UPPA/ZUMApress.com

The midterm elections brought an unprecedented number of climate skeptics into Congress, with no incoming Republicans acknowledging the existence of man-made climate change. Environmentalists have all but given up on passing significant climate legislation in the near future, but in the long term, it may be difficult for climate skeptics to hold their ranks: Young Americans are significantly more concerned about global warming than older generations, and there are no major organizations of young climate skeptics.

This raises the question: What will come of climate skeptics as young people begin to rise to positions of power?

[Environment1] The Washington Independent put this question to Warren Meyer, who runs the website climate-skeptic.com. Meyer, in an email, said younger generations are drawn to “the ‘civilization in peril’ line,” and he suggested that people’s views change over time. “The lack of teenage skeptics today is meaningless for whether there will be skeptics in 20 years,” he said.

Meyer said young people will eventually become more attuned to the economic cost associated with lowering greenhouse gas emissions. “This seems really compelling to the young,” he said. “Until you understand that on the other side of the equation is a 100% chance of really high economic costs.”

There is evidence to suggest that older people care much more about the cost of policies like cap-and-trade than younger people. A June National Journal/Society for Human Resources Management poll shows that while 65 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds favor “protecting the environment” — to 29 percent concerned with “keeping prices low” — those numbers change for older people: 40 percent of people over 65 care about protecting the environment, while 47 percent are concerned with keeping prices low.

Overall though, the issue breaks down along party lines. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that about 79 percent of Democrats and just 38 percent of Republicans believe the earth is warming. Among Republicans who identify with the Tea Party, just 23 percent say there is solid evidence of climate change. The majority of Tea Partiers are over 45, with just 7 percent between the ages of 18 and 29, according to an April New York Times poll.

In an effort to find young people who question the science behind global warming, I allowed Meyer to put a call out on his blog. During the last several weeks, I’ve heard from about half a dozen young people who question climate science.

Andrew Funk, a 27-year-old biologist at the Department of Agriculture, is one of those people. Funk rejects the term climate skeptic in favor of “rational optimist.” In a phone conversation, Funk said he believes climate science is “pretty shaky.” He added, “I think it’s a shaky platform to re-engineer large portions of society.”

In a city flush with young Democrats, Funk said he has found a small group of like-minded individuals. “I end up hanging out with friends that are more independent, a little more libertarian-minded,” he said.

Other skeptics preferred to remain anonymous. For example, one 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Maryland said in an email:

It would be imprudent of me to let my heterodoxy on this issue be publicly known, as, sadly, I feel this has become more of a political matter in academic circles than a scientific one. I would rather my name not be associated with dissent on this matter.

The student’s comments say a great deal about the way young people think about climate change and the potential implications for somebody who questions the broad scientific consensus on the issue.

Anthony Watts, a prominent climate skeptic who runs the popular and controversial site “Watts Up With That,” blamed the “liberal” education system for the lack of young climate skeptics. “I suppose such a group would be unlikely because our children are conditioned by textbooks and a generally liberal education process to believe in the [man-made global warming] premise as factual and without question,” he said.

“In colleges, there are so many activist groups recruiting to ‘save the planet’ that skepticism generally gets drowned in the cacophony,” he added.

Maura Cowley, national director of the Sierra Student Coalition, organizes the types of “save the planet” activists Watts criticizes. “My opinion is that this whole dialogue will just fade into the past,” she said. “If you look at the millennial generation, you look at a generation that is savvy and soon to be the best educated generation.”

Cowley said young people recognize what’s at stake if nothing is done to address climate change “It’s really clear that this generation has the most to lose with this issue,” she said. “I think that’s a big part of the reason they care about this.”

Polling shows that climate skepticism has increased significantly in the last couple of years, as the issue has heated up in Congress. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that between April 2008 and October 2009 — a period that saw the passage of a cap-and-trade bill in the House and the beginning of debate on a similar bill in the Senate — the percentage of Americans who believe there is “solid evidence” that the earth is warming fell drastically, from 71 percent to 57 percent.

Joe Romm, a former Clinton administration official who now runs the popular blog Climate Progress, said any effort to address climate change in Congress will run into opposition from a number of powerful industry interests.

“The disinformation campaign is incredibly well funded,” he said. “There’s a staggering amount of money in it.

But he said the effects of climate change will become more obvious over time, forcing skeptics to change their tune. “Come 2020 we’re going to be desperate to respond to global warming and the skeptics will be condemned,” he said.

iStockphoto

As the Obama administration moves forward with its green agenda, climate change concerns have been elevated to a top priority. Yet in the midst of the deepening economic crisis, public opinion appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A Gallup poll released last Wednesday found a six percent drop from last year in the number of people who are worried a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about global warming, after that number had been increasing for the previous five years. It also showed that after a similar five-year climb, the percentage of respondents who believe that the effects of global warming have already begun had decreased by eight points over the past year. A record-high 16 percent of Americans now believe that global warming will never occur; in more than ten years of polling, no more than 11 percent of respondents had ever expressed this opinion.

