Google searches reveal opinions on global warming are unaffected by public rows
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Pictured is Professor Phil Jones, the academic at the centre of the 'Climategate' affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change
High-profile rows over climate science have had no lasting impact on people's views on global warming.
This is according to an analysis of search terms on Google from 2004 to 2013 around two events: 'Climategate' and the discovery of an error about the melting of Himalyan glaciers in a major UN climate report.
In both these incidents, media coverage highlighted apparent issues with the science.
During 'climategate' emails were hacked from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in November 2009 (CRU) and used to accuse scientists of misconduct.
Sceptics seized on phrases from the emails such as 'trick...to hide the decline' in data on temperatures to claim scientists manipulated or deleted data to support the evidence of global warming, though they were cleared of doing so following several independent inquiries.
Shortly afterwards, in January 2010, news broke of an error about the rate of ice melt in the Himalayas in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report, a major review of climate science.
Although there were spikes in the search term 'global warming hoax', indicating scepticism, as news of the incidents emerged, levels of the search quickly fell back to previous lows, the study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters found.
The search term 'climategate' halved six days after a peak in public interest, the research found.
The study's co-author Dr Greg Goldsmith, from the University of Oxford, said: 'The study uses the search term 'global warming hoax' as an indicator of global warming scepticism amongst the public.
in January 2010, news broke of an error about the rate of ice melt in the Himalayas in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report. Pictured is Rajendra Pachauri, the head of UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who admitted that the figure needs reviewing
'Although we found an increase in the volume of searches for the term immediately after the news of the hacking of the emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the search volume quickly returns to the same level as before the incident.
'This suggests no long-term change in the level of climate change scepticism.'
The research also found that 'global warming' was more commonly searched for than 'climate change', although the gap between the two had narrowed.
But the analysis suggested an overall fall in interest in the subject since a peak in 2007 after Al Gore's climate documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' was released and the IPCC's fourth assessment report was published.
The analysis suggested an overall fall in interest in the subject since a peak in 2007 after Al Gore's climate documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' was released and the IPCC's fourth assessment report was published
Dr William Anderegg, from Princeton University, said: 'Our results showed that the volume of these search terms peaked in 2007 around a unique sequence of major events - the releases of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in August 2006 and the IPCC fourth assessment report in April 2007 - and the level of interest has declined since then.
'There is no single reason why the public have become less interested in climate change. However research certainly suggests that economic issues, such as the recent recession, tend to take precedence over environmental issues like climate change.'
Although there were spikes in the search term 'global warming hoax' after both events, indicating scepticism, levels of the search quickly fell back to previous lows
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