Tracking Climate Change Opinions from Twitter Data (original) (raw)
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Public microblogging on climate change: One year of Twitter worldwide
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Public perceptions of climate change are traditionally measured through surveys. The exploding popularity of social networks, however, presents a new opportunity to research the spatiotemporal pattern of public discourse in relation to natural and/or socio-economic events. Among the social networks, Twitter is one of the largest microblogging services. The architecture of Twitter makes the question "What's happening?" the cornerstone of information exchange. This inspired the notion of using Twitter users as distributed sensors, which has been successfully employed in both the natural and social sciences. In 2012 and 2013, we collected 1.8 million tweets on "climate change" and "global warming" in five major languages (English, German, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish). We discuss the geography of tweeting, weekly and daily patterns, major news events that affected tweeting on climate change, changes in the central topics of discussion over time, the most authoritative traditional media, blogging, and the most authoritative organizational sources of information on climate change referenced by Twitter users in different countries. We anticipate that social network mining will become a major source of data in the public discourse on climate change.
PLOS ONE
How do climate change deniers differ from believers? Is there any correlation between human sentiment and deviations from historic temperature? We answer nine such questions using 13 years of Twitter data and 15 million tweets. Seven aspects are explored, namely, user gender, climate change stance and sentiment, aggressiveness, deviations from historic temperature, topics discussed, and environmental disaster events. We found that: a) climate change deniers use the term global warming much often than believers and use aggressive language, while believers tweet more about taking actions to fight the phenomenon, b) deniers are more present in the American Region, South Africa, Japan, and Eastern China and less present in Europe, India, and Central Africa, c) people connect much more the warm temperatures with man-made climate change than cold temperatures, d) the same regions that had more climate change deniers also tweet with negative sentiment, e) a positive correlation is observed...
Evolution of international sentiment towards climate change on Twitter
Discover Sustainability, 2024
The objective of the study was to examine a vast dataset of over 11 million English-language tweets concerning climate change gathered over an eleven-year period. The overarching aim was to illuminate the trajectory and geographical variations in sentiment throughout this timeframe. The authors conducted an exhaustive study of tweets adorned with hashtags related to climate change, using the Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner (VADER) as a tool to assign sentiment scores and determine the polarity of tweets. Concurrently, it was traced the geographical dispersion of these tweets and their evolution over the duration of the study. The findings unveiled noticeable shifts in sentiment aligning with major global events. For instance, the United Nations’ endorsement of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 stimulated a rise in positive sentiment toward climate discourse, while the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2019 to 2021 triggered a significant fall in sentiment scores. The study also detected an ascending trend of positive discourse in the United States and Europe, with Central Africa sustaining the highest average annual sentiment score. On the other hand, the sentiment in New Zealand and India was extraordinarily volatile, exhibiting dramatic changes from one year to the next. In contrast, Australia and New Zealand consistently registered the lowest sentiment averages. Overall, our findings highlight a complex mosaic of sentiment pertaining to climate change discourse across diverse global regions.
2014
In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 report, the first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using statistical methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report, and how Twitter users formed communities around their conversational connections. In short, the paper presents the topics and tweeters at this particular moment in the climate debate. The most used hashtags related to themes of science, geographical location and social issues connected to climate change. Particularly noteworthy were tweets connected to Australian politics, US politics, geoengineering and fracking. Three communities of Twitter users were identified. Researcher coding of Twitter users showed how these varied according to geographical location and whether users were supportive, unsupportive or neutral in their tweets about the IPCC. Overall, users were most likely to converse with users holding similar views. However, qualitative analysis suggested the emergence of a community of Twitter users, predominantly based in the UK, where greater interaction between contrasting views took place. This analysis also illustrated the presence of a campaign by the non-governmental organization Avaaz, aimed at increasing media coverage of the IPCC report.
