COVID-19, climate change, and the finite pool of worry in 2019 to 2021 Twitter discussions.

ABSTRACT: Climate change mitigation has been one of the world's most salient issues for the past three decades. However, global policy attention has been partially diverted to address the COVID-19 pandemic for the past 2 y. Here, we explore the impact of the pandemic on the frequency and content of climate change discussions on Twitter for the period of 2019 to 2021. Consistent with the "finite pool of worry" hypothesis both at the annual level and on a daily basis, a larger number of COVID-19 cases and deaths is associated with a smaller number of "climate change" tweets. Climate change discussion on Twitter decreased, despite 1) a larger Twitter daily active usage in 2020 and 2021, 2) greater coverage of climate change in the traditional media in 2021, 3) a larger number of North Atlantic Ocean hu

SUBMITTER: Smirnov O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9618108 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature