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

越来越多的跨学科文献研究了行业参与者和主要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。它探讨了气候变化反运动（CCCM）如何试图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。我的研究目的是用文本挖掘方法量化CCCM对政治话语的影响。之前曾尝试使用一种简单的语义相似性度量来量化CCCM对政治讨论的影响，结果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，所使用的语义相似度测量并没有隔离CCCM独有的（至少平均而言）单词，因此可能夸大了这些行为者对政治言论的“影响”。因此，这种正相关关系可能是由于气候变化话语的总体增加，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，在第一步隔离怀疑语言。环境运动和CCCM被认为在气候变化辩论中对主导场框架的定义进行了争论，形成了截然相反的运动。区分这两种话语将允许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合适的衡量标准。具体来说，应该探讨以下问题：1)区分怀疑论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，我将探索广泛的监督和半监督方法来分类运动语言。2)如何衡量政治演讲中的“影响力”？3)气候变化话语对政治话语是否有可衡量的影响，这种影响的来源是否可以追溯到？

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?