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Researchers at the University of Helsingfors and Örebro have conducted a survey about attitudes about changes in the climate and children's and young people's mental health. The conclusion from the survey is that:
“Half of the children and young people between the ages of 11 and 15 are worried about climate change”.
Link to source
Here are some quotes from the article:
“- My friends and I always talk about what's happening in the world, but we don't have direct anxiety" (a 16 year old girl)”.The name of the inquiry is Teens go green.
The person responsible for the project is Katariina Salmela-Aron, a professor in pedagogy.
Dr. Salmela-Aron et al. claim they have identified:
“four different climate anxiety and climate change denial profiles"Group 1. Normative-carefree.
“Half of the young people were not worried about climate change (approx. 50% of the respondents). They experienced only minor climate anxiety, but also did not deny the existence of climate change. This group also had the highest overall well-being in the profile comparison”.Comment. This group didn't experience climate anxiety.
Group 2. denialists.
“Every fifth young person was a climate change denier (approx. 20% of respondents). They therefore did not experience climate anxiety”.Group 3. Emotionally involved.
“One in five young people, on the other hand, was emotionally committed to climate change (approx. 20% of respondents). This group had elevated values especially in the emotional dimensions of climate anxiety, which were related to difficulty concentrating, worry, feelings of inadequacy and guilt caused by climate change. This group acted more environmentally responsible than others”Group 4. Overburdened
“one in ten young people was overwhelmed by climate change (approx. 10% of the respondents). The young people belonging to this group simultaneously experienced strong exhaustion in relation to climate change and had a negative attitude towards the existence of climate change. At the same time, they also experienced lower general well-being”.The main author of the paper - Salla Veijonaho - is also in pedagogy. Two of the co-authors are psychologists. Here's a link to the paper.
The human species has a unique ability called the executive functions. It's a broad concept containing several subsets which help us to be both instrumentally and epistemically rational in a prospective manner (Adornetti, 2016;Aiello och Dunbar, 1993; Ardila, 2008, Ardila et al. 2018; Barkley, 2001; Coolidge and Wynn, 2018).
The executive functions can be divided into three subgroups: emotional and social adjustment, as well as cognitive development. The foundation for the unpacking, adjustment, and development takes place in the home environment during the first four years of living (Baker et al. 2020; Baumrind, 1966; Farran och Formby, 2011; Gopnik, 2016; Hart och Risley, 1995; Olsson, 2022). And there's a father effect; children who grew up with both parents or their father, have better mental adjustment and development compared to children who grew up with a single mother (Rolle et al. 2019; Sethna, 2017; Vieno et al. 2009, 2014; Österberg, 2004).
Women are typically more neurotic compared to men (Jiang, Dong och Wang, 2022; Ode et al. 2009; Weisberg et al. 2011), which is manifested through women's relational aggressiveness (psychological violence) (Crick and Grotpeter, 1995; Hyde, 2005). 40% of Finnish kids are victims of mothers' psychological violence (Maj Estlander, 2023).
Nutrition also plays a role in the model. Our species need to eat saturated fats to produce myelin - a lipid-rich material that surrounds nerve cell axons (Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Mayo clinic):
“However, myelin assembly requires a significant amount of lipids, and lipids play an important role in glial cell myelination”.Kids need to eat meat, and animal fats for physical and mental development (Adesogan et al. 2020; Allen, 2003; Balehegn et al. 2019, 2023). Adults need to eat meat and animal fats to sustain physical and mental (Dobersek et al. 2023; Ede, 2019, 2022, 2024; Itkonen et al. 2020; Margara-Escudero et al. 2022; Pan et al. 2024; Tong et al. 2020; Ylilauri et al. 2019).
Despite all of the above gone well, our species are still at risk of “natural stupidity” - the tendency to believe information that is prototypical (Kahneman och Tversky, 1972), often repeated (Tversky och Kahneman, 1973) or is just easy to access (Kahneman and Tversky, 1977), which is congruent with Dysrationalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (this includes instrumental and epistemic rationality) (Stanovich, 1993).
