A interesting tool I’ve came across today, Blogpulse, among other things gives an indication of what percentage of blog posts on a certain day contain a certain keyword.
It’s difficult to determine from the Blogpulse website exactly which blogs are indexed, however it seems to have a fairly broad range of English language blogs. Of course, the caveat about who is likely to use blogs and the according systemic bias, applies. It is still fun to play with however.
Obviously the word Katrina takes a huge spike as it approaches and hits, and now finally seems to be dropping off. In a similar pattern, at much lower frequency, do mentions of the terms climate change, and global warming occur in blogs. Clearly at least some people are bringing these things together.
It would seem logical for those in the know to use the interest in climate change that spikes with such events, to inform people more generally what climate change could mean for events like hurricanes. The various posts over at realclimate were a good start for me, there seems to be various conflicting threads of knowledge drifting about the internet, with some saying climate change (although usually ‘global warming’ is used in this context) had no effect, and others immediately blaming the people in the hummers.
It would be an interesting exercise in virtual activism to see if the data could be manipulated in some way to produce a spike. In that way a buzz would be created: make it appear that there’s enormous interest in climate change. It’ll be newsworthy. Then people will become interested in climate change.