Who are the 13 percent of us who've never heard of global warming?
SuzannePjam
Posts: 411
While it is pretty sad and unbelievable that millions of Americans haven't heard of global warming, there's some pretty funny lines in this article.
Behold, The Lost Americans
And how can they be stopped?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, February 23, 2007
Behold, this bizarre demographic. Behold this odd and simmering and rather shockingly large hunk of the American population because chances are very good that at least some of them live right next door to you and breathe the same air and steal your parking spaces.
And maybe, just maybe you should be painfully, dreadfully aware of them because they are -- in their quiet, seemingly innocuous way -- far more frightening than chicken-flavored soap bubbles for dogs and far more disconcerting than Britney Spears' barren skull.
They are, in short, the deeply uninformed. The inexplicably ignorant. The wondrously numb, the disconnected, the way, way out of touch. And they are, apparently, legion.
Let me be clear. I am not speaking merely about the ideologically lopsided and the intellectually misshapen. I am not speaking of, say, those armies of happy blank-eyed red-state 'Merkins who only read NASCAR-themed Harlequin romance novels and only drink Hooters-branded energy drinks (real products, both).
No, I am speaking of a group far more mysterious and far more bewildering. And they number, in fact, in the tens of millions, or fully 13 percent of the American population, if this recent, 46-nation poll is to be believed. Here is one way you shall know them: They have never heard of global warming.
You read that right. According to this ACNielsen poll, there are, right now, upwards of 40 million bipedal adult Internet-using Americans living in this nation who have never, not even once, seen a program about the most dire issue facing the planet today. They have not read about it in a newspaper or seen photos in a magazine or heard about it via an award-winning documentary or seen monkey-like Republican presidents deny its existence and spit on science and mock the simply insurmountable pile of evidence in the name of oil profits and flagrant cronyism.
Who are these people, you ask? Are they, say, millions of forgotten, heavily medicated shut-ins across the land? Are they the disregarded elderly? People living in the backwoods of Louisiana or Appalachia and therefore we can't expect them to actually read or watch television or care much about the health of the planet (except, of course, to take part in a broad, 46-nation Internet survey) because they're simply too busy hunting squirrels and making fire and picking their teeth with dinosaur bones?
Or perhaps they are the very young and the desperately teenage, so packed to the skullcap with screaming hormones they can barely navigate the lousy American education system much less name the current president or flirt well on MySpace or understand how many tons of greenhouse gases are pumped into the sky to crank out one PlayStation 3. You think? Does this explain it?
Verily, it does not. Not by a long shot. Not when, for example, fully 95 percent of Latin America has heard of global warming, and 75 percent think it's a "very serious" issue. Not when the United States ranks dead last among all 46 nations in its concern for the issue of dire climate change.
No, there is something more sinister at play here. Something darker and just a little disquieting. Do you know what it is? I don't, either. Do you ask, as I do, How the hell can this be? What sort of people are these? How can this survey be accurate? How can anyone even moderately attuned to the culture not have heard of global warming, even once? Is it not part of the popular lexicon? Is it not being used to sell sexy white jeans, fer chrissakes? What, pray tell, gives?
Here is what we do know: The United States is, by far, the world's worst contributor to the root causes of global warming, and yet we are the least concerned about it. Read that again: Despite how the United States pumps more pollutants and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than China or India or Russia, a scant 42 percent of us see the problem as "very serious." Even China and India, those irresponsible mega-polluters of the developing world we like to scoff at for their flagrant industrial waste, are far more concerned and more universally informed.
It's enough to make your heart shudder as you wonder who the hell we are, really, as an ostensibly proud people, as a supposedly "unified" nation, a global leader, a role model to the planet. Is the great United States really just some sort of moral joke? Are we really leading the world in anything except warmongering and defense spending and sexual hysteria and cool iPod accessories?
Sure, the overall lack of concern is understandable. After all, the vicious GOP spin machine has been working like a rabid dog for the last six years to demonize science and mock environmentalists and sneer at the Kyoto protocol and force eminent scientists to bury their dire findings lest Dick Cheney visit them in the night with a box of rat poison and a shotgun sneer.
And then there's this: Only 13 percent of congressional Republicans see global warming as a human-caused issue, compared to 95 percent of Dems. That's right, despite the National Academy of Sciences, despite the AAAS and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, despite the U.N., despite every reputable (and often, very conservative) scientific body on the planet, half of our own Congress snickeringly denies humans have had anything to do with global warming. Ah, how proud they must be.
But while that level of willful, greedy ignorance is relatively easy to explain, this weird hunk of gaping blindness, this intellectual black hole, isn't quite so easy to figure out.
Except for this: Maybe it's the end result of the great, chronic dumbing down of the American mind. Possible?
Maybe our 13 percent blindness rate is simply the brutal upshot, the logical conclusion of all the endless stripping of school textbooks of fact and perspective, of the push for silly literalist Christian dogma at the expense of true awareness, of the systemic neoconservative drive to get Americans to stop asking questions and stop thinking for themselves and to hate and mistrust the media (except, of course, Fox News), and wouldn't you be better off just enjoying your Wal-Mart candy corn and your "Everybody Loves Raymond" DVDs and just turn off your brain because it's all just far too complicated and messy and suspicious anyway, so really, why care at all?