After jumping to conclusion, a political stance or fictional viewpoint about health and/or climate, may turn into a belief:
“A belief is a subjective attitude that a proposition is true or a state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some stance, take, or opinion about something. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. However, holding a belief does not require active introspection” (Wikipedia).or even a conviction:
“A conviction is an unshakable belief in something without needing proof or evidence” (Wikipedia).In order to dodge the above, I have developed a model called Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking (Österberg, 2021, kap 3). it is based on three established theories:
- Epistemic vigilance - to minimize the risk of being accidentally or intentionally being misinformed, be suspicious of statements and the purpose of Communication the statement, especially from legacy media (Sperber et al. 2010).
- Disjunctive reasoning - take all sources into account (Stanovich, 2009).
- Numeracy - ability to understand, reason with, and apply simple numerical concepts, the foundation for instrumental and epistemic rationally (Brooks och Pui, 2010).
The second question (Q2) is why didn't the management at the University of Helsingfors interview the main author?
The third question (Q3) concerns the introduction to the paper, which will be the researchers framing (Tversky and Kahenman, 1981). Here's how it goes:
“Climate change is creating concerns about the future as one of the most urgent threats that humanity is facing” (p. 103).The fourth question (Q4) concerns time frame.
The fifth question (Q5) concerns the use of "climate denialism".
Responses to Q1-5.
Q1. Why does the management at the university of Helsingfors only promote this research in Uralic-Finnish?
Finland became a civilization as part of the Swedish kingdom. The kingdom controlled the trade across the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea. That includes transitioning into renaissance thinking, science revolution, and enlightenment thinking (McKneown, 2009; Pinker, 2018; Widmalm, 2012). The trade language around these waters was, and still is, Swedish.
In 1808, Russia invaded the Swedish fortress Sveaborg, and in 1809, the newly appointed Swedish king rejected the possibility to reunite the eastern part of the kingdom. Instead, Finland became a vassal state to Russia, on paper, a grand duchy.
In 1863, Kreml demanded the Finns to abandon the trade language around the waters now between Finland and Sweden in favor of a uralic language which had been spoken in different versions by tribes in the inland. Sometime between 1910 - 1940, this standardized version of the uralic languages reached break even. After that, stagnation started. Finns who move to Sweden and don't speak Swedish (2%) tend to end up in low-paid jobs, and not seldom in isolation including alcoholism.
Finns in Finland who do not speak Swedish have worse health and a shorter life span compared to Finns who speak Swedish (47%) (Helsingfors city). During his Gifford talk, Mark Pagel mentioned tribalism. Finland was the second example (Pagel, 2019).
Despite this, the Finnish government demands that this Uralic language should be the country's prime language. That includes the universities.
Q2. In the paper, it says that Salla Veijonaho is the corresponding author. Why don't they interview her?
Q3 - Q4. Why didn't they follow good academic ethics of providing a definition of climate?
Climate is defined as a complex process where trace gases move in cyclic fashion between five spheres: the atmosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, and the pedosphere. Since the Cambrian explosion, when CO2-levels were 5000 - 7000 ppm, the oxygen level was 4-10 ppm, and the temperature was 50 % higher, 95% of the CO2 has moved from the atmosphere to the bedrock, the forrests, and the seas.
Q5. Climate denialism is a very political concept. The authors have used the term 21 times throughout the paper, whereas three times in abstract. This is their framing of the concept:
“Previous research suggests that climate denialism exists on a spectrum— ranging from (1) full denial of the existence of climate change to (2) downplaying scientific facts, and, finally, (3) acknowledging the facts but denying the implications of climate change” (Rahmstorf, 2004; Wullenkord, 2022).Rahmstorf (2004) is not a research paper, but an opinion piece. There he on the one hand correctly concur that Earth has had a climate since its emergence, and on the other put forward more limited time-frames: 400 000 years before the present which is late Pleistocene, and 174 years before the present, a time-frame which is used within the Marxist community to oppose the positive results of the industrial revolution.
