The impact of local temperature volatility on attention to climate change: Evidence from Spanish tweets

Variability in local weather patterns has long been suggested as a major barrier impeding laypeople from recognizing long-term climate trends. However, as humans are able to detect and interpret rapid signal fluctuations, it seems psychologically plausible to assume that they are able to integrate short-term variations of weather variables into their mental representations of climate change. Using a combined analysis of social media and weather station data, here we investigated the impact of the short-term volatility of local temperature on climate change-related tweets from 2014 to 2017. We found a nonlinear hockey stick relationship between weekly temperature volatility and climate change-related tweets, a volatility rise of 1 °C corresponds to an 82% increase in climate change tweets when volatility is above 3.5 °C. This volatility effect was observed from 2016 onwards, suggesting a recent change in people’s mental representations of climate change. This study provides empirical evidence illustrating that in the public mind, climate change may not be represented as a mere temperature increase any more, but as a disruption of the climate system in general.