From the University of Michigan , recognition of a whole new crop of, ahem, deniers. I can hear Joe Romm’s head exploding from my house.
Generation X is surprisingly unconcerned about climate change
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—As the nation suffers through a summer of record-shattering heat, a University of Michigan report finds that Generation X is lukewarm about climate change—uninformed about the causes and unconcerned about the potential dangers.
“Most Generation Xers are surprisingly disengaged, dismissive or doubtful about whether global climate change is happening and they don’t spend much time worrying about it,” said Jon D. Miller, author of “The Generation X Report.”
The new report, the fourth in a continuing series, compares Gen X attitudes about climate change in 2009 and 2011, and describes the levels of concern Gen Xers have about different aspects of climate change, as well as their sources of information on the subject.
“We found a small but statistically significant decline between 2009 and 2011 in the level of attention and concern Generation X adults expressed about climate change,” Miller said. “In 2009, about 22 percent said they followed the issue of climate change very or moderately closely. In 2011, only 16 percent said they did so.”
Miller directs the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the U-M Institute for Social Research. The study, funded by the National Science Foundation since 1986, now includes responses from approximately 4,000 Gen Xers—those born between 1961 and 1981, and now between 32 and 52 years of age.
Only about 5 percent of those surveyed in 2011 were alarmed about climate change, and another 18 percent said they were concerned about it. But 66 percent said they aren’t sure that global warming is happening, and about 10 percent said they don’t believe global warming is actually happening.
“This is an interesting and unexpected profile,” Miller said. “Few issues engage a solid majority of adults in our busy and pluralistic society, but the climate issue appears to attract fewer committed activists—on either side—than I would have expected.”
Because climate change is such a complex issue, education and scientific knowledge are important factors in explaining levels of concern, Miller said. Adults with more education are more likely to be alarmed and concerned about climate change, he found. And those who scored 90 or above on a 100-point Index of Civic Scientific Literacy also were significantly more likely to be alarmed or concerned than less knowledgeable adults. Still, 12 percent of those who were highly literate scientifically were either dismissive or doubtful about climate change, Miller found. He also found that partisan affiliations predicted attitudes, with nearly half of liberal Democrats alarmed or concerned compared with zero percent of conservative Republicans.
“There are clearly overlapping levels of concern among partisans of both political parties,” Miller said. “But for some individuals, partisan loyalties may be helpful in making sense of an otherwise complicated issue.”
Given the greater anticipated impact of climate change on future generations, Miller expected that the parents of minor children would be more concerned about the issue than young adults without minor children.
“Not so,” he said. “Generation X adults without minor children were slightly more alarmed about climate change than were parents. The difference is small, but it is in the opposite direction than we expected.”
Miller found that Gen X adults used a combination of information sources to obtain information on the complex issue of climate change, with talking to friends, co-workers and family members among the most common sources of information.
“Climate change is an extremely complex issue, and many Generation X adults do not see it as an immediate problem that they need to address,” Miller said.
“The results of this report suggest that better educated young adults are more likely to recognize the importance of the problem, but that there is a broad awareness of the issue even though many adults prefer to focus on more immediate issues—jobs and schools for their children—than the needs of the next generation. These results will not give great comfort to either those deeply concerned about climate issues or those who are dismissive of the issue.”
Established in 1949, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research is the world’s largest academic social science survey and research organization, and a world leader in developing and applying social science methodology, and in educating researchers and students from around the world. ISR conducts some of the most widely cited studies in the nation, including the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, the American National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, the world’s largest digital social science data archive. For more information, visit the ISR website at www.isr.umich.edu.
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As I just remarked on FB, neither does this boomer. 🙂
Looks like there is a good (negative) correlation between time on earth and belief in BS.
“Generation X adults without minor children were slightly more alarmed about climate change than were parents. The difference is small, but it is in the opposite direction than we expected.”
Yeah they have more important things to worry about.
The results of this report suggest that better educated young adults are more likely to recognize the importance of the problem…
Where does it follow from, that young adults are better educated than people born in 1960s?
Modern public education system is a joke, colleges are prestige farms, where substance and real knowledge are precious rarities, Academia is a venal quagmire, where a survivor needs to be made of that fertile substance that always floats on top… Better educated? You mean, more brainwashed?
The level of ones education has absolutely nothing to do with weather the AGW speculation is valid or not. As far as being informed I vaguely recall sceptics were better informed about CAGW science.
