Exploring climate change on Twitter using seven aspects: Stance, sentiment, aggressiveness, temperature, gender, topics, and disasters

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 a...

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Main Authors: Dimitrios Effrosynidis, Georgios Sylaios, Avi Arampatzis
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2022-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9491544/?tool=EBI
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author Dimitrios Effrosynidis
Georgios Sylaios
Avi Arampatzis
author_facet Dimitrios Effrosynidis
Georgios Sylaios
Avi Arampatzis
author_sort Dimitrios Effrosynidis
collection DOAJ
description 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 between human sentiment and deviations from historic temperature; when the deviation is between −1.143°C and +2.401°C, people tweet the most positive, f) there exist 90% correlation between sentiment and stance, and -94% correlation between sentiment and aggressiveness, g) no clear patterns are observed to correlate sentiment and stance with disaster events based on total deaths, number of affected, and damage costs, h) topics discussed on Twitter indicate that climate change is a politicized issue and people are expressing their concerns especially when witnessing extreme weather; the global stance could be considered optimistic, as there are many discussions that point out the importance of human intervention to fight climate change and actions are being taken through events to raise the awareness of this phenomenon.
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spelling doaj.art-55b5db83f6054ba7ba0e7c3cf1fb0ec02022-12-22T03:50:02ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032022-01-01179Exploring climate change on Twitter using seven aspects: Stance, sentiment, aggressiveness, temperature, gender, topics, and disastersDimitrios EffrosynidisGeorgios SylaiosAvi ArampatzisHow 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 between human sentiment and deviations from historic temperature; when the deviation is between −1.143°C and +2.401°C, people tweet the most positive, f) there exist 90% correlation between sentiment and stance, and -94% correlation between sentiment and aggressiveness, g) no clear patterns are observed to correlate sentiment and stance with disaster events based on total deaths, number of affected, and damage costs, h) topics discussed on Twitter indicate that climate change is a politicized issue and people are expressing their concerns especially when witnessing extreme weather; the global stance could be considered optimistic, as there are many discussions that point out the importance of human intervention to fight climate change and actions are being taken through events to raise the awareness of this phenomenon.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9491544/?tool=EBI
spellingShingle Dimitrios Effrosynidis
Georgios Sylaios
Avi Arampatzis
Exploring climate change on Twitter using seven aspects: Stance, sentiment, aggressiveness, temperature, gender, topics, and disasters
PLoS ONE
title Exploring climate change on Twitter using seven aspects: Stance, sentiment, aggressiveness, temperature, gender, topics, and disasters
title_full Exploring climate change on Twitter using seven aspects: Stance, sentiment, aggressiveness, temperature, gender, topics, and disasters
title_fullStr Exploring climate change on Twitter using seven aspects: Stance, sentiment, aggressiveness, temperature, gender, topics, and disasters
title_full_unstemmed Exploring climate change on Twitter using seven aspects: Stance, sentiment, aggressiveness, temperature, gender, topics, and disasters
title_short Exploring climate change on Twitter using seven aspects: Stance, sentiment, aggressiveness, temperature, gender, topics, and disasters
title_sort exploring climate change on twitter using seven aspects stance sentiment aggressiveness temperature gender topics and disasters
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9491544/?tool=EBI
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