New Survey: Nearly Half Of Young Americans Are Climate Skeptics
The Younger They Are, The More Skeptical
In fact, the age group that least agreed with the statement that global warming is a fact and caused by CO2 emissions was that of 18 to 20-year-olds. The assumption that younger US adults are more liberal when it comes to global warming does not hold up; if anything, they are even more skeptical. –Emma Kromm, Harvard Political Review, 29 April 2015
New Survey: Nearly Half Of Young Americans Are Climate Sceptics
From the Harvard Political Review, 29 April 2015 by Emma Kromm (h/t to The GWPF)
At the White House Correspondents Association Dinner last Saturday night, President Obama got angry. With the help of his anger translator, Luther (played by comedian Keegan-Michael Key), the president abandoned his usual reasonable tone to condemn those who deny climate change. “The science is clear,” he began. “Every serious scientist says we need to act. The Pentagon says it’s a national security risk.” As the president continued, it became clear that he no longer needed Luther to reveal his inner anger, and he drew laughs from the crowd after letting loose. “It is crazy! What about our kids? What kind of stupid, shortsighted, irresponsible… ”
While the president’s skit might have been the highlight of the night, do Americans really need this kind of angry reminder that climate change is a problem? Some seem to think we are living in a world where climate change is widely acknowledged as an irrefutable fact. Mary Robinson, the seventh president of Ireland and founder of the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice, has argued that the generation in power now is the first to fully know about climate change, and the last with the ability to prevent its projected effects. She and others are of the opinion that, at this point, all but a few outliers understand global warming, its causes, and its dire consequences.
New data from the Harvard Public Opinion Project tell a very different story. Only 55 percent of survey participants agreed with the statement,
“Global warming is a proven fact and is mostly caused by emissions from cars and industrial facilities such as power plants.” Twenty percent held the belief that “Global warming is a proven fact, and is mostly caused by natural changes that have nothing to do with emissions from cars,” and the remaining 23 percent who answered the question believe that “Global warming is a theory that has not been proven yet.”
Even more surprising, these numbers are the same across the board for participants between 18 and 29 years old, with 51-56 percent agreeing that global warming is a fact and is caused by fuel emissions across age groups. In fact, the age group that least agreed with the first statement was that of 18 to 20-year-olds. The assumption that younger adults are more liberal when it comes to global warming does not hold up; if anything, they are even more skeptical.
Consequently, young Americans are often unsupportive of government measures to prevent climate change that might harm the economy. Less than a third of those surveyed agreed with the statement, “Government should do more to curb climate change, even at the expense of economic growth,” and only 12 percent strongly agreed with it. Again, the youngest survey respondents were more conservative than any other age group, with only 28 percent of 18 to 20-year-olds in agreement and eight percent in strong agreement with that statement. In contrast, other age groups varied between 30 percent and 34 percent in agreement and 11 percent to 14 percent in strong agreement. Not only are the newest voters less convinced of climate change as a reality; they are also less likely to support government funding of climate change solutions.
Every generation rebels against the previous to a point this may just be that.
YUO SAY
Bill Damon (@billdamon) April 29, 2015 at 9:07 pm
Yes. Great point, Bjorn! There has been no warming in the last 18 years except that 13 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000.
Keep cherry picking your data!
On record? Surely that is cherry picking at its most dishonest and blatant. If the less than 150 years is “on record” then how are comparisons being made? If the earlier data is not valid then how can it be used for comparison and if it is then on record means for at least a six hundred years as a basic bottom end requirement. This is a raw minimum given the cycle can be proven to be three hundred years from Fourier analysis as the product of the two major easily identifiable cycles, and even two cycles is really quite inadequate.
This really is a field in which honesty seems to have zero value to the so called scientists involved.
Leland N says:
Dirk’s data appears to be false
Aren’t assertions convenient? In grown up world, someone who disputes a fact normally goes to the source, in this case NOAA, and tries to determine if they are posting rubbish.
But Leland takes the easy way out: he makes an evidence-free comment, asserting his opinion that the NOAA data is “false”.
Nice try, Leland, and thanx for playing with the adults here.
[That’s the same Leland who called this NASA/GISS graph “snark”]:
Here’s some more “snark” for Leland:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/files/2012/05/Mean-Temp-1.jpg
EVERYBODY PANIC!! …not.
[Now ^that^ was snark.☺]
Well, Leland is more right than he wished. All of it is false, it comes from the masters of falsity, the warmunists. Not that it makes much sense to compute an average after you have done your very best to trample the Nyquist theorem all the way from here to sunday. Or that an average temperature of a planet is a terribly useful metric for anything anyway.
