Climate Change Perception in Scientific and Public Sphere

Abstract

Climate change is one of the major concerns of humankind during this 21st century. Indeed everywhere on the planet, effects climate change is now widely perceptible to everyone. However, while a lot of efforts have been made on the proposal of efficient models able to provide reliable climate projections for the future years, very little work has been done on the global population's feelings regarding the climate changes. Thus in this paper we focus to this social dimension of the problem and we adopt a data analytics approach that aims to study people's perception of climate change. First, we analyze the scientific papers published during the last forty years and we try to understand what are the topics addressed and their evolution. Then, we have collected data on Twitter to understand what are the feelings and the topics addressed by the individuals regarding climate change. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first data analysis approach that highlights the feelings and topics of the global population about climate change and compares them with scientific articles.