From Global Warming to Climate Crisis – Urgency on the Rise
Sweeping Change in the 2020s
Our original Climate Conversations report charted the emergence of a new sensibility in green discourse online: more and more people were engaging with the subject as the 2010s progressed, with conversation keywords on social media shifting from the distant and theoretical (“global warming”) to the accepted and immediate – “climate change” and “climate crisis” both grew rapidly in the latter part of the 2010s – only to fall away with the emergence of the novel coronavirus and the ensuing global pandemic, lockdown and recovery.
Much has changed since then. The global economy has emerged from COVID, though shaken and strained. The aviation industry has bounced back and is expected to return to profit in 2023, but supply chains have struggled and got back up to speed only to be hit by what many have labelled a recession in 2022.
At the same time as inflation has soared (up from 4.7% in 2021 to 8.8% globally in 2022), we have seen a cost of living crisis and an energy crisis, most keenly felt in Europe, and driven by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There has been a 55% reduction in EU reliance on Russian gas in the past year, one which has seen countries turn to other energy sources, clean or not.
Meanwhile, COP27 in November 2022, which focused heavily on emissions and climate goals, was largely seen as failing to make any major progress on the promise shown at COP26 the year prior. And all the while, we have witnessed the rise and rise of environmental activism across the world, with new forms of protest capturing media attention.
With COVID now receding from the headlines, how has dialogue shifted again online? We saw the first signs in our original report of a pivot to more urgent language and agreement that action is necessary. Has the needle shifted once again, and the focus on action increased? Or has the wider economic crisis kept attention diverted?
For this second edition of DTM, we needed to go deeper, and commissioned a study of policymakers and business leaders to find out not only what people were saying at scale on social media, but also thinking in company headquarters and the halls of power.
While there are many friction points and conflicting attitudes to unpick, it is also clear there is a real accord on the urgency of the situation we find ourselves in.
Urgency is Key
From a position of relative parity, conversations around “climate change”, “global warming” and “climate crisis” changed dramatically over the course of the 2010s.
“Climate change” monthly volume exploded in the late 2010s, reaching over 6 million per month by 2019, while “global warming” began to fall away at the same time, becoming over taken by “climate crisis” at over 1 million mentions per month in the same year.
It was clear that the window of discourse was beginning to shift towards urgency with the entrance of “crisis” into the debate. But the onset of the pandemic in 2020 abruptly caused conversation to pivot as the world’s attention focused on coping with COVID-19. What has happened since then?
Monthly online mentions of "Climate Change", "Global Warming" and "Climate Crisis" from 2010 - 2020
Monthly online mentions of "Climate Change" from 2020 - 2022
Monthly online mentions of "Global Warming" from 2020 - 2022
Monthly online mentions of "Climate Crisis" from 2020 - 2022
Clearly, the COVID era has had consequences on the discussion – all three terms above dipped dramatically in the spring of 2020, only to rise to (in some cases) record highs 18 months later in the build up to the high profile COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which began at the end of October 2021.
We also detected a noticeable shift in the discussion in this period, as conversation around “climate crisis” continued to grow, and overtakes “global warming” – itself not dropping away as a discussion – as a talking point in late 2021, reaching over 600,000 mentions per month online.
And now so is Action
Monthly online mentions of “#climateaction” and “Climate Action” from 2018 to present
In our original report, we highlighted the emerging social media phrase “#climateaction” and its largely positive sentiment. The phrase has only become more popular since then, and monthly mentions have doubled on average over the past five years, reaching highs of almost 800,000 per month at times.
But online conversation has also shifted to focus on more tangible sub-topics within the climate debate: “carbon” in particular has become a key talking point in the 2020s as focus turns to how we deal with climate change.
The last report found that carbon-related conversations were growing – up 133% in 2019 compared to 2018, and up a further 26% in 2020; we’ve seen this trend continue post-pandemic at a similar rate with mentions increasing by 130% from 2020 to 2022 as the debate has only intensified.
Monthly online mentions of "Carbon" from 2018 - 2022
Probing further, we can see that different carbon-related conversations have continued to grow in the past five years:
Monthly online mentions of "Carbon Emissions" from 2018 - 2022
Monthly online mentions of "Carbon Neutral" from 2018 - 2022
Monthly volume mention of "Carbon Offset" from 2018 - 2022
Monthly online mentions of "Carbon Positive" from 2018 - 2022
Monthly online mentions of "Carbon Zero" from 2018 - 2022
Each of the above phrases charts a general increase over the past five years, with noticeable spikes in late 2021, with “carbon emissions” making a substantial seven-fold growth since 2018 to over 300,000 mentions per month (though it is also worth noting that mentions of “carbon neutral” have plateaued and gradually started to decline, something we will investigate in more detail later on).
It can be argued that what we are seeing here, in other words, is a shift to specific actions and goals that we must take in order to mitigate climate change.
Sure enough, mirroring this growth in conversations around carbon, we also see an increase in discussion of energy policy during the 2020s, even before the invasion of Ukraine and the decision to rapidly move away from Russian fossil fuels. In fact, mentions have increased by 123% during the past three years and now stand at around 100,000 per month.
We can see that the conversation is continuing to move from caution to urgency, and from debate to action, as the online discussion shifts from climate change to climate emergencies and how we directly address these.
This pivot to action is key. In our last report, we looked at language – how the climate conversation is framed by the public.
Monthly volume mention of "Energy Policy" from 2018 - 2022