Let's rewind Climate History

Amazing title illustration image

Abstract

Since 2015 and the Paris Agreements following the COP21, states and citizens are taking the issue of climate change more and more seriously. This has led to strong political movements like the climate strikes initiated by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The goal of our project is to rewind the story of climate change through the quotes of multiple newspapers.

We will first be interested in identifying what the quotes reveal about the important events related to climate change. Then we will dig into the actors behind the quotes. We will ask ourseleves if the important newspapers talking about climate change are mostly for a sustainable change or are rather climate sceptics. A focus will be made also on the most important political opinions of the speakers in the quotes. Finally, these analyses will allow us to have a global overview of how and about what Quotebank quotes talk about regarding climate change.

A little overview

We can first see the distribution of the number of occurrences of climate quotes through the years of 2015 to 2020. The distribution presents an irregular pattern, we can see that some months have a lot of quotes, mostly due to very famous ones like the one of President Donald Trump in august 2017 when he responded to North Korea’s nuclear threats saying that the regime

“will be met with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”

In 2016 there are only a few quotes due to the fact that the original dataset had fewer quotes this year.

The quotes’ story

We can now try to retrace the history of climate change viewed by the quotes. To do so, a typical language processing task will be solved : topic detection. We represented the topic of each month in word clouds of 20 words and then tried to connect these words to an event that happened that month. The size of the word is proportional to the degree to which the month’s quotes represent that particular topic. The timeline below shows the results of our unsupervised learning.

President Obama cancelled a XL pipeline

February 2015

Barack Obama rejects Keystone XL pipeline and hails US as leader on climate change.

US Military forces

May 2015

US Military experts say climate change poses 'significant risk' to national security.

Sea rise level record

August 2015

Record global water level rise published in a report by the National Center for environmental information,

World Agreements

December 2015

Adoption of agreements with all governments’ leaderships on december 15th before Paris Agreements signature in 2016.

Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

March 2016

Economic agreement between members of TPPA, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States signed on 4 February 2016 with an important deal for climate and in particular to stop overfishing.

Paris Agreements signing

April 2016
Four months after negotiating a global climate agreement in Paris, government officials are coming to New York on Friday, April 22, 2016, to sign the pact in a ceremony at the United Nations. (Photo/Sait Serkan Gurbuz)

Donald Trump, announce retreat of Paris Agreement

June 2017

On June 1, 2017, United States President Donald Trump announced that the United state of America, would cease all participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation.

International Solar Alliance

March 2018

Foundation summit of the International Solar Alliance in New Delhi to promote Solar energy power.

Forest fire in California

August 2018

National disaster declared in Northern California, due to the extensive forest fires.

School Strikes for Climate

March 2019

School Strike for Climate is a world wide international movement of young people participating in demonstrations to demand political action against climate change.

Amazon Wildfire

August 2019

Record of wilfires in Amazon forest with unprecedent CO2 emissions to change the use of the land.

Fossil fuel demonstration

September 2019

Major protests by people to demonstrate against fossil fuel arguing it's time to change the system.

Australia Bushfires

January 2020

Australia suffers devastating bushfires after high temperatures and extreme weathers condition

  • It is interesting to see that we can retrace most of the important events that happened through the years thanks to only 20 words. It is pretty remarkable, for the years with low data how we can reconstitute a sentence that corresponds to a specific event that happened that month, like for example the photo of the signature of the Paris Agreement’s pact on a friday in april. However, the more the quotes the more difficult it is to connect a specific event to the month’s quotes as the topic is getting more general.

  • We can see that the word ‘Trump’ appears a lot in word clouds. This is naturally due to the fact that President Donald Trump is very publicized and cited a lot in the quotes. Word clouds reveal also that the Paris Agreement has an important media coverage in the anglophone newspapers. We were also a little surprised by the fact that Greta Thunberg does not appear once in the word clouds as we think she became important in the figth for action for climate change these past few years. This means that she is maybe not as cited as we thought in the quotes. Naturally, a lot of general words like ‘people’, ‘like’, ‘world’ , ‘time’ appear a lot in the word clouds and make the analysis a bit harder. When the word cloud has mostly general words it is pretty impossible to retrace a specific event and there are many possibilities.

