Climate change and political polarization are two of the twenty-first century’s critical socio-political issues. Here we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP) using Twitter data from 2014 to 2021. First, we reveal a large increase in ideological polarization during COP26, following low polarization between COP20 and COP25. Second, we show that this increase is driven by growing right-wing activity, a fourfold increase since COP21 relative to pro-climate groups. Finally, we identify a broad range of ‘climate contrarian’ views during COP26, emphasizing the theme of political hypocrisy as a topic of cross-ideological appeal; contrarian views and accusations of hypocrisy have become key themes in the Twitter climate discussion since 2019. With future climate action reliant on negotiations at COP27 and beyond, our results highlight the importance of monitoring polarization and its impacts in the public climate discourse.
Network embedding techniques are powerful to capture structural regularities in networks and to identify similarities between their local fabrics. However, conventional network embedding models are developed for static structures, commonly consider nodes only and they are seriously challenged when the network is varying in time. Temporal networks may provide an advantage in the description of real systems, but they code more complex information, which could be effectively represented only by a handful of methods so far. Here, we propose a new method of event embedding of temporal networks, called weg2vec, which builds on temporal and structural similarities of events to learn a low dimensional representation of a temporal network. This projection successfully captures latent structures and similarities between events involving different nodes at different times and provides ways to predict the final outcome of spreading processes unfolding on the temporal structure.
Climate change and political polarisation are two of the critical social and political issues of the 21st century. However, their interaction remains understudied. Here, we investigate the online discussion around the UN Conference of The Parties on Climate Change (COP) using social media data from 2014 to 2021. First, we highlight that cross-platform engagement peaked during COP26. Second, focusing on Twitter, we reveal low ideological polarisation between COP20 -COP25, with a large increase in polarisation during COP26. Finally, we show that this is driven by growing rightwing engagement (a 4-fold increase since COP21) and find no evidence of polarisation driven by individuals moving between ideological groups. With future climate action reliant on negotiations at COP27 and onwards, our results highlight the importance of monitoring polarisation in the public climate discourse and how this may impact political action.
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