It only takes 1 fact to invalidate a theory (AGW not being one of them). 😉
This is not remotely surprising. Generation X has been around long enough to know by experience if their local climate has changed. Asking Generation X to believe in climate change is like asking a grown adult to believe in leprechauns.
Mr Miller was surprised that parents with minor children were less concerned about ‘climate change’ than just adults. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. People with children are going to be more concerned about the negative consequences for their children that come with the totalitarian ‘solutions’ that True Believers are open about bringing to us. That naturally gets them labeled as the d-word (though not explicitly stated here). We seem to have a genetic tendency to care about our offspring’s future. Whodathunkit?
*Apologies for runon sentences, had back surgery a few days ago, and the combination of pain, poor sleep, and lots of (legal) drugs.
New to me but this makes me Generation W and I do not worry about Climate Change only the idiots who consider themselves so clever that they want to try changing climate. Idiots!
“The results of this report suggest that brainwashed young adults are more likely to recognize the importance of the problem, but that there is a broad awareness of the issue even though many adults prefer to focus on more immediate issues—jobs and schools for their children—than the needs of the next generation. These results will not give great comfort to either those deeply financed about climate issues or those who are dismissive of the issue.”
fify 🙂
To add to the last, I don’t think the being in one political party or another (a pox on all of them) causes a belief in ‘climate change’, rather an individual’s beliefs that draw them into one party or another, and lead them to have a position on AGW. People naturally inclined to believe in statist solutions will tend to be in their national leftist party, and AGW. Those inclined to mistrust statist solutions will be in their national rightist party, and against AGW. We who tend to be against statism, often are educated in history. Statist regimes always lead to lower levels of freedom. We know that historical context, so we are naturally, against in this case, AGW. If you want me to believe in your ideas, I will not blindly submit. If you want me to go along with your ideas, prove to me there is a problem, and prove to me your solutions will work without loss of liberty to me.
Most of us had to sit through global “cooling” lectures. We’re a little skeptical the second time round.
Weird. They use alarm as a criterion. Better-
educatedindoctrinated adults were more likely to recognize the problem. The people asking the questions were doing so while using a sky-umbrella.“Generation X adults without minor children were slightly more alarmed about climate change than were parents. The difference is small, but it is in the opposite direction than we expected.”
Shows that J D Miller was running at the problem with a battering-ram of preconceptions, don’t you think? My guess, and it’s a guess, is that parents are way more worried about survival than single adults, whose earlier
educationpropagandization has not worn off. While the results are not surprising, despite Miller’s vague attempt to prove the sky is falling, he ‘proved’ the opposite.I’m Gen-X. I remember watching the film Silent Running (1972) about man’s destruction of the last forests. But that same year the film Zero Population Growth (ZPG) was made, about a dystopian eco-fascist future. Gen-X came after the Boomers, who thought they had to save the world. Gen-X is a lot more cynical, even about saving the world. I really do think that there is a generational bias, where the next generation grows up reflecting on the mistakes and attitudes of the previous generation. If you were old enough to be a somebody signing stuff at the Club of Rome, you were part of the previous generation, the Boomers. Their “solution” became part of the “problem” for the next lot. It is a big giveaway in global warming that people’s opinion about it reflect more their own generation and political outlook, than a mundane rational analysis of cold hard facts and uncertainties and risks. Cries of “we have to do something!” express that bias, as do the notions that geoengineering and nuclear are automatically “wrong” and to be dismissed. But this isn’t to say that the Boomers were entirely wrong — they envision and desired a united harmonious planet. They want to reduce greed and oppression. But it is the WAY in which they want to achieve this that the next generation thinks, hm, that’s not really going to work. Part of it is maybe also that the Boomers were reacting against their own previous generation, which was more about hierarchies and order, traditional nationalistic mindset, but in reacting to that, they just created a new “ecological” hierarchy where the planet is above humans, and humans are just another species whose numbers are to be managed. Gen-X came along just in time to see some of the contradictions, and end up feeling incredibly cynical about it all. I hear the Millenials have since reacted to us dark black clouds of cynicism and loser-ness, and are turning out as bright happy hard working people who are healthily materialistic and cheerful. Ie. even less taken by global warming. Hope so, somebody’s gotta build something useful.
“Still, 12 percent of those who were highly literate scientifically were either dismissive or doubtful about climate change,”
Hardly a surprise except that the percentage isn’t higher! But notice how ‘man-made’ or ‘anthropogenic’ gets lost. Who does not ‘believe’ in climate change?
