Jade Murphy
Lauren Cloughesy
Keldy Mason
Norbu Globus
In order to get a feel of the general consensus of not only Portland, but all of America, we took a look at multiple credible national surveys on the public’s attitude towards climate change. These surveys show that just over half of Americans say they are very (16%) or somewhat worried (39%) about global warming, while 45% say they are not very (26%), or not at all worried (19%).
Cross-National surveys show that compared to other countries America is below the median. This means that America has the less than the average amount of concern for climate change affecting the earth.
We believe that the range of public opinion of climate change is dependent on many factors. Some example include: occupation, education, class, religion, news source, political opinion, gender, race, age, and culture. We hypothesized that younger people would have more concern about climate change and environmental issues compared to other global issues. Based on our previous research we concluded that upper class citizens with more liberal views usually tend to find the issue more pertinent than their working class counterparts. Looking at cross-national data we found that South American countries were more concerned with climate change than the majority of other countries. This may be tied, like suggested by Mike Hulme via our Skype interview, to their religious (Catholic) beliefs. Analyzing data from only American citizens, we saw that only about 50% of participants felt “fairly well informed” on environmental issue, and in particular climate change. Another surprising bit of information we found was that almost half of Americans (49%) incorrectly believe that the space program contributes to global warming.
Procedure
In order to gather information for the survey, we traveled to downtown Portland. We broke up into groups of two and took on various streets in order to spread out our sample in order for it to be more representative. In our groups of two we would approach people and follow a script telling them who we were and why we had approached them, then ask them if we could ask them a few questions about climate change, and finally assure that their responses would be anonymous. for those who replied that we could survey them we asked them the three questions on the survey and writing down their answers as they spoke. After each group got 2-3 people we met back together and came back to begin looking at the varying data that was collected by other students.
Gender Graphs
Analysis of Gender Graphs
Out of the 166 people that were surveyed, 80 of them were perceived as female and 84 were perceived as male, and two people whose gender could not be identified within the constraints of male or female. The data above shows that most perceived males on average placed a higher value on climate change than perceived females did, but it is interesting to note the huge disparity between the number of females who place climate change as their top issue (30.95%) versus males, who rated climate change as a 10 as the lowest total frequency (2.25%). Neither males nor females believed that climate change is no concern at all. We did not include the graphs for the people whose gender we could not identify because we did not have a large enough pool of them to make proper inferences from.
Race Graph
Analysis of Race Graphs
As a class, we gathered significantly more data from white people than any other ethnicity. However, because we took the frequency of each possible value of importance, we believe that we eliminated much of the bias given the fairly unrepresentative sample. It is important to note that there was only one person who was identified as Native american and because of that their frequency in believing the climate change was a level 7 importance was 100%. We found that as the levels of importance increased, so did the frequency with which they were chosen.
We were surprised to find that ‘liberal’ Portland had so many individuals that did not rate climate change as a higher priority, but according to the graph, almost no one believes that climate change is not an issue at all. However, it may be that Portland inhabitants are more concerned with current political and human rights issues. One resident said that “[climate change is] still a huge issue, but we have other issues going on. Presidency is a pressing issue.” Another interviewee stated “…I think that with our president and new elect we won’t see any new progress. I’m disappointed and it’s scary because they care more about economic issues if we don’t act now there will be serious implications.” These sentiments made our group realize that, while people are concerned about climate change as shown in the graph above, people are generally more concerned with non-environmental problems.
Age Range Graphs
Analysis of Age Range Graphs
In the ‘Under 30’ graph, we had a total of 92 people, 56 people that were surveyed were perceived to be between the ages of 30-60, and we only had 15 people surveyed in the ‘Above 60’ category. In general, the graphs of the importance of climate change among people of different age groups are left-skewed, which we predicted would be the case. We believe a reason for this could be that the majority of Portland is liberal and has taken actions towards becoming a greener more energy efficient. By living in such a city we presume that these beliefs of working towards a greener city and planet infiltrate into the citizens.
The above graphs show the age range of the individuals interviewed and the importance they felt towards climate change. The most surprising data came from the ‘Above 60’ age group who shared a very high concern for climate change. It’s usually a stereotype that the older generation shows less concern for environmental issues, because environmental science has become a more prominent science recently.
Location Graphs
Analysis of Location Graphs
The interquartile range of our results downtown and periphery are the same, and the minimum whiskers of both are between two and seven and two and six, respectively. Their maximum ranges are the same. Therefore, these box-and-whisker plots demonstrate that there was very little difference in the opinions of downtown Portland habitants versus residents from the peripheral areas. We expected that there would be a larger disparity in-between the median scale of importance among PDX residents downtown versus PDX residents interviewed along the periphery of Portland, that people who lived along the periphery would have a larger lower importance of climate change than people in downtown Portland.
It was surprising to see such a high extent of concern from individuals in the periphery of Portland when compared to the national data which suggests that rural areas tend to have less knowledge and concern about climate change. Some may even be happy with the change in climate because it may yield a longer growing season for agricultural farmers. Additionally, because these places are less industrialized, the effects and byproducts of climate change, such as smog and rises in sea levels.
Conclusion
This assignment helped us realize the complexities of analyzing data surrounding climate change and individuals opinion on it. The debate over climate change spans far greater than whether climate change is “real” or “fake.” We were surprised that women valued climate change as less concerning than men did. However, during this stressful political time for much of our country, it is not very shocking that there are a variety of issues that every person values differently.We saw a large range of concern for climate change from Portland citizens. Responses spanned from “I think the media makes it more than it is, like they exaggerate it.” to “It’s fact. We should’ve recognized it yesterday.” Often times people who placed climate change lower on the importance scale had reasons similar to not feeling personally affected by it or defined themselves as a nihilist. These answers did not shock us but rather gave us a better understanding as to why some people are indifferent to climate change.The main understanding we took away was that debate over climate change isn’t necessarily a debate over its reality, but rather a conversation about the potential concern for it and whether it action should be taken immediately or with caution.