And oh, those dark storm clouds? Pay no attention to those. Those are just God's happy lint balls. Go back to sleep.
Behold, The Lost Americans
And how can they be stopped?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, February 23, 2007
Behold, this bizarre demographic. Behold this odd and simmering and rather shockingly large hunk of the American population because chances are very good that at least some of them live right next door to you and breathe the same air and steal your parking spaces.
And maybe, just maybe you should be painfully, dreadfully aware of them because they are -- in their quiet, seemingly innocuous way -- far more frightening than chicken-flavored soap bubbles for dogs and far more disconcerting than Britney Spears' barren skull.
They are, in short, the deeply uninformed. The inexplicably ignorant. The wondrously numb, the disconnected, the way, way out of touch. And they are, apparently, legion.
Let me be clear. I am not speaking merely about the ideologically lopsided and the intellectually misshapen. I am not speaking of, say, those armies of happy blank-eyed red-state 'Merkins who only read NASCAR-themed Harlequin romance novels and only drink Hooters-branded energy drinks (real products, both).
No, I am speaking of a group far more mysterious and far more bewildering. And they number, in fact, in the tens of millions, or fully 13 percent of the American population, if this recent, 46-nation poll is to be believed. Here is one way you shall know them: They have never heard of global warming.
You read that right. According to this ACNielsen poll, there are, right now, upwards of 40 million bipedal adult Internet-using Americans living in this nation who have never, not even once, seen a program about the most dire issue facing the planet today. They have not read about it in a newspaper or seen photos in a magazine or heard about it via an award-winning documentary or seen monkey-like Republican presidents deny its existence and spit on science and mock the simply insurmountable pile of evidence in the name of oil profits and flagrant cronyism.
Who are these people, you ask? Are they, say, millions of forgotten, heavily medicated shut-ins across the land? Are they the disregarded elderly? People living in the backwoods of Louisiana or Appalachia and therefore we can't expect them to actually read or watch television or care much about the health of the planet (except, of course, to take part in a broad, 46-nation Internet survey) because they're simply too busy hunting squirrels and making fire and picking their teeth with dinosaur bones?
Or perhaps they are the very young and the desperately teenage, so packed to the skullcap with screaming hormones they can barely navigate the lousy American education system much less name the current president or flirt well on MySpace or understand how many tons of greenhouse gases are pumped into the sky to crank out one PlayStation 3. You think? Does this explain it?
Verily, it does not. Not by a long shot. Not when, for example, fully 95 percent of Latin America has heard of global warming, and 75 percent think it's a "very serious" issue. Not when the United States ranks dead last among all 46 nations in its concern for the issue of dire climate change.
No, there is something more sinister at play here. Something darker and just a little disquieting. Do you know what it is? I don't, either. Do you ask, as I do, How the hell can this be? What sort of people are these? How can this survey be accurate? How can anyone even moderately attuned to the culture not have heard of global warming, even once? Is it not part of the popular lexicon? Is it not being used to sell sexy white jeans, fer chrissakes? What, pray tell, gives?
Here is what we do know: The United States is, by far, the world's worst contributor to the root causes of global warming, and yet we are the least concerned about it. Read that again: Despite how the United States pumps more pollutants and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than China or India or Russia, a scant 42 percent of us see the problem as "very serious." Even China and India, those irresponsible mega-polluters of the developing world we like to scoff at for their flagrant industrial waste, are far more concerned and more universally informed.
It's enough to make your heart shudder as you wonder who the hell we are, really, as an ostensibly proud people, as a supposedly "unified" nation, a global leader, a role model to the planet. Is the great United States really just some sort of moral joke? Are we really leading the world in anything except warmongering and defense spending and sexual hysteria and cool iPod accessories?
Sure, the overall lack of concern is understandable. After all, the vicious GOP spin machine has been working like a rabid dog for the last six years to demonize science and mock environmentalists and sneer at the Kyoto protocol and force eminent scientists to bury their dire findings lest Dick Cheney visit them in the night with a box of rat poison and a shotgun sneer.
And then there's this: Only 13 percent of congressional Republicans see global warming as a human-caused issue, compared to 95 percent of Dems. That's right, despite the National Academy of Sciences, despite the AAAS and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, despite the U.N., despite every reputable (and often, very conservative) scientific body on the planet, half of our own Congress snickeringly denies humans have had anything to do with global warming. Ah, how proud they must be.
But while that level of willful, greedy ignorance is relatively easy to explain, this weird hunk of gaping blindness, this intellectual black hole, isn't quite so easy to figure out.
Except for this: Maybe it's the end result of the great, chronic dumbing down of the American mind. Possible?
Maybe our 13 percent blindness rate is simply the brutal upshot, the logical conclusion of all the endless stripping of school textbooks of fact and perspective, of the push for silly literalist Christian dogma at the expense of true awareness, of the systemic neoconservative drive to get Americans to stop asking questions and stop thinking for themselves and to hate and mistrust the media (except, of course, Fox News), and wouldn't you be better off just enjoying your Wal-Mart candy corn and your "Everybody Loves Raymond" DVDs and just turn off your brain because it's all just far too complicated and messy and suspicious anyway, so really, why care at all?