“As the nation suffers through a summer of record-shattering heat”
Weather is not Climate – we are constantly told (when it is cold). Here in Britain, we are having a cold wet summer so if the heat in parts of the USA is supposed to be AGW it certainly is not global, unfortunately.
“Not so,” he said. “Generation X adults without minor children were slightly more alarmed about climate change than were parents. The difference is small, but it is in the opposite direction than we expected.” (emphasis mine)
So the researchers were disabused of their preconceived notions, eh? I would be interested in seeing exactly how the survey questions werer phrased.
Curious that the author remarks on the difference between his expectations and the results. As sophisticated as he may think he is about bias, I doubt it.
========================
“many adults prefer to focus on more immediate issues—jobs and schools for their children—than the needs of the next generation. ”
How many times does one have to read this sentence before it starts to make sense?
Many Gen-X-ers probably also remember the global cooling scare of the ’70s and realize that this CAGW scam is just more of the same fearmongering.
Thank you for this posting. What caught my eye was the graphic showing the modern generations. I was an Aviation major in college back in the early 80s. Needless to say, studying meteorology was a large part of our curriculum, but we also took business and economic classes. During that time period I was always told that I belonged to Generation X, as I was born in 1964 and my parents were Baby Boomers, born from the WWII Generation. Years later I started to see articles and graphics that referred to people that were my age as Baby Boomers. This left me none too happy. No offense to my Boomer friends, or parents. It’s just that I spent my teen years rebelling against the Boomers and then to be told you are your parents, well that was just too much. It’s bad enough that one year we wake up with children of our own and then catch ourselves saying the same things to them that mom and dad said to us when we were young. Then you finally realize that you really have become your parents after all.
However, I’m still no Boomer. I’m proud to be Generation X and indeed I am not concerned with Climate Change, at least not the “anthropogenic” global kind of change. As many people remember, I grew up in the late 70s hearing about the new Ice Age that was going to bury NYC in a few years.
There can no GHG-AGW. It’s the artefact of the assumption that the Earth’s surface radiates as a black body in a vacuum, a concept no professional scientist can accept.
Let’s consider CO2. Because of its simple band structure, above ~200 ppmV in a long optical path at ambient temperature it’s in ‘self-absorption’ mode. The ~95% of inactivated CO2 molecules absorb thermal IR from the interior so emissivity/absorptivity asymptotes, proved by experiment a long time ago.
But UP IR from the Earth’s surface in that band competes for these inactivated molecules. In turn lower atmosphere DOWN emissivity increases as you get nearer the Earth’s surface and the temperature gradient changes to compensate.
The additional DOWN flux competes for the emission sites on the surface, reducing its emissivity in that wavelength band. So, the real origin of the GHE is probably lower IR flux in GHG bands, more in the ‘atmospheric window’. The reduction of TOA flux in a particular band is because there was less to start with.
The sequitur is that once self-absorption occurs in a GHG, its contribution to the GHE self limits. This inversion of thinking will I suspect be controversial. Considering the ~400% increase in IR assumed in the models, it’s time we stopped the charade. GIGO proves nothing.
I’m past the Gen-X time window, having been born in 1952. But I have been through that phase when environment and AGW were on my mental back-burner, when I was too busy trying to make ends meet, working hard and finnacing my three offsprings’ education. After my kids finally got their degrees and finacial independence, I had time on my hands to update myself on the planet’s position in the solar system and other matters. The weather is always a topic immediately discussed when friends meet and the climate is not different from weather at this level. So I went digging, utilising my scientific background (a first degree in mechanical engineering science). I soon realised that what Al Gore, CNN, National geografic, Dicovery Channel and my local newspaper had been telling me was all baloney, part of a global manufactured man-made scam.
When the gen-X-ers reach my age and start digging, most of them will go through the same process I went through.
I guess their desired result of when they state “think of the children” didn’t workout the way they thought it would. Kinda like how their concensus worked out for them too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Massey
Attended a presentation by this gentleman many years ago. Very good at explaining why different generations have such varying views on all matters.
I guess Generation X deserves more credit for common sense than previously thought.
Glad to hear that about the Millennials. Since the field for cheerful hard work is wide open, I predict sterling results.
There are too many flaws in his arguments to know where to start rebutting them. Suffice to say, his presumptions are all bollocks.