Wullenkord (2022) is a paper published in the Journal Personality and Individual Differences. She hypothesized that men who do not concur with left wing ideology are typical climate deniers. Her method was to sample responses from men and women (~51%) through an online questionnaire (N=1007). She received approval from a local ethics committee in H. She used five scales:
- Balanced Measure of Basic Psychological Needs Scale is used o assess "general satisfaction and frustration of the needs for autonomy (e.g., “My choices expressed my ‘true self’”), competence (e.g., “I took on and mastered hard challenges”), and relatedness (e.g., “I felt close and connected with other people who are important to me”) with reference to the past month".
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Climate Self-Protection Scale which assesses
“implicatory (1–3) and interpretive climate denial (4–5): 1) avoidance (e.g., “I try not to think about climate change”), 2) denial of guilt (e.g., “I don't need to make climate change a matter of conscience”), 3) rationalization (e.g., “My personal influence on climate change is negligible”), 4) denial of personal outcome severity (e.g., “Climate change will not affect me here in [country]”), and 5) denial of global outcome severity (e.g., “The influence of humans on climate change is being overstated”).”
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Literal climate denial. Four items assessed literal climate denial (two own items; two taken from.
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Aspiration Index (Grouzet et al., 2005; German translation: Matthey & Kasser, 2013) assessed importance of intrinsic and extrinsic values on eleven domains using 5-point Likert scales. Following instructions by Kasser (2019), I calculated relative intrinsic vs. extrinsic value orientation scores (score range:-6 to 6). Positive scores reflect extrinsic goals to be relatively more important for a given person than intrinsic goals.
- Right-wing ideological conviction. Several markers assessed participants' right-wing ideological convictions. The 7-item SDO7(8) Scale (Ho et al., 2015; own translation) measured SDO. Ten items of subscale 9 of the Environmental Attitudes Inventory (Milfont & Duckitt, 2010; German translation: Markey, 2013, items 5–8 own translation) assessed ND. The 12-item RWA3D Scale (Funke, 2003) measured RWA. The System Justification Scale (Kay & Jost, 2003; German adaptation: Ullrich & Cohrs, 2007) assessed endorsement of the society participants live in as just and good. Participants indicated their political orientation on a left-right spectrum, using a slider bar.
It's similar to Eva Lundgrens et al.'s (2001) pilot study on Domestic violence where they excluded men, and then concluded that domestic violence is a male phenomenon. But in that case, Uppsala university intervened. The implication, according to Dr Lundgren, was that from 2005, she was no longer allowed to teach and supervise students about gender, power, and violence (Holm, 2011).
In 2021, a professor in nutrition claimed: “- The link between colon cancer and red meat is clear” (Yle, 2021).
In 2022, Helsingin Sanomat reported that freedom of speech was suppressed at the faculty of agriculture and forestry (Parikka, 2022).
In 2023, Helsingin Sanomat reported that the research at the University of Helsingfors had collapsed:
In September 2023, In September of 2023, the The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters arranged a Climate crisis symposium (Österberg, 2023).
In August 2024, The management at the University of Helsingfors claimed that researchers have refuted the Gender-equality paradox (Österberg, 2024).
Conclusion. Common academic knowledge says that if the premises are wrong, then the work which builds upon those premises are also wrong. Climate is a complex, and depending on which narrative is distributed, the response will vary. Part of the response is influenced by upbringing, another part by nutrition. Women are more neurotic compared to men.
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Executive coaching for CEOs/managers and workshops to facilitate Organizational Performance, Learning, and Creativity for Problem Solving | Lectures: Nutrition for physical and mental health | Course/lecture: children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development | Language training - Swedish | Academy Competency | CV | Teaching skills and experience | Summary of research project | Instagram | Linkedin | YouTube-channel | TikTok | Twitter
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