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Americans do not necessarily know how small and gradual changes in the world around them are getting worse – variations that make it a powerful argument. climate change.
This is a new study that analyzes more than 2 billion weather-related tweets sent from across the United States between March 2014 and November 2016. The results suggest that Americans may not be able to recognize the magnitude of the weather. damage caused by climate change. attacking their lives; If they do, recognition can inspire a grumpy tweet, and not the kind of systemic change needed to deal with climate change.
"There is a risk that we will quickly normalize the conditions [that] we do not want to standardize, "lead author Frances C. Moore, environmental scientist at UC Davis in California, said in a statement. "We live in historically extreme conditions, but they might not seem particularly unusual if we tend to forget what happened more than five years ago."
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The apparent five-year period of the public is very different from the baseline used by scientists to study climate – researchers generally referring to the second half of the 1800s. And weather conditions that may reflect Horrible climate change and destructive of the human Compared to the weather conditions of the late nineteenth century, nothing looks comparable to that of five years ago.
The study team used an algorithm to identify weather-related tweets, checking its results on a subset of about 6,000 tweets to make sure the program recognized them correctly. For each week of data, scientists compared local weather in the early 2010s to the 1980s average to get an idea of how climate change was interacting with local weather.
The results show that Americans on Twitter are comparing current weather with local standards in the last five years or so. If the temperature has been warmer in a region in the last five years than in the 1980s, internet users are much more likely to turn to Twitter when the temperature drops colder than when it's warmer. The opposite principle applies when it is colder recently than in the 1980s: in this case, briefly brief temperatures are more likely to be commented on Twitter than cold temperatures.
This is worrisome, because climate change has picked up speed, the hottest four years of our planet are also his. last four years – Thus, warmer temperatures become less and less remarkable in the public imagination.
The team expressed concern that similar short-term memories outweigh the consequences of climate change beyond unusual temperatures. Climate change, on average, also creates hurricanes more violent, crawling shores and hungry forest fires – and these consequences could well infiltrate our sense of normal in the same way, the researchers wrote.
And if people see this strange Earth as a new standard, there will be fewer calls for the kind of broad and deep societal change that will be needed to reduce carbon emissions and slow down the force of climate change. "This translates to temperatures that are largely innocuous during the 21st century, even in a high emissions scenario," the team writes. "Our results, coupled with the results of the existing literature, suggest that it is unlikely that rising temperatures alone will generate widespread support for mitigation policies."
The research is described in a document published yesterday (February 25) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Email Meghan Bartels to [email protected] or follow her @meghanbartels. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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