And oh, those dark storm clouds? Pay no attention to those. Those are just God's happy lint balls. Go back to sleep.
"Where there is sacrifice there is someone collecting the sacrificial offerings."-- Ayn Rand
"Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed..."-- Elvis Costello
"Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed..."-- Elvis Costello
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
...I picked some chapters that I liked most... and that made me think, smile and worried all in one.
once again thanks a lot for that great sunday read and your "work" here, dear Suzanne.
And even so I like this article very much I like America more. Isn't it an American that wrote it... so great, no German would dare to write that way about oneself, one's home.
So I saw many lines that would lead to Europe as well. Some points made here refer to germany very well as well.
It is like a funny mirror.
And I am sure we also have a population of those who just do not know much about the theme/ subject.
But maybe there are not so many like in the USA and Germany is no leading country at all, we are Europe now
I like the democratic system, so call me a child from the West,
and, I see the US still as the leading role here and those days,
but the country needs a political change, a wipe out ... and then the WEST needs a revolution, a new focus: earth and life.
short: Bush and its propaganda and its system need to go!
I blame them for the not knowing... they cover all up and just do what those few think is best to do!
and for the rest nobody cares...
It seems they lie all the time and keep their voters dumb... and too many stupid and not informed nor educated people are danger to a nation self-
- ...see what propaganda and distraction through war, combined with a low educated level, can do to a nation: remember Germany 75 years ago-
... just my2cents and a thanks for the post.
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
oh yes, those must be the village people
global warming is often talked about subject, i constantly see all those articles and news, how we all going to die if we don't do something right now.....
Thanks for the kind words!
You know what is scary? These people still get to vote!
Pensacola '94
New Orleans '95
Birmingham '98
New Orleans '00
New Orleans '03
Tampa '08
New Orleans '10 - Jazzfest
New Orleans '16 - Jazzfest
Fenway Park '18
St. Louis '22
This was my favourite line. I find it heartening to know that there are those on the inside that can see America's hypocrisy in the same light that we on the outside see it. Maybe that means that there is hope for change.
-C Addison
http://www.wishlistfoundation.org
Oh my, they dropped the leash.
Morgan Freeman/Clint Eastwood 08' for President!
"Make our day"
You mean the "Oscar" Winning Melissa Etheridge song. :rolleyes:
'Do the evolution' might have scared the old ladies too much
-C Addison
...are those who've helped us.
Right 'round the corner could be bigger than ourselves.
What ever they decide to name it, it exists and the fact that 13% of Americans have never heard of it just reinforces my notion that there are a lot of clueless people in this country.
i liked it better when we called it "seasons".
....well, I admit it: I watched the Oscars this morning (in Germany it is on from 2.30 - 6.30 am
and I liked it a lot that Melissa won ... so she kind of reached me.
We look at America through movies mainly, and well, I think it is setting an example that the subject was discussed big times during the show last night -and "an inconvenient truth" winning even two Oscars was a big surprise to me-
Leo and Al made me smile big times, and hey hey, the Oscars are defenately a way to spread the word "climate change"... hey, maybe some of those 13 percents have been reached last night - and maybe even more!!!
to me it is great that the movie and the subject got into attention of the mass now- and Melissa does her job good, out of my view.
hey,
and btw: isn't it cool that Germany won
and p.s. thanks makingWaves for your encouraging words.. thanks big times.
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
So scientists are wrong re: Global warming/climate change? How so?
Same thing can go to the Scientists that think the opposite.
Scientists are on both sides of the fence here but we mainly only hear through the media the scientists that believe in Global Warming.
The fact is that everything is assumption and of course Al Gore's charts he makes LOL but there are arguements to both sides.
Point is that you can't always believe what you see on TV because John the "Scientist" said so...You have to look into with an open mind
and you're open mind has dissected all the info and come to the conclusion that man-induced climate change is a farce?
breakmarysfall - i didn't watch either but the german beat out the canuck!! ... booo! ...
BUT Polaris...like I said it goes both ways.. The fact is there is no conclusive evidence on either side and that is my point.
Yes the earth is warmer now than it was a few decades ago but it was even warmer a few hundred years ago as well and then cooler then warmer, etc..
Just say in 20 years it gets cooler..I bet ya any money there will be a big hype about that as well..and so on..
Where do you get your false information?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
Ok..so 2000 years is a good basis to go on for a planet that is over 4.5 billion years old..
Real scientific I'm sure.
-Enoch Powell
Yeah we just beat out all others...
and even so this has nothing to do with the post, I need to say that the movie "the life of others" indeed deserved it to win...
what a cool movie about our history as well, the dark side of the social communist system called DDR ... very scary but full of humanity... so nice
Anyway, thanks for your greetings
"we are proud like Oscar - Wir sind stolz wie Oscar"
(it is a German saying with its roots in the jewish language,
that fits now perfectly to the whole picture
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
Oh yeah...forgot about those wikipedia charts...Just like Al Gore..he loves his damn charts