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

Abstract

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.