 (race.undark.org)

Visual: Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty

Science showed decades ago that race was a fiction. Has that changed anything?

In his 1940 essay “Dusk of Dawn,” the renowned scholar W.E.B. Du Bois reflected back to his early-career appointment, some 44 years prior, as a temporary instructor at the University of Pennsylvania — a time he described as coinciding with a clarifying vision he had on America’s “race problem.” At that time, near the dawn of the 20th century, Du Bois says he believed the primary impediment to enlightenment on racial issues was “stupidity” — and the cure was simple: “knowledge based on scientific investigation.”

‍But where the youthful Du Bois had faith in the power of science to overcome ignorance, the older Du Bois admitted that this faith was waning: “I regarded it as axiomatic that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the truth was sought with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the effort,” he wrote. “This was, of course, but a young man’s idealism, not by any means false, but also never universally true.”

‍It still isn’t. We have known for decades, for example, that the bigoted nostrums of certain scientists, consumed by the conviction that “race” had some genesis in our cells, were wrong — and wildly so. In the grand sweep of time, the human species is simply too young for meaningful racial differences to have evolved. ″We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world,” J. Craig Venter, then-head of the Celera Genomics Corporation in Rockville, Maryland, affirmed to The New York Times more than 20 years ago.  

‍The American Anthropological Association had concluded as much two years earlier, in its 1998 statement on race: “The ‘racial’ worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth,” the organization wrote. “The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called ‘racial’ groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.”

Because people look different, they must be different, this noxious idea holds, and its grip has proven unshakable.

And yet now, as ever, America remains heavily, inextricably, invested in the preservation of those racial taxonomies — a matrix of overt assumptions and covert expectations, subtle inferences and systemic inequities, that scientific progress alone has been unable to eradicate. We are, after all, visual animals, and some research has suggested that humans register another person’s race in about one-tenth of a second — before they notice gender. In that sense, our brains may well conjure and process racial biases before we ever have a chance to consciously counter them with higher thinking. 

‍But we might still hope that the larger project of modern science — the accumulation of all that higher thinking — might do something to rectify the stupidity that Du Bois lamented. And yet for all we’ve learned about the evolutionary trajectory of genes, and of the overwhelming hereditary unity we share as a species, too many people still cling to the notion that superficial differences simply must belie more substantial differences in our bones.

‍Because people look different, they must be different, this noxious idea holds, and its grip has proven unshakable. It’s a belief system that has enjoyed centuries of currency, giving meaning to appearance based on who has power — with whiteness elevated to the top of the heap. It has survived whole revolutions in genetic science, and it still surfaces in our schools and in our state houses; it fuels attacks on the halls of Congress — broadcast on national TV — and it guns down shoppers in western New York. What hope do we have of defeating all of this with more science?

The slave master, the statesman and abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote in 1881, “had a direct interest in discrediting the personality of those he held as property. Every man who had a thousand dollars so invested had a thousand reasons for painting the Black man as fit only for slavery. Having made him the companion of horses and mules, he naturally sought to justify himself by assuming that the Negro was not much better than a mule.”

‍This, I think, is the rub. “Race” as a biological concept may not be real, but the racism it cultivated is very much so — and its persistence is not a function of failed pedagogy, but the tenacity with which certain groups guard their power. Race, after all, created whole hierarchies of humanity, doling out both privilege and oppression. It continues to allot and restrict. The atrocities committed in the service of maintaining racial hierarchies not only implicate ancestors, they indict current privileges, too. 

‍And yet I see no indication that any real accounting, any true reckoning, is underway. Science may march forward, but in too many ways we remain mired in the bigotry of the past. And as much as I want to believe it possible, I am no more aware of a pedagogical path to racial enlightenment and racial egalitarianism than Du Bois was generations ago — at least not by way of science. We already know enough. The evidence is plain. Ignorance is not the impediment. Something else is in the way. 

‍The failure to abandon the concept of race in this country is not rooted in a lack of knowledge. It is rooted in a persistent urge for dominance. And until we reckon with that urge, science is unlikely to deliver us. 

Charles M. Blow is an American journalist, commentator, and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, and a political analyst for MSNBC. He is a founding member of the Undark advisory board, and the author of the 2014 book “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”

Rolo Tomasi • Dec 30, 2016 Philomena Cunk, Christmas 2016 More here https://www.youtube.com/user/Rolotoma…