Glob. Environ. Change 30, 92–100 (2015)

Maintaining public interest in environmental issues is important if solutions are to be to found, funded and ultimately implemented. Understanding the factors that influence public attention to climate change is therefore valuable information for those working towards policy solutions. The proliferation of social media provides one means to examine these influences.

In a US-based study, Andrei Kirilenkoa, from the University of North Dakota, and co-workers use the volume of Twitter messages containing the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” as an indicator of public attention to the issue.

They find that both the mass media and temperature variables strongly influence public interest in climate change, as indicated by tweeting rate. They also investigate the causal relationships, finding no support for the hypothesis that the media influences the relationship between local weather experience and climate change tweets. These findings support the idea that the public connects extreme temperature events to climate change.