The public is not easily swayed by positive or negative reporting on climate change, and its also not in their top interests.
Researchers looked at how often people look for climate change-related information on the internet. They found interest in the subject has been declining since 2007, a Princeton University news release reported. The decline is not believed to be linked to media reporting.
The research team looked at how two events impacted the public opinion on global warming: when emails were hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia suggesting dissenting reviews of climate change were cast out (no misconduct actually took place), in an event dubbed "climategate"; and when the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) overestimated how quickly glaciers would melt in the Himalayas.
The team found internet searches on global warming started to increase after former vice president Al Gore released the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth"; after the IPCC's fourth report the number of searches continued to climb.
The team looked at searches for "climategate." They found the searches dropped by 50 percent every six days from Nov. 1 2009.
"The search volume quickly returns to the same level as before the incident," Gregory Goldsmith, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford's Environmental Change Institute, said in the news release. "This suggests no long-term change in the level of climate-change skepticism."
"We found that intense media coverage of an event such as 'climategate' was followed by bursts of public interest, but these bursts were short-lived," he said.
The team also found that climate change is not one of the most popular public issues.
"If public interest in climate change is falling, it may be more difficult to muster public concern to address climate change," first author William Anderegg, a postdoctoral research associate in the Princeton Environmental Institute, said in the news release. "This long-term trend of declining interest is worrying and something I hope we can address soon."
