Attitudes Towards Global Warming on Twitter

Abstract

Public opinion surveys over the past thirty years show that public opinion is split on the issue of global warming. One of the problems with “solicited” opinion polls is that the findings may be selectively interpreted in favour of the political goals of a particular interest group. To gain a better understanding of the general public’s unsolicited responses to climate change news, the current study examined Twitter messages containing the words “global warming” spanning 16 months. Using a framework combining a sentiment analysis technique, Hedonometer from the perspective of natural language processing, and Appraisal Theory from a discourse analysis perspective, the study shows that the demonstrated happiness level in tweets containing the words “global warming” is consistently lower than the general level on Twitter, due to increased use of negative words and decreased use of positive words. The Appraisal analysis shows that Appreciation is used most frequently and Affect least.