Yet another side effect of climate change — as weather events get worse/more extreme, so have our bad moods online. A recent study analyzed Twitter conversations from around the world and found a correlation between extreme heat and rain events and increases in “negative” expressions on the platform.
The study compared tweets from 190 countries (which is almost all of them) that were posted during normal weather to ones that were posted during severe heat and/or rain. The data set consisted of 7.7 billion geolocated tweets from about 43,000 different counties or regions between 2015 and 2021. The results showed that positive tweets declined significantly while negative ones became more frequent during the bad weather.
According to the study's authors, this points to an overall lack of adaptation to our rapidly changing global climate. “As of right now, we see very little evidence of adaptation in the way that these new extreme events that are emerging globally are impacting human sentiment,” said Kelton Minor, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University who was part of the study.
