So I should start with a disclaimer, since it’s not very popular right now to defy the idea that global warming is ruining our planet. DISCLAIMER: I am a strong supporter of protecting the environment. I think finding an alternative source for energy is should be one of our nation’s top priorities. And regardless of my views on global warming, I don’t think pumping pollutants into our atmosphere is a good thing.
With that said, I would like to point out some interesting things. I performed 4 searches on Google News’ archives, each one simply containing the words ‘global warming’, not in quotes. I set the dates to be 06/01/2006-Present (picked because that’s two months before An Inconvenient Truth came out), 06/01/2005-06/01/2006, 06/01/2004-06/01/2005, and 06/01/2003-06/01/2004. The number of results for each search were, 95,000 articles, 56,000 articles, 35,000 articles, and 20,500 articles, respectively. Note that each search does not contain articles coming up in previous years, so each is the number of new articles that year. Now obviously, not too much can be inferred by such a basic search, since one could argue blogs have become more popular in the last few years and are contributing to the increase in hits, among other things, but we can draw a couple conclusions.
The question that needs to be asked: Have we really affected things so much in the last 4 years that the number of news stories regarding global warming has quintupled? Or have the media latched onto a hot idea and made it into an epidemic? It all feels like a classic information cascade. A few people were talking about it and then a celebrity made a movie about it, and all of a sudden it become cool to promote environmental issues, and then it exploded! The number of news stories regarding global warming nearly doubled in one year! Now there’s always the argument that people have just now found out about this problem, and it was a huge problem before but no one knew about it. I find that hard to believe since I’ve known what global warming was since 2nd grade, and the fact that 3 years of searches from 2000-2003, each contain about 20,000 results.
We have to be wary sometimes of information cascades and how they can affect our perceptions without us really knowing. I know this is all a relatively weak argument, but it deserves some attention. Here’s some articles that argue things better than me:
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