Submitted by Saba Iakobidze, Regional Ambassador in Georgia of the 22nd Eco-generation Program

Tbilisi, Georgia

When Tunza assigned us a book review, I had a hard time finding the right book, but I think that I made the right choice by choosing “American Teens’ Knowledge of Climate Change”, a book which is the study of the University of Yale about environmental awareness of teens compared to adults issued in 18 April 2011. The investigators were Anthony Leiserowitz, Nicholas Smith and Marlon, Jennifer R., all professors at Yale. Questions varied from “How sure you are that global warming is happening?” to questions involving charts about gases that trap heat from earth’s surface.

This book was very influential for me because it made me learn several facts that I was not aware of, like the fact that the system in which climate is working is called threshold, which means that climate on earth is mostly stable and can recover from small climate change, but if it is big, the climate will change forever, so that means that climate has its limits (31 teens knew about that fact compared to 34 adults). Also, the fact that is worth mentioning is that carbon dioxide rose with an exponential increase over the past 500 hundred years, which means that it only started rising in the industrial era and is continuing to increase over time.

If we speak in general, according to this book, teens have the same or less awareness about climate change than adults. 54% of teens say that global warming is happening, compared to 63% of adults and 62% of teens acknowledge the fact that switching to renewable energy sources are more sustainable than fossil fuels compared to 63% of adults. Authors of the book claim that teens have a higher understanding of crucial topics like the statement that climate change is caused mostly by human actions or that carbon dioxide traps heat from the earth’s surface.

I would like to recommend this book to all young people interested in environmental issues. It gave me a lot of knowledge about environmental awareness of my peers and now I know what to address during my awareness-raising sessions, also as I mentioned before I got knowledge of different facts that I wasn’t aware of, I really recommend this book and hope you will find it as interesting as I did. Link of the book: http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication-OFF/files/American-Teens-Knowledge-of-Climate-Change.pdf