The day after the poll was released, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a leading climate change skeptic, took to the Senate floor and celebrated the results as a triumph of information. “You should never underestimate the intelligence of the American people,” he proclaimed. “Sadly, that is exactly what the promoters of man-made climate fears have been consistently doing, and the American people have consistently rejected climate alarm.”

Inhofe attributed the shift in public opinion to new studies from prominent scientists that he said contradicted the prevailing climate change arguments embraced by former Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “A steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments have further refuted the claims of man-made global warming fear activists,” he said.

Gallup (click to enlarge)

On the other side of the climate debate, the Center for American Progress’ Joseph Romm, an acting assistant secretary of energy under Bill Clinton and an influential environmental activist, also chalked the changing attitudes up to a change in propaganda, albeit with a different slant.

“Objectively, in the last two years, the science makes painfully clear that climate risk has grown sharply,” he wrote on his blog, Climate Progress. “That means if the public has come to the reverse view, it must be due to the messaging and the media and the misinformers.” While “the vast majority of scientists are consistently bad at messaging,” he explained, global warming skeptics have “never stopped their single-minded disinformation campaign.”

Yet public opinion experts have a different explanation for the poll results.

Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, argues that the economic downturn has trumped all other concerns. “In a time of economic crisis, people are less willing to focus on an issue like global warming because they see other, more pressing issues,” he said.

A similar phenomenon took place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Dimock explained. “In January 2002, a few months after 9/11, the public’s sense of priority on a whole host of important issues just fell through the floor,” he said. “They expected the government, almost to the exclusion of other important things, to focus on this issue.”

Karlyn Bowman, who studies public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, published a comprehensive report in April 2008 that tracked polls on the environment and global warming over the past several decades. Her data showed that in the three years following the 9/11 attacks, fewer people said they were worried about global warming than in any other year in the past decade.

Similarly, she argues, the economic crisis has now pushed environmental considerations aside. “The economy is just swamping all other issues right now,” she said. “Nothing else comes close.”

According to Paul Mohai, a professor of environmental policy and public opinion at the University of Michigan, this trend fits into historical patterns. “It’s not unusual at all that when there are economic problems in the country, concerns about the environment drop off,” he said.

Pew Research Center (click to enlarge)

The current economic crisis, of course, is the most severe in decades, and the Gallup poll is not the first to show its effects on public attitudes toward climate change. Every January, Pew conducts a poll to assess people’s “top priorities” for the government to address. This year, global warming came out on the very bottom of the list.

“Out of the 19 things that we ask people to rank as priorities, it’s number 19,” said Dimock. Only 30 percent of respondents considered global warming a “top priority,” down from 38 percent in 2007 and 35 percent in 2008. Other non-economic concerns likewise tumbled down people’s list of priorities, including crime, immigration and “protecting the environment” generally.

While the economy is likely the leading cause of reduced concern about global warming, these experts also posit a number of other possible explanations. Bowman and Mohai argue that Americans tend to feel less worried about a problem when they believe that the government is addressing it. In this case, confidence in President Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership to tackle global warming has led people to feel less personally worried about the issue. “During Republican administrations, people’s concerns about the environment go up, and during Democratic administrations they go down,” said Mohai.

Bowman’s 2008 study backs up this claim. In every poll she recorded since 1971, people have had greater confidence in the Democratic Party to protect the environment. In the latest poll included in her study, a February 2008 Pew poll, 65 percent of respondents expressed greater confidence in Democrats on this issue, compared to just 21 percent for Republicans.

Dimock, on the other hand, points to Al Gore’s Oscar-winning 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” as a possible complement to the economic causes of the change in public opinion. He hypothesizes that as a highly polarizing figure, Gore may have solidified Democratic support for his environmental agenda while turning off some Republicans and independents. “You can imagine how, with people feeling like Al Gore was lecturing them on global warming, so to speak, they might have some sort of backlash, because it was no longer coming from a neutral source. It was coming from a political source.”

Nonetheless, Dimock believes that the struggling economy is far and away the primary cause of the shift in public opinion. “The 800-pound gorilla is this economic crisis,” he said.

Inhofe’s claim that the change stems from the propagation of new scientific studies that cast doubt on man-made global warming theories garnered little support from these experts. “If that is indeed happening, I haven’t seen it on the news, and I follow it pretty closely,” said Mohai.

So what might cause Americans to renew their global warming concerns? In the lingo of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, it’s the economy, stupid.

“If and when people feel more comfortable about the economy turning around, their focus can turn to other issues,” said Dimock.

Just as President Obama has tied his economic agenda to an environmental one, it appears that Americans’ global warming concerns will rise and fall with their 401(k)s.