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Climate science terms going out of style?
A new study by Professor Alex Bentley and Dr Phil Garnett
from the Tipping Points project has found that some of the
most popular keywords from climate science have recently
been used much less frequently in publications. This may be
an important indicator for how climate science needs to be
communicated more effectively for it to have a greater societal
impact. Researchers sampled a series of top one-word climate
science terms, such as ‘climate’ and ‘adaptation’, from a
random selection of books from the Google N-Gram database,
about 4 percent of the world’s published books. They modelled
the frequency of the climate science words over time to find
out how popular they were. They also explored how the words
themselves were used, because how they spread socially may
be key for their use by non-scientists.
The rise and fall of top climate science words that appear in books.
Key Finding: To encourage widening interest and
understanding about the findings of climate change science,
an approach that accounts for how information about
climate change spreads through social learning is needed.
Effective and accessible science communication allows
members of the public, in their respective communities,
to learn about climate change themselves.
‘Word diffusion and climate science’. PLOS ONE, 7(11).
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047966
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