Gen-Xers don’t care much about global climate change

UPDATE  09-JAN-2013:  According to the NY Times, the numbers are in, and 2012 -- the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the Corn Belt and a huge storm that caused broad devastation in the Middle Atlantic States -- turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.  And in on-fire Australia, it's gotten so much hotter that they've had to add new colors to the weather maps.  But will these developments finally change the minds of climate change deniers?  Not bloody likely.  As Upton Sinclair once famously quipped, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

UPDATE  28-AUG-2012:  From the American Meteorological Society’s 40th annual Broadcast Meteorology Conference, in Boston, Mass. comes the story of weathercaster Jim Gandy, one of the nation’s most effective climate change communicators.  Gandy broadcasts in South Carolina, one of the most conservative states in the nation.  But instead of the expected backlash from "deep red" viewers, the public response has been very positive.  That's a lesson for the kids.   Watch here to see Jim Gandy explain how climate change is great ... at least for Poison Ivy!

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UPDATE  07-AUG-2012:  Mother Jones offers a handy guide to the health impacts of global climate change.  Increased rainfall, warmer temperatures, dying reefs, and hotter oceans are handing diseases that afflict humans—algal, fungal, mosquito-borne, tick-borne—a chance to spread.  That means that diseases previously unheard in the United States of are now emerging.  Thanks, Ma!

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UPDATE 30-July-2012:  Even Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a one-time leading climate change skeptic, has issued a mea culpa and announced, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, that not only is global warming real, but estimates of the rate of warming were correct, and humans are almost entirely the cause.  

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A story in Grist provides alarming new insights into the views and concerns of members of Generation X on the subject of climate change. ("Generation X" is often defined as the post-Baby Boom generation born in the developed Western nations between 1961 and 1981.)

According to a 2011 poll of about 3,000 Gen-Xers in their late 30s, members of Generation X are responding in a disturbing way to climate change — with a big, collective shrug of indifference. 

Only 22 percent expressed “high concern” about climate change ... and this despite the fact that “Generation X is the most scientifically literate and best educated generation in American history,” according to lead researcher Jon D. Miller.

Of even more concern is that these numbers seem to be trending downwards, while people with children and grandchildren appear to care even less on the whole.

Miller says the complexity of climate change and global weather patterns, combined with contradictory messages broadcast by politicians, environmental groups, media outlets, and fossil-fuel companies, make it difficult for busy people to wrap their heads around the issues.

Or to put it less delicately, Christian Chynoweth, a 40-year-old San Francisco poll respondent who fears that his two children will grow up to face a topsy-turvy climate, is “totally into the environment” and “definitely concerned” about climate change. 

But Mr. Chynoweth just doesn’t “spend much time” thinking about climate change. 

Why not?  Mr. Chynoweth complains of the sensationalistic approach of American media, and added “you’ve got to read through a lot of bullshit” to find actual, impartial news.

Just so.

Nevertheless — and notwithstanding frequent proclamations to the contrary on Fox News — the vast majority of actual scientists worldwide concur that the global climate is trending significantly warmer.  And as a recent Audubon policy brief concludes, that situation is increasingly bad for the birds we claim to care so much about.