[ad_1]
What types of times do people find remarkable, when does it change and what does it say about the public's perception of climate change? A study conducted by the University of California, Davis, examined these issues from the angle of more than 2 billion US Twitter messages.
The study, published February 25 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that people have brief memories of what they consider a "normal" time. On average, people base their idea of normal time on what has happened in the last two to eight years. This disconnect with historical climate data may obscure public perception of climate change.
"We run the risk of quickly normalizing conditions that we do not want to standardize," said lead author Frances C. Moore, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Toronto. California to Davis. "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."
TRENDS ON TWITTER
To reach their conclusions, the researchers quantified a universal and timeless hobby – talk about the weather – by analyzing the publications on Twitter.
They sampled 2.18 billion geo-tagged tweets created between March 2014 and November 2016 to determine the type of temperature at the origin of the largest number of messages on the weather. They found that people often tweet when temperatures are unusual for a particular place and time of year – a particularly warm March or an unexpected winter, for example.
However, if the same time persisted year after year, it would cause fewer comments on Twitter, which would indicate that people have started to perceive it as normal in a relatively short period of time.
FROG OF FROG
This phenomenon, note the authors, is a classic case of the metaphor of the boiling frog: a frog jumps into a pot of boiling water and comes out immediately. If, instead, the frog in the pan is slowly heated to a boiling temperature, it will not pop and will eventually be cooked. Although scientifically inaccurate, this metaphor has long been used as a warning against the normalization of ever-changing conditions caused by climate change.
The sentiment analysis tools, which measure the positive or negative association of words, have provided evidence of this "boiling" effect. After repeated exposures to historically extreme temperatures, people talked less about the weather, but they still expressed negative feelings. Especially cold or hot conditions still seemed to make people unhappy and grumpy.
"We have seen that extreme temperatures always make people miserable, but they stop talking about it," Moore said. "It's a real boiling effect. People seem to get used to the changes they prefer to avoid. But it's not because they do not speak that it does not mean it will not make them worse.
The co-authors of the study are Nick Obradovich of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Flavio Lehner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Patrick Baylis of the University of British Columbia.
Source of the story:
Material provided by University of California – Davis. Original written by Kat Kerlin. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
[ad_2]
Source link