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.
Notice the article presents “climate change” as synonymous with AGW. If you buy into the semantics you concede part of the argument. Perhaps folks realize that “climate change” is something that happens and we can’t do anything about it and it is something apart from global warming. Or maybe the continuing doomsday predictions get a bit old after a while.
“better educated young adults are more likely to recognize the importance of the problem”
What they are trying to say is this;
“young adults being in contact with brainwashed academia are more likely to recognize the imagined problem”.
http://www.aoiusa.org/blog/dismantling-of-a-culture/
“He also found that partisan affiliations predicted attitudes, with nearly half of liberal Democrats alarmed or concerned compared with zero percent of conservative Republicans.”
I’ll quote Christopher Hitchens here: “I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness. Amazing. My conservative friends look at me and say, ‘Welcome to the club. What took you so long?’ Well that’s what it took and I think it’s worth recording.”
I used to be leftish. My exposure to green ideology has moved me firmly to the right. University of Michigan has got this arse-about-face.
What are the survey findings for the 50-60 year old generation XXOS?
Found this comment by Michael Mann:
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2012/07/gen-x-climate-attitude
“Priming is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences a response to a later stimulus. It can occur following perceptual, semantic, or conceptual stimulus repetition.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29
Nice impression of their fellow human beings the elistist crackpot charlatans like Mann show here.
The change wasn’t small. More than a quarter of those who followed the issue in 2009 did not do so in 2011. That’s a big change. At that rate, by 2015, fewer than 10% will follow the issue.
A “100-point Index of Civic Scientific Literacy”____What socialist jargon!! Most likely a 100-point Index of Political Correctness.
—Generation X is lukewarm about climate change—uninformed about the causes and unconcerned about the potential dangers.—
Well, actually, we are all quite uninformed about the causes as they relate to climate change. Oh, we posses some knowledge of some of the variables involved yet, to say with certainty that one
“knows” is not only inane but just plain bad science.
a tip for CAGW-sceptic parents with CAGW-zealous children.
tell them they have convinced you they are right and you are wrong.
tell them some changes need to be made.
to start, because using the computer is adding considerably to greenhouse emissions, computer use will be curtailed and u r cancelling internet service.
problem solved.
Could it be that us GenXers have seen so many scare stories and doom laden idea’s, that nothing fazes us..and we are not so gullible as the younger generation who thinks that every thing that comes out of a computer is gospel, even though they are more computer savvy??
“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.”
It obviously doesn’t occur to them that these people no longer believe because they’ve studied the evidence and found it lacking credibility.
Systems thinking which has been pushed in the schools for more than 20 years was supposed to make the students susceptible to the AGW hype and to “feel” threatened. The ISR is interesting because it evolves out of Kurt Lewin’s work and the Center for Group Dynamics. It has been heavily intertwined with the academic social psychology work done at U-Mich. And that’s a big deal because U-Mich College of Ed is where they develop the various theories to transform education in ways none of us like. BSTEP-the Behavioral Sciences Teacher Education Project came out of Michigan in the 60s to push ed schools away from the transmission of knowledge to changing the child.
I was going to write about this new science education rubric being pushed for colleges. My guess is with this research, it will get pushed more and more. Especially as it dovetails with the K-12 pushes we see going on all over the world under the headings authentic learning and pedagogies. http://www.sencer.net/Assessment/pdfs/Rubric_Jan232012.pdf
SENCER pushed by NSF stands for Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities. A la BSTEP, the motto is to apply the Science of Learning to the Learning of Science.
It is looking for students to be alarmed and thus emotionally engaged and searching for the right public policies to solve various modern problems. Usually, and the students may never know enough history to recognize this, caused by bad public policies pushed in the past.
I was born in 1970. I don’t particularly remember Global Cooling as an issue, but here’s what I do remember:
1) OMGZ – we’re going to run out of oil by 1980!
2) OMGZ – we’re going to be nuked by the Soviets
3) OMGZ – the Soviets are going to conquer the planet with their superior economic systems
4) OMGZ – We’re not going to be able to feed everyone and we’re all going to starve
5) OMGZ – The Japanese are going to crush us economically
6) OMGZ – We’re going to be crushed by Skylab
7) OMGZ – Drugs are going to destroy everyone in the country
8) OMGZ – Crime is going to skyrocket
9) OMGZ – George W Bush is going to turn this country into a religious dictatorship
10)OMGZ – If you leave your child outside alone for 5 seconds, they’ll be raped and killed by a pedophile
11) OMGZ – Beer and Wine are bad for you. No wait, they’re good for you. No wait, Bad. No, good, No, badgoodbad, No, goodbadgood.
12) OMGZ – Fat is bad for you. No wait, meat is bad for you. no wait, carbs are bad for you. No wait, high fructose corn syrup is bad for you. No wait, processed food is bad for you.
13) OMGZ – We’re raising a generation of mindless corporate drones. No wait, we’re raising a generation of hopeless narcissists.
And so forth. The point is – I’ve been told the sky was falling since I can first remember hearing anything. And every time it turns out the fears were overblown, the next crisis comes along, and “this time, it’s different.” EVERY SINGLE TIME! For instance:
A) OMGZ – the US is polluting the planet with CO2. No wait, the Chinese are polluting the planet with CO2, and the US levels are dropping. But they’re not dropping fast enough!
B) OMGZ – we’re at a tipping point on climate, it’s certain to rise uncontrollably. No wait, we’re _past_ the tipping point, all we can do is mitigate the suffering. No wait, the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today.
After a while, one starts to realize that panic is the only button that most people (pundits) know how to push. And I’ve been living through crisis after crisis after crisis since I was 6 years old. And yet the world is still here, and, in a lot of ways, is better now than it has ever been before. So yes, I’m pretty cynical that the latest “crisis” is any more real than the tales of mass famine, economic destitution and/or socio-political ruin that I’ve been fed all my life. You want me to believe in AGW? Don’t mess with the station measurements and increase them 2/3rds of the time, don’t hide the decline and don’t use the court system to try and keep your methods and software secret. These kinds of actions do not help the AGW case at all.
“When the gen-X-ers reach my age and start digging, most of them will go through the same process I went through.”
So true, Alex.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I once helped out on a “climate action” day, (several years ago) then some idiot said the words, “the science is settled”. Well, being from a science background and having a science degree in physics and maths, I knew immediately something VERY IFFY was happening. Here was this very new science, and suddenly it was “settled” ..
My BS meter went haywire and I statrted digging further, and the whole hoax is now so totally obvious that I find it hard to believe that anyone with even the slightest scientific understanding could actually accept the whole scam.
But I guess noses in the trough can turn once knowledgable people into moronic imbeciles.
Why are some humans so weak in this respect ??
Well, the funny (but sad) thing is that the american people have played a part in society becoming what it has. We now have a society of consumers. Liberal spenders if you will. It’s even a problem with people that call themselves conservatives. Most people are sheeple in one way or another. When you understand that, you understand this countries need for strong leadership. Which we haven’t had in decades.
It doesn’t help that we’re constantly bombarded with advertisements encourging us to BUY BUY BUY instead of saving. You ever watch TV now? It’s sad.
If society is worried about it’s future it better start changing it’s ways. I’ll start taking these studies about “what people are really worried about” when I see the results in our society. Right now I see a society that is too materialistic and with too much lovelier for American Idol to really understand what is really going on.us
Speaking as a Gen Xer I can tell you that we are quite the cynical bunch having grown up witnessing the Boomers destroy our family culture in the 60s and 70s and then become a bunch of money grubbing, coke snorting hypocrites in the 80s (peace, love, dope to money, power, coke). We also grew up before the internet and reality TV became our education system. This guy can go s**t in his hat.
davidmhoffer says:
“How many times does one have to read this sentence before it starts to make sense?”
Once you realize that the next generation doesn’t need food/shelter/etc. now or an education, and that what they do need is an unelected global bureaucracy in control of their energy and productivity for the good of the planet; it all makes sense. (/sarc)
I never did like the Generation X label, it sounds like we’re …. um … variable, wish-washy even. Let’s change it to Generation “D”.
The “Index of Civic Scientific Literacy.” Jeez, that’s a new one!
I can only assume it conforms to their particular ideas of scientific literacy. I imagine it’s just a ticklist of questions. Number one would be, do you believe those 97% of scientists who say we’re heading for thermogeddon Y/N? If you should press N, you’ve just become a scientific illiterate …
Pointman
Don’t worry about the youngsters. At least some of them are aware of what is going on.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/selkovjr/3148260856/
As a Gen-Xer… I’m kind of insulted. It insinuates that I’m not educated enough to recognise a problem when I see one. It also makes the assumption that Climate Change/Global Warming is a problem.
I can’t believe that the National Science Foundation paid good money for this garbage report. I think the National Science Foundation should ask for its money back.
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.
Where on the Venn diagram does zero overlap fifty?
I’m between Boomer and X. Do that make me a W er?
The older a generation becomes – the more climate one experiences. It is hard for propaganda to overcome actual life experience. Except for the very gullible whose numbers also decrease with increasing age. Too bad trillions, of funding dollars for climate study, wasn’t used to crack the whole aging problem. It is one disease everyone has to face and kills us all, in the end. Maybe if everyone lived for 600 yrs we would find climate control an easy problem. GK
I am trying to get my head around the following two quotes:
How can this study reconcile these seemingly contradictory comments? I don’t see how a zero percent CAGW concern rate amongst conservative Republicans can be interpreted as “overlapping levels of concern”. Non-concern — yes; concern — no.
Now on the liberal side, with less than a 50% concern rate, here I can see “overlapping levels of concern”. Although I might be more inclined to interpret this as the beginning of their shift from the indoctrination of the green movement to their embracing the truth of actual scientific thought.
It may not be possible to score higher than 90% on the 100-point Index of Civic Scientific Literacy cited unless you believe in AGW.