In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 report, the first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using statistical methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report, and how Twitter users formed communities around their conversational connections. In short, the paper presents the topics and tweeters at this particular moment in the climate debate. The most used hashtags related to themes of science, geographical location and social issues connected to climate change. Particularly noteworthy were tweets connected to Australian politics, US politics, geoengineering and fracking. Three communities of Twitter users were identified. Researcher coding of Twitter users showed how these varied according to geographical location and whether users were supportive, unsupportive or neutral in their tweets about the IPCC. Overall, users were most likely to converse with users holding similar views. However, qualitative analysis suggested the emergence of a community of Twitter users, predominantly based in the UK, where greater interaction between contrasting views took place. This analysis also illustrated the presence of a campaign by the non-governmental organization Avaaz, aimed at increasing media coverage of the IPCC report.
Political Polarization over Global Warming: Analyzing Twitter Data on Climate Change
The widespread adoption of social media for political communication creates unprecedented opportunities to monitor the opinions of large numbers of politically active individuals in real time. Several methods have been recently proposed for predicting the political alignment of Twitter users based on the content and structure of their political communication. In this study, we examine political polarization within the American public over the existence of anthropogenic climate change by analyzing Twitter data from 315,862 users who have participated in climate change discussions.
2014
In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 report, the first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using statistical methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report, and how Twitter users formed communities around their conversational connections. In short, the paper presents the topics and tweeters at this particular moment in the climate debate. The most used hashtags related to themes of science, geographical location and social issues connected to climate change. Particularly noteworthy were tweets connected to Australian politics, US politics, geoengineering and fracking. Three communities of Twitter users were identified. Researcher coding of Twitter users showed how these varied according to geographical location and whether users were supportive, unsupportive or neutral in their tweets about the IPCC. Overall, users were most likely to converse with users holding similar views. However, qualitative analysis suggested the emergence of a community of Twitter users, predominantly based in the UK, where greater interaction between contrasting views took place. This analysis also illustrated the presence of a campaign by the non-governmental organization Avaaz, aimed at increasing media coverage of the IPCC report.
Understanding online communication about climate change
Communication about climate change online is influencing the debate over policy responses to climate change. There is evidence that sceptics are attempting to de-legitimise the scientific basis for climate change, and also that much online communication centres on opinion leaders who are influencing attitudes about climate change. The large datasets generated by Internet platforms may be useful for further empirical research on these topics – but caution is needed when using data from Twitter.
Topic modeling and sentiment analysis of global climate change tweets
Social Network Analysis and Mining, 2019
Social media websites can be used as a data source for mining public opinion on a variety of subjects including climate change. Twitter, in particular, allows for the evaluation of public opinion across both time and space because geotagged tweets include timestamps and geographic coordinates (latitude/longitude). In this study, a large dataset of geotagged tweets containing certain keywords relating to climate change is analyzed using volume analysis and text mining techniques such as topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Latent Dirichlet allocation was applied for topic modeling to infer the different topics of discussion, and Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner was applied for sentiment analysis to determine the overall feelings and attitudes found in the dataset. These techniques are used to compare and contrast the nature of climate change discussion between different countries and over time. Sentiment analysis shows that the overall discussion is negative, especially when users are reacting to political or extreme weather events. Topic modeling shows that the different topics of discussion on climate change are diverse, but some topics are more prevalent than others. In particular, the discussion of climate change in the USA is less focused on policy-related topics than other countries.
Extreme weather and climate change: social media results, 2008–2017
Environmental Hazards
The link between extreme weather and climate change is being highlighted in ever more countries. Increased public understanding of this issue is essential for policymaking, both in terms of climate change mitigation and adaptation. As social media are becoming central to the exchange of information in society, the purpose is to analyze what generates intensified attention to the connection between extreme weather and climate change in digital communication. This is done by examining periods of intensified co-occurrence of mentions of extreme weather and climate change on English-language Twitter (N = 948,993). Our quantitative analysis suggests that during the period 2008-2017 the years 2010, 2011 and 2017 exhibit a considerable increase in 'causality discourse', i.e. tweets that articulate the topic of climate change + extreme weather, in comparison with earlier years. These periods of significant growth are interpreted as involving dynamic relationships between three factors, namely mediated highlighting of previous or ongoing extreme-weather events (extreme-event factor); connection of extreme weather to climate change by traditional media or other intermediaries (media-driven science communication factor); and actions of individual users (digital-action factor). Through a qualitative discourse analysis, how these factors jointly generate increasing attention to 'causality discourse' is more closely explored for the case of 2017.