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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I would wager that Gen Xers, especially the onces who were into science, remember vividly the Global Cooling scare from the 1970s. This movement finally ran its course like so many other oddities and freak shows of the era, such as Chariots of Fire, Bigfoot, streaking, etc.
As a Gen-Xer I am old enough to remember the cooling scare of the 70s, the nuclear winter scare of the 80s, as well as the economic and environmental damage caused in communist one party states. I remember Mutually Assured Destruction, the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, acid rain and endocrine disrupters, Nixon, Brezhnev, Ford, Carter and Reagan.
It’s difficult to get worked up over a rise in temperature of 0.8C when I’ve seen the destructive power of cold snaps and famines as the result.
I’ve also seen science and the scientific method co-opted by both left and right and with equally disastrous results. I know for a fact that the shenanigans of Man, Jones, Hansen and Schmidt are powering the resurgence of the extreme right to take potshots at science as a whole, evolution and biology in particular.
My favourite programs are Numbers, House and CSI because life ain’t the simple.
“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.”
How is a 27% reduction (22 down to 16%) small? If I lost 27% of my salary I would not consider that small. These folks use words in ways I cannot fathom.
Of course they’re not concerned–according to one left-leaning pundit (for that’s all he is), they didn’t build that.
The government did.
Jon Miller, Michigan State University Hannah Professor of integrative studies and political science.
Actually we’re (Although most put me as a baby boomer, not Gen X) not disengaged. We’re just tired of seeing political science morons posing as real scientists.
WOLF ! Wolf ! wolf ! isn’t working on anyone with a brain….sometimes ‘brains’ evolve with age….
Just fit into generation X. Born 1979. I would assume most of us don’t care about “Climate change ” is because we can still remember when it was called Global Warming. Before the re branding effort etc. And the fact that all the original predictions about warmer winters, with less snow. Much warmer summers, and much less rain have been proven false.
At least in the UK.
We’ve been hearing Doomsday scenarios since we were born. Overpopulation and mass starvation, global cooling, nuclear annihilation, nuclear winter, global warming, the ozone layer, acid rain, the rain forests, coral reefs…the list goes on. All of this in our lifetimes.
We’re a little tired of it and we have other things on our minds at the moment.
I am 50 and have lived in the same city all my life. The reason I am not concerned about climate change? I’ve been around long enough in the same place to know that there is nothing going on now that hasn’t happened before.
The only thing I have not seen a repeat of is the regular dust storms we used to see in the late 60s and 70s. Dust from west Texas blowing into central Texas used to be common back then. I would not be surprised to see the dust return in another 10 to 15 years.
Yep – the baby boomer professors and scientists who are currently raising a stink about “climate change” have already, in their lives, lived the dream. They have the six figure salaries, they’ve had their gas guzzling muscle cars in their youths and now own $5000 hand-made bicycles. They’ve got money in the bank, fat 401K’s and/or pensions, and as much gluten-free pasta as they want. And now, they want to screw over the futures of our current generation of young people, all in an effort to validate their careers in climate science or environmental studies.
Yes, with the CAGW climate scientists, it’s all been about taking care of themselves first…
Stefan says:
July 19, 2012 at 2:12 am
In my opinion, Boomers are not out to save the world. They want to take everything they can get from the world for themselves. Their desire to save everything is an extension of their own selfishness. They were given everything, far more than they needed, while growing up after the war. Yes, call them gen W (want). They want their social security, they want government to protect them, and give them more. They are never satisfied. Before them came gen V (victory) the ones who earned the freedom and power that created the most spoiled generation.
As for me, I’m really in neither gen W or X. I don’t identify with either group, born between them. The Dubs took everything and left me nothing (little brothers get screwed all the time). I got out of school before it went truly bad. The Xers are finally figuring out they’ve been had, but don’t have any solutions.
