Climate change believers and sceptics: a text-mining approach to measure their impact on the political discourse

气候变化的信徒和怀疑论者：一种文本挖掘方法来衡量他们对政治话语的影响

• 批准号: 2097042
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2018 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2097042
• 关键词: Climate; change; believers; sceptics; text

A growing interdisciplinary literature examines the role of industry actors and key conservative think tanks for shaping the climate change debate and promoting inaction. It explores how the climate change counter movement (CCCM) tries to undermine legislative attempts of restricting carbon emissions by manufacturing doubt about the credibility of anthropogenic climate change.The aim of my research is to quantify the influence of CCCM on the political discourse with a text-mining approach. Prior attempts to quantify the impact of the CCCM on political discussion, using a simple measure of semantic similarity, have found a positive relationship over time between the discourse of the CCCM with both the news media and the US presidents, i.e. their discourse is becoming more similar, thus indicating an increasing influence of the CCCM. However, the measure of semantic similarity used does not isolate words that are (at least on average) unique to the CCCM and thus may be overstating the "influence" of these actors on political speech. As such, the positive relationship is possibly due to an overall increase in climate change discourse and not necessarily as a result of the CCCM.The goal of this research is, therefore, to isolate the sceptical language in a first step, by taking the competing discourse of the environmental movement into account. The environmental movement and the CCCM are thought to be contesting the definition of the dominant field frame in the climate change debate forming diametrically opposed movements. Distinguishing between the two discourses will allow a more nuanced exploration of political agendas, while also providing a suitable measure of the impact of each group. Specifically, the following questions should be explored:1) What are the best methods for isolating the language of both sceptics and the convinced? Working closely with my advisor, I will explore a wide range of supervised and semi-supervised methods to classify movement language.2) How can one measure "influence" in political speech?3) Is there a measurable impact of the climate change discourse(s) on the political discourse and can the origin of this impact be traced?

越来越多的跨学科文献研究了行业行为者和关键保守派智库在塑造气候变化辩论和促进不作为方面的作用。本研究旨在探讨气候变化反运动（CCCM）如何通过制造对人为气候变化可信度的怀疑来破坏限制碳排放的立法尝试，并采用文本挖掘的方法量化CCCM对政治话语的影响。先前试图量化CCCM对政治讨论的影响，使用一个简单的语义相似性测量，发现随着时间的推移，CCCM与新闻媒体和美国总统的话语之间存在正相关关系，即他们的话语变得越来越相似，从而表明CCCM的影响力越来越大。然而，使用的语义相似性的措施并没有孤立的话（至少在平均水平上）独特的CCCM，因此可能夸大了这些演员的政治言论的“影响力”。因此，这种积极的关系可能是由于气候变化话语的整体增加，而不一定是CCCM的结果。因此，本研究的目标是，通过考虑环境运动的竞争话语，在第一步中隔离怀疑语言。环境运动和CCCM被认为是对气候变化辩论中主导领域框架的定义提出质疑，形成了截然相反的运动。区分这两种话语将有助于对政治议程进行更细致的探索，同时也为每个群体的影响提供了适当的衡量标准。具体而言，应该探讨以下问题：1）隔离怀疑者和确信者的语言的最佳方法是什么？与我的导师密切合作，我将探索一系列监督和半监督的方法来分类运动语言。2）如何衡量政治演讲中的“影响力”？3)气候变化话语是否对政治话语产生了可衡量的影响，这种影响的根源是否可以追溯？