  • Also, a lot of events that we were able to extract from the word clouds are related to big climate protests or climate disasters which are very publicized events related to climate change.

Who tells the story ?

The types of newspapers

We can now wonder which newspapers are behind the climate quotes. A lot of sources with an important share of climate quotes are websites that convey articles, they are in bold in the table. These types of newspapers mostly convey articles about trendy topics from other newspapers. This emphasises the fact that climate change became very trendy these past few years.

The following table shows the 10 websites that have the most quotes.

Websites Number of quotes
msn.com 1106632
investing.com 475852
jdsupra.com 319747
wokv.com 215855
krmg.com 192553
news965.com 174527
wsbradio.com 157839
independent.co.uk 58124
yahoo.com 57526
salon.com 57224

Breitbart VS InsideClimateNews

Two american newspapers that stood out by their number of quotes are Breitbart and InsideClimateNews. We found out that these two websites had 2 opposite points of view about climate change and thought it was interesting to compare these two. Breitbart is fully against climate change actions whereas InsideClimateNews is pro.

We resumed in the table below the number of quotes of Breitbart and InsideClimateNews and their number of unique quotes. Unique quotes are the ones that are not reused in any of the newspaper’s other articles.

  Breitbart InsideClimateNews
Number of quotes 40’102 21’202
Number of unique quotes 23’185 (~58%) 19’973 (~94%)
  • We can see that about 42% of Breitbart quotes are reused in different Breitbart articles whereas only around 6% of CarbonBrief quotes are reused by them. This lights out that sources and quotes are more diversified for InsideClimateNews than Breitbart. Breitbart articles rely on the same quotes to argue their point of view while InsideClimateNews tries to use different quotes to support their opinions in their different articles.

We would like to know now how are the quotes reused by Breitbart. We plotted the number of occurrences of the used quotes as a function of how often these quotes are reused by Breitbart in their articles.

  • The plot is a power law which means that increasing the number of reused quotes reduces exponentially the number of occurences of the quotes. So on, we can say that Breitbart is reusing their quotes but their number of reused quotes is drecreasing very fast. Even if quotes are reused by Breitbart, they still have for the main part quotes that are reused only a few times.

Let’s now investigate which newspapers share quotes with Breitbart and InsideClimateNews. The table belows shows the 10 websites that share the most number of quotes with Breitbart or InsideClimateNews.

Breitbart Number of quotes InsideClimateNews Number of quotes
yahoo.com 5180 environmentalhealthnews.org 2675
msn.com 4691 dailyclimate.org 2644
news12.com 4370 nytimes.com 1864
kdhnews.com 4183 msn.com 1807
seattletimes.com 3817 yahoo.com 1230
sfgate.com 3810 thehill.com 1142
startribune.com 3623 startribune.com 914
washingtontimes.com 3609 seattletimes.com 820
wftv.com 3524 breitbart.com 805
wtop.com 3338 sfgate.com 804

The newspapers in clusters

An interesting analysis could be to see now how these newspapers that share quotes with Breitbart or InsideClimateNews are linked together.

  • We can see in the node graph three clusters. If two nodes are linked this means that they share some same quotes. The distance between two nodes is for Breitbart the total number of quotes in Breitbart’s articles divided by the number of quotes shared between Breitbart and 50 other newspapers. The same applies for InsideClimateNews. The more the links are short, the more there are quotes shared between newspapers.

  • At first sight, this graph points out the fact that Breitbart and InsideClimateNews do not share a lot of quotes, only 30% of the total number of quotes are shared between these two newspapers. This is interesting as it demonstrates the fact that their articles that have the same main topic which is climate change (as we filtered all other articles) have different quotes. The newspapers that share the same quotes between Breitbart and InsideClimateNews are mostly websites that convey articles like Yahoo or ExpressNews. This same cluster is at the same distance from Breitbart as from InsideClimateNews, this means that newspapers in this cluster relay the same amount of quotes from the pro climate newspaper as from the climate sceptic one.

