The role of the micro-blogging site Twitter has turned the Web into a major repository of topical comments, and a rich source of information for social science research. This code systematically searches Twitter for messages related to climate using a Twitter Streaming Application Programming Interface (API) in python.
558,993 live streaming tweets from July 1st 2019 to July 24th 2019 from 12:00 pm to 05:00 pm that include at least one of these phrases/hashtags: “global warming”, “climate change”, #climatechange, #globalwarming are collected. Figure 1 depicts top 4 languages in which the tweets were written in July 24th, 2019. It shows that English, Spanish, French and Hindi are four languages that most of the tweets were written. Figure 2 illustrates top 4 countries from which the tweets were sent. Most of these tweets are in these five hours were from United States, Australia, Thailand and Canada. With collecting daily tweets regarding climate change, the association between exposure to different climatic patterns and tweets at the global scale can be tested.
In July 2019, in total 8,385,450 tweets with the considered keywords and hashtags about climate change have been twitted and I was able to track the location for 98650 of them. Fig 2 shows those countries with largest number of tweets and positive correlation with the maximum temperature.
Figure 1- (a) Top 4 languages in which the tweets were written, (b) top 4 countries from which the tweets were sent in July 24th, 2019
The countries with largest number of tweets and positive correlation with max temperature in July 2019