Text-mining the signals of climate change doubt
Text-mining the signals of climate change doubt
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DOI：
10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.12.001
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发表时间：
2016-01-01
影响因子：
8.9
通讯作者：
Coan, Travis G.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Boussalis, Constantine;Coan, Travis G.
气候科学家压倒性地同意地球正在变暖，全球平均气温的上升主要是由于人类活动。然而，相当大比例的美国公众，以及美国国会中相当数量的立法者，继续反对“共识观点”。尽管分歧的来源多种多样，但一个突出的解释是，气候怀疑论者发起了一场协调一致、资金充足的反运动。这项研究通过提供近15年来保守智库怀疑话语的系统概述，为有组织的气候怀疑论文献做出了贡献。具体地说，我们(1)汇编了迄今最大的逆向文学语料库，在1998-2013年期间从19个组织收集了16,000多份文件；(2)引入了一种方法来衡量语料库中的关键主题，该方法可根据保守派智库在过去十年中产生的内容的大幅增加来衡量；以及(3)利用这一新方法来阐明保守派智库中与科学和政策相关的讨论的相对盛行程度。我们发现几乎没有人支持“否认科学的时代已经结束”的说法--相反，在样本期间，关于气候科学的讨论总体上有所增加。(C)2015爱思唯尔有限公司。保留所有权利。
Climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that the Earth is getting warmer and that the rise in average global temperature is predominantly due to human activity. Yet a significant proportion of the American public, as well as a considerable number of legislators in the U.S. Congress, continue to reject the "consensus view." While the source of the disagreement is varied, one prominent explanation centres on the activities of a coordinated and well-funded countermovement of climate sceptics. This study contributes to the literature on organized climate scepticism by providing the first systematic overview of conservative think tank sceptical discourse in nearly 15 years. Specifically, we (1) compile the largest corpus of contrarian literature to date, collecting over 16,000 documents from 19 organizations over the period 1998-2013; (2) introduce a methodology to measure key themes in the corpus which scales to the substantial increase in content generated by conservative think tanks over the past decade; and (3) leverage this new methodology to shed light on the relative prevalence of science- and policy-related discussion among conservative think tanks. We find little support for the claim that "the era of science denial is over"-instead, discussion of climate science has generally increased over the sample period. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.