I think the Ys are waking up. Some of them have been raised on pure BS in school and they know there is something terribly wrong with the system. They don’t like the PC garbage,and the lack of real knowledge necessary to get jobs. They feel emply, and they should. Many are expressing a natural reaction to the indoctrination they reject and are not helping the system. They are the slackers. They don’t care to participate in the dysfunctionality. I hope they will try to fill the void in themselves one day and create solutions.
Socialists have run amok on campuses for too long (the NEA should be exposed as corrupt and dangerous). Students have been increasingly abused by bad policies and practices. These experiences are perhaps teaching young people to reject socialism. I would not be surprised if a new Free Speech movement on campuses occurred in a few years to restore real freedom of speech. It’s time to drain the bolshevik cesspools we call universities. Perhaps academic freedom will return when government money runs dry. The unsustainable academic bubble (produced by large indirect costs for grants, insane student loans) will pop one day.
They know they have been lied to on a number of things. ‘Smoking will kill you’ has been greatly emphazed. My kids were amazed I was not dead when I said I smoked for 15 years and quit. They looked around and saw people were not dropping like flies from smoking. My son now smokes and is addicted to it. And don’t get me started on the DARE program.
They realized alarmists are just spouting BS.
Not only does GenX remember the global cooling scare, but we also grew up under the shadows of the threat of nuclear holocaust. Every single person I knew in high school believed there would be nuclear war between the USA and the USSR.
Even if you stipulate that the projected <2C increase in mean temperature is real and man made, what's +2C compared to nuclear winter?
Here is a PowerPoint by Miller with his rationale for the Index of Civic Scientific Literacy as well as some of the questions.
http://tinyurl.com/755w2jr
If you dont want to click on the link you can google “Index of Civic Scientifc Literacy” and it is the 2nd link.
The “Index of Civic Scientific Literacy.” Jeez, that’s a new one!
It seems to be Miller’s particular idee fixe, there’s about a half-dozen impenetrable papers of his either citing this or claiming to describe it. I haven’t had a chance to parse through the (apparently) relevant description-paper, but the abstract is wreathed by a choking miasma of smug opacity… found it. Unless this is an earlier version – circa 1998 – and he’s working with some sort of new updated version. The old one seems to be unobjectionable, looks like a quick-and-dirty test for creationists, radiation-paranoids, and the generally ignorant. Do I think that he’s still using the 1998 index with about a dozen measures? Not really… there it is, 2007, Word document, don’t want to link that, but you can google for it if you’re interested. He’s gone from a dozen, uncontroversial questions (unless you’re a creationist or a nuclear-freeze loon, I suppose) to over two dozen, including about a half-dozen on climate change, mostly expressed in old “global warming” language.
Yeah, he’s offering a hidden tautology by testing his surveyees against their performance on his own “Index of Civic Scientific Literacy”.
Johnbr said:
Does that mean the policies have been working? /sarc
Next point: There is no Conservative party. In the OP there is a sly comparison of the two-party system but then they use Liberals (there is a Liberal party) and Conservatives. Nice try and it seems to have flown under the radar nicely.
The entire topic is a wedge-advancing attempt to manage the conversation by alienating the generations. Isolate, embrace, educate, reform. That continues to be the goal of leftist education policy. This is article is what the clarion of these social shepherds sounds like, and they are calling in the straying sheeple. The MSM are their dogs in the field.
Yea, having 10,000 Soviet warheads aimed at you is a REAL worry. Climate Whatever… not very scary no matter how you hype it. The Boomers will go down clawing and scratching at every last morsel of power/cash. They are vain, greedy, and willing to cross some pretty scary ethical lines in order to extend their lives at the expense of others. We will see organ harvesting in our life time, really already here when you hear some of the Organ Wrangler/Angel of Death stories.
Pretty much every rat-bast**d CEO that has raped our country is a Boomer, the tenured, sclerotic minds of Boomer faculty are rotting our campuses, and their financial mismanagement has forced them to work in their 70s and block the advance of Gen Xers behind them.
