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Fake news and indifference to scientific fact: President Trump’s confused tweets on global warming, climate change and weather

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“To permit ignorance is to empower it. To do nothing as our leaders proclaim absurdities is a crime of complacency”.

Edmond Kirsch in Origin by Dan Brown.

Abstract

A set of 115 tweets on climate change by President Trump, from 2011 to 2015, are analysed by means of the data mining technique, sentiment analysis. The intention is to explore the contents and sentiments of the messages contained, the degree to which they differ, and their implications about his understanding of climate change. The results suggest a predominantly negative emotion in relation to tweets on climate change, but they appear to lack a clear logical framework, and confuse short term variations in localised weather with long term global average climate change.

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Acknowledgements

For financial support, the first author acknowledges the Australian Research Council, and the second author is most grateful to the Australian Research Council, National Science Council, Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    David E. Allen

  2. Department of Finance, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan

    David E. Allen & Michael McAleer

  3. School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, Australia

    David E. Allen

  4. Discipline of Business Analytics, University of Sydney Business School, Sydney, Australia

    Michael McAleer

  5. Institute of Advanced Studies, Yokohama National University, Yokohama, Japan

    Michael McAleer

  6. Econometric Institute, Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Michael McAleer

  7. Department of Economic Analysis and ICAE, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Michael McAleer

Authors
  1. David E. Allen
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  2. Michael McAleer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael McAleer.

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The analysis in the paper was undertaken with the R sentiment package.

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Allen, D.E., McAleer, M. Fake news and indifference to scientific fact: President Trump’s confused tweets on global warming, climate change and weather. Scientometrics 117, 625–629 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2847-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2847-y

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