This confirms the half-life of climate prognostications to be below 18 years. A brief recap seems appropriate:
http://thefederalistpapers.integratedmarket.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/205_156257.jpg
Interesting, but I am skeptical about polls questioning 18 to 20 year-olds. ;->
PaulH
(“Interesting, but I am skeptical about polls questioning 18 to 20 year-olds. ;->”)
Not sure which way your irony is cutting, but the poll is interesting as a measure of the effectiveness of the “global warming education” that these 18-20 year-olds have been exposed to for, maybe, 18-20 years. It says that somewhere in the murky cognitive development processes of young people there is a capacity for questioning. If so, there may be a glint of hope for the planet yet.
“The Younger They Are, The More Skeptical”
Of course, when you have a school system that is dominated by progressives who rejected “The Man” when their reached young adulthood, it only seems obvious that when youth they teach grow to young adulthood, they will reject “The Man” .. just like their school teachers had done years ago.
The real problem is that now the “progressives” are “The Man.”
Benny Goodman before a concert at Carnegie Hall was heard to say … “tonight this place will be full of long hairs” … and he didn’t mean hippies.
Yesterday (Apr 29th) in Edmonton we were at 9C. Today, at 7:30 AM we are at 16C. OMG….globul warming. Blame the Alaskans for sending down that warm air! Do I really need a sarc tag?
I’ve got a 12yr old boy and 11yr old girl. The boy could give a rats ass, the girl is firmly in the skeptic camp. I being a meteorologist gave her direction and she thinks it is all much ado about nothing. Good girl that daughter of mine :-).
Once upon a time young, impressionable minds were taught how the world is by older people who thought they knew everything. Whatever they first heard on any topic was held to be Gospel, and any later, disparate ideas were considered heresies at best and Machiavellian lies at worst.
Then along came the Internet, which quickly came to replace the efforts of lazy teachers and busy single parents at educating the children.
Searching the Internet would answer their questions faster and more reliably than asking a grown-up. But the search engines are intellectually neutral, so they present the correct answers and the incorrect answers to kids’ questions, side-by-side, without bias. Children raised with Internet access have quickly learned to compare the different sides of any argument and decide for themselves which seems to make more sense.
I’d like to see the real numbers from this study, but the “page is currently offline.”
I’m curious because it seems to me that most of the really fierce skeptics here are older.
And wiser.
While it is true that recent generations have grown up with the internet and social media, it should not be forgotten that there was already a very large pool of experienced PC and Mac users long before the internet was ever democratized, and I would argue as well that it is in fact some cadres from these older generations who have profited most from the rise of the worldwide web, because many of these people were educated under a system whose standards were very much higher than those of recent decades. Yet, there are always plenty of nincompoops and technoflubs in every generation.
My impression is that most of the younger, outspoken voices are those of CAGW drones lapping up the royal nectar.
I haven’t posted anything in here, simply because I don’t have enough knowledge to say anything particularly intelligent on the topics. But in this case, I was reading a story over at Science Daily, and there was a sentence part that struck me as encapsulating the issue with a lot of the AGW stuff, what is posted in here, and the real meaning of what the practice of science is as opposed to what “warmists” seem to do:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150430170755.htm
“…Richards teamed up with experts in many areas to try to discover faults with his radical idea…”
Also keep in mind that this is America we’re talking about, where 42% of the population believe that God created the Earth in 7 days, and 36% think aliens have visited the earth. So I’mma take your science opinions with a grain of salt.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx
http://www.livescience.com/21216-americans-ufo-belief.html
By any definition an angel that comes down from heaven, on wings no less, (they didn’t specify whether the wings were fixed or attached) is an alien. The very construct of the images from the old testament accounts could very well anybody’s description of a ufo today.
I can hold 2 contradictory dogmas in my mind at the same time. In this case one is a basis in fact and one is of belief. No matter how far down the rabbit hole you go with string theory or quantum physics, the question will always remain, what or who made this. So if you were abducted by aliens, would that be a belief or a fact? Who says that there aren’t several different species already here? Could you really tell if someone was genetically engineered to live here? Or close to but not from here? Does a 0.1 make a difference in DNA and the outcome?
Well, Flash, that’s why we keep asking you climate alarmists for facts and evidence to back up your assertions. Starting with some measurements quantifying manmade global warming.
But all we get are answers that sound suspiciously like the folks who believe in aliens.
I despair that a woman bright enough to work at Harvard is trying to shoe-horn this issue into the pathetically crude and useless liberal-conservative dichotomy.
I am not a liberal.
I am not a conservative.
The same applies to everyone else, if only they would think it through for themselves. Neither term is of any use at all as a summary of the views of anyone who thinks at all.