International  Journal  of 
Environmental Research
and Public Health
Article
#Climatechange vs. #Globalwarming: Characterizing
Two Competing Climate Discourses on Twitter with
Semantic Network and Temporal Analyses
Wen Shi 1, Haohuan Fu 1,2 , Peinan Wang 3, Changfeng Chen 3 and Jie Xiong 4, *
1 Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System Science,
Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China; shi-w18@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn (W.S.);
haohuan@tsinghua.edu.cn (H.F.)
2 National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, Wuxi 214000, China
3 School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China;
wpn17@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn (P .W.); chencf@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn (C.C.)
4 Strategy and Innovation Department, Rennes School of Business, 35065 Rennes, France
* Correspondence: jie.xiong@rennes-sb.com; Tel.:+ 33-(0)-2-99-54-46-79
Received: 5 December 2019; Accepted: 3 February 2020; Published: 7 February 2020
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Abstract: Distinct perceptions of the global climate is one of the factors preventing society from
achieving consensus or taking collaborative actions on this issue. The public has not even reached
an agreement on the naming of the global concern, showing preference for either “climate change”
or “global warming”, and few previous studies have addressed these two competing discourses
resulting from distinct climate concerns by diﬀerently linking numerous climate concepts. Based on
the 6,662,478 tweets containing #climatechange or #globalwarming generated between 1 January 2009
and 31 December 2018, we constructed the semantic networks of the two discourses and examined
their evolution over the decade. The ﬁndings indicate that climate change demonstrated a more
scientiﬁc perspective and showed an attempt to condense climate discussions rather than diﬀuse the
topic by frequently addressing sub-topics simultaneously. Global warming triggered more political
responses and showed a greater connection with phenomena. Temporal analysis suggests that
traditional political discussions were gradually fading in both discourses but more recently started to
revive in the form of discourse alliance in the climate change discourse. The associations between
global warming and weather abnormalitiessuddenly strengthened around 2012. Climate change is
becoming more dominant than global warming in public discussions. Although two discourses have
shown more similarities in the rank order of important climate concepts, apparent disagreements
continue about how these concepts are associated. These ﬁndings lay the groundwork for researchers
and communicators to narrow the discrepancy between diverse climate perceptions.
Keywords: climate change; global warming; semantic network analysis; temporal analysis; public
discourse; Twitter
1. Introduction
The public’s distinct understanding of the cause and eﬀect of the global climate issue is an obstacle
to joint mitigation actions. In addition to a diversity of views co-existing in the public discourse [1,2],
previous studies noticed that the public had even failed to reach an agreement on whether “climate
change” or “global warming” is the most appropriate deﬁnition of the global climate concern [3–5].
According to the deﬁnition provided by [ 6], global warming describes global climate issues as
a continuous increase in the average temperature of Earth’s surface due to anthropogenic emissions
of greenhouse gases, whereas climate change includes not only temperature rise but also a range of
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 1062; doi:10.3390/ijerph17031062 www.mdpi.com /journal/ijerph