  • We can see that websites associated with Breitbart represented inside the cluster are for the most climate sceptics newspapers like FoxNews or other newspapers that belongs to FowNews like Fox23 or NewsAdvance. Likewise, most of the websites associated with InsideClimateNews are pro climate like the WashingtonPost or the NyTimes.

  • Also, we can see that the distances between the nodes connected to Breitbart are closer than the ones connected to InsideClimateNews. That means that Breitbart shares a lot of quotes with other similar websites. As pointed out before, this confirms the fact that the newspapers related to Breitbart and Breitbart do not diversify their sources and use the same quotes.

Inside Breitbart and InsideClimateNews’ quotes

Let’s now focus on what the quotes tell us about these newspapers.

  • We can see from the graph below that the relevance of words for InsideClimateNews is higher than for Breitbart. This relevance score shows that the words in InsideClimateNews quotes are more diverse and carefully chosen. Especially when we compare these scores with the quotes from Breitbart and InsideClimateNews together, we see that Breitbart has a similar distribution of scores, while InsideClimateNews has a distinctly skewed distribution. This really shows the quality of the quotes used by InsideClimateNews.

  • Next, we can look deeper and see which words have the highest score for each newspaper. The more relevant a word is, the more carefully it was used, certainly to support a specific topic. The most relevant words used by InsideClimateNews are mostly words directly related to climate change, while Breitbart’s are mostly more general words. For example, the most relevant word for InsideClimateNews is ‘epa’, which is the US Environmental Protection Agency. We show below most relevent words into word clouds.

Word clouds illustration

  • We can therefore conclude that the quotes relayed by InsideClimateNews are more qualitative and the words used are more precisely chosen. This complements what we have seen previously, namely that Breitbart reuse many of the same quotes.

  • However, it should be noted that this analysis is based on quotes filtered only on the word climate, and it does not mean that 100% of them are related to climate change. That is why words like ‘women’ or ‘family’ also stand out.

What about their speakers ?

Now, we can have a review about speakers in Breitbart and InsideClimateNews quotes. Thanks to the wikidata data set, we made a link between the quotes’ speakers and their political orientation. It’s important to take into account the fact that some people have changed their political orientation, so on, some people can be affiliated to more than one political orientation.

Breitbart quotes political views

Inside Climate News quotes political views

  • We can first notice that Breitbart and InsideClimateNews both have the same percentage of speakers for which we identified a political opinion, 69% for Breitbart and 62% for InsideClimateNews. This illustrates how politicized the subject of climate change is.

  • We have to notice that Unkown include either quotations which don’t have speakers or have speakers whithout significant political views.

  • Both newspapers’ speakers are for the majority from the two important political parties of the USA, Republican and Democratic parties. This shows the importance of these political parties in these two american newspapers. It is interesting, but not very surprising to notice that Breitbart is the only newspaper between the two that has the Independent Party of America represented which is a party that is openly against climate change.

  • Breitbart has more than 41% of their quotes’ speakers that belong to american’s political parties whereas InsideClimateNews only has 21% that does. In the category ‘other parties’, political parties from many countries are represented like the english Conservative party or the french one La République en Marche. This shows that even though the two newspapers are american, one diversifies more his speakers than the other. InsideClimateNews gives a more global overview of climate change referring speakers from all over the world in his articles than Breitbart.

Conclusion

After a little rewind about the history of climate change of these past years we were interested in looking at who was behind that story. We then focused on two newspapers that we thought interesting as they have a totally different opinion regarding climate change. The pro climate newspaper uses more unique quotes, whose quotes are more relevant and more related to climate change in their articles and whose speakers are politically diversified. Also, the climate sceptic newspapers cluster all share the same quotes and are not very diversified.

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