Newfie wrote:Just to not me how opinions have changed (or not) below are the percentages for 2009 and the 2016. And the delta from the Yale study.
Cohort 2009 2016 delta
Alarmed. 18. 18. 0
Concerned. 33. 34. +1
Cautious. 19. 23. +4
Disengaged 12. 5. -7
Doubtful. 11. 11. 0
Dismissive. 7. 9. +2
In short, not a lot of movement, but more polarization.
Here is the link to be origional report. The demographic analysis starts on page 125. It’s interesting to. It’s that dismissives are pretty convienced they know all they need to know and appear to be closed to any new info.
It dismissives are not really the problem, they are a distinct minority. A much bigger problem is the tiny increase I. Alarmed and concerned in the past 7 years. Apparently we are not collectively learning very much.
http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp ... ericas.pdf
IMO there is a sound reason few people are alarmed. In fact I would go on to say the 11 percent alarmed today are not the same 11 percent of the population that were the alarmed in 2009. Other than those in places like this website who are well nigh obsessed with doom of one fashion or another I believe probably 10 of the 11 percent alarmed are young adults just starting to make their way in life. These are the people who have had a limited exposure to the national media and its grossly overblown statements that are very rarely actually based upon facts. If you are a news watcher then by the age of 30 you will be exposed to literally hundreds of media accounts of how something is going to kill you/give you cancer/injure your children. During that same 8-12 years of early adulthood nearly all of those histrionic pronouncements of imminent disaster will have been proven wrong, sometimes by a huge margin. Looking back I can still remember the hype from 3 mile island, and then Chernobyl and then Fukushima, and yet in all the time between those individual events and now nearly every doomsayer prediction was proven totally in error by the facts of reality. For a more prosaic example after the Tsunami in Southeast Asia there were a string of stories about the next Cascadia plate rebound which will some day cause a tsunami to hit Portland, Oregon in the same fashion. Or the earthquake during the World Series in Oakland, California that lead to the hundreds of predictions about the next California Big Quake. Or the very small eruption of Mount Saint Helen's a few years ago that lead to a string of movies like Dante's Peak and Volcano. IOW by the time you reach about 30 years old you come to realize that most doom predictions are no more accurate than any Hollywood movie and you really should not base life decisions on those predictions.
In the real world outside of the Internet that means people start discounting every doom story whether there is science to back it up or not. Some day the Cascadia fault will break loose Tsunami-ing Portland Oregon, and some day the Next Big Quake will hit San Fransisco and break a lot of things and kill a lot of people, and Some Day Yellowstone Caldera is liable to erupt again causing two or three years of Volcanic Winter and devastating about a third of the land territory of the USA and a quarter of Canada as well. All of these things, and Climate Change as well, will happen some day. It is wise to not live in what you know will be a badly damaged place when these natural disasters happen, but other than choosing where to live there is not a heck of a lot you can do about it.
Humans dominate this planet for two reasons. People love to talk about intelligence because they see that as what makes us different than other species, but without the other factor it wouldn't make us world dominators. Species all over this planet at every level of complexity come in two basic types, specialists and generalists. Specialist species develop successfully to exploit some resource that no other species is using early on. A lot of insects are in this category but there are also mammals like the Koala Bear that specializes in eating Eucalyptus trees to the exclusion of everything else. Specialization can get you a very long way, for example when Eucalyptus forests were widespread and there was no competition the Koala Bears boomed in numbers by exploiting that resource alone. But it also breeds fragility, because they are so tightly specialized Koala Bears are symbiotic with their trees and if the trees die so do the Koala. The other evolutionary strategy is generalization and is epitomized by the omnivorous animals that can eat plants or animals to get their essential nutrients. Bears and Swine are both examples of this capability as are Humans. Coupling omnivorous diet with high intelligence means humans have been able to spread everywhere on the planet where food sources exist. The only reason Humans were not already living on Antarctica when the Europeans discovered it in the 19th century was because of the difficulty crossing the Davis Strait. If some crazy time traveler had dropped an Eskimo whaling village from the Arctic Coast on the Antarctic Peninsula any time in the last 15,000 years they would have been able to meet all their same nutrition/clothing/shelter needs with the resources available in Antarctica as they have access to on the Arctic Ocean coast. We quite literally could have spread from coast to coast north to south if the Paleo-Indians had managed to build strong enough boats to cross from South America to Antarctica.
Adaptable species spread far more easily than specialized species. If the koala Bears had developed human like intelligence the best they could do would be to plant groves of Eucalyptus trees in territories where the trees could survive and thrive. We know they could have spread them somewhat because Humans have planted them for lumber and the useful plant oils they produce in places very far away from where they evolved. But no matter how smart they might be an Intelligent Koala would still be trapped into a tree farming lifestyle which would make developing metallurgy or any other technology beyond stone shaping very difficult. In comparison humans will eat literally anything they can digest and many things they can't which today is mostly limited by cultural biases. You can liver quite healthy on nothing but insects if you choose to do so, but very few humans do so even today. Or slime mold, or garden slugs, or any of a hundred other foods that my cultural bias labels as nauseating.
So until Climate Change actually takes the next step away from the current condition 89 percent of Americans surveyed will not be alarmed by it. After the next climate step takes place most people will be alarmed at first, but depending on how big the step is most of us will still be alive in the short term after the step and trying to think up ways to adapt and make an opportunity out of the changing ecosystem around us. Heck for the people living in Phoenix, AZ there is a reasonably good chance the next step in climate change will create more cloudy days and more regular rain events rather than the brief monsoon season they experience today, meaning their climate will be improved over what it is today. Millions of people living in the very dry desert are only able to do so by shipping in a lot of food and water so on the other hand if their sources are disrupted they might all have to move somewhere else. In the most likely case for most people the immediate impact of the next climate shift, which could take place today or 50 years from now, will be small and they will be able to adapt or move after it happens. This means staying alarmed about it is counter productive on an individual basis.