They must be climate realists–i.e., heretics of this new age hippie religeon. Skeptics of global warming alarmism are drawing back the curtain on the superstition and ignorance of the Left. Over the past decade, global temperature on the Earth has not increased; global warming has ceased, and already there are signs of the future deep temperature drop. (Dr. H. Abdussamatov)
Old hippies have been telling this generation of people “the End is Nigh” for decades without result. They simply don’t believe them anymore.
One of the questions for Civil Scientific Literacy: “The earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs”. [see link from: Eric above ]
While, obviously, what we think of as dinosaurs didn’t live anywhere near around the same time as humans; taxonomically speaking birds are dinosaurs and are certainly living at the same time as humans (both earliest and current). So, what’s the scientifically literate correct answer? Is that the same as the Civil Scientifically Literate correct answer?
Goes to show that today’s kids are harder to brainwash than the liberals/progressives thought. Maybe there is some hope for this world.
If one looks at the pattern in views per day of the (biased and dishonest) Wikipedia global warming article and compares to that of many other articles on Wikipedia, there is a very strong pattern of particularly higher weekday than weekend activity for the former. From that, one may deduce how many (most) of the around 0.4 million views per month of it (around 5 million a year) are from many of today’s kids getting it directly or indirectly in school assignments on weekdays, as part of propaganda-pushing in much of the educational system as well as the “mainstream” media.
For instance, contrast the utterly different shapes of the viewership curves in http://stats.grok.se/en/201205/Global_warming versus http://stats.grok.se/en/201205/Space_colonization where the former implicitly shows it is what schoolkids are being taught about as our future, more so in fact than in intrinsic interest of the average person. (Although some do assignments as homework on weekends, in general weekday viewing is less likely than weekend viewing to be recreational and not as likely to be someone’s own independent initiative).
So we are getting a young generation fed and raised on propaganda to a degree.
However, in general, the more someone has lived through the past half century of global warming (and countless false claims on a wide assortment of topics as other comments here have reminded), the less likely they are to naively believe BSing about the next half century.
For instance, Popular Science in their July issue is trumpeting propaganda about a 1 foot sea level rise in California in 10 years with the ocean supposedly to flood the San Francisco airport, but some of the naive young teenagers who believe it now will notice a few years later how such isn’t actually happening. In the total population, few people read specific true scientific info (like http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006GL028492.shtml on how actual sea level rise was about 0.145 cm/yr 1954->2003 and less then than the 0.203 cm/yr average 1904->1953), but many notice in personal experience such as how the coastline is where it has always been throughout their lifetimes.
Sometimes I wonder if the CAGW movement backfiring in the end, if we get the cooling of a grand minimum in future decades to destroy it, may do society a lot of good by raising a generation often partially inoculated against naivety — learning skepticism by watching claim after claim from elite “reputable” sources become blatantly garbage in their lifetimes. Reportedly, some people who grew up in Eastern Europe learned not to trust newspapers or the government due to getting used to seeing false info in the communist era.
While anecdotal evidence is a limited sample size, actually the hardcore CAGW proponents I know the most about seem to have really limited interest in learning about global warming effects in themselves but vast passion for trying to get others to believe in the cause, seeming to secretly mostly already know alarmist claims are false, having nil personal fear of global warming doom but enormous desire to dishonestly use such as a tool convenient for their political side. Millions of casuals often sincerely honestly believe, but the smaller minority who are the elite core of the movement are most likely to have inadvertently come across enough info to know better already, albeit with getting into their positions having indirectly already screened out those bothered by dishonesty.
Just more proof of how ignorant the general population is and how inept our education system is and on and on…
If I move from Nome Alaska to Hong Kong, that is climate change.
Bob Rogers says:
July 19, 2012 at 7:19 am
The nuclear winter scare is another fairytale, manufactured by Sagan with a model that was so stupid that the Russian scientists left the meeting in protest.
http://www.textfiles.com/survival/nkwrmelt.txt
I never heard this ultra extreme version of the nuclear winter, just that a massive nuclear exchange would by combination of particulate matter in the air nuclear fallout and unmanagable fires would have a terrible effect on agriculture and sully the water supply.
—-
The nuclear winter scare is another fairytale