Solar geoengineering stances
What people think about solar geoengineering, a proposal to cool Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space.
Last updated August 26, 2024
Should scientists should do geoengineering research?
Geoengineering-related posts on r/climate and r/environment classified as pro-research, neutral, or anti-research.
Expressions of opinion
By default this chart counts upvotes and downvotes as expressions of opinion equal to posts. Negative counts are set to 0. There is a ~4 month lag time between today's date and the latest data in this chart, partly because of this project's reliance on torrent releases, partly because this allows votes to stabilize.
Classification
Each post was zero-shot filtered into a pro-research, neutral, or anti-research bucket with gpt-3.5-turbo. The entirety of each post was used regardless of length.
Why Reddit?
Discussions on Reddit, especially in subreddits such as r/climate, are more likely to be well-informed and less likely to revolve around the chemtrails conspiracy than discussions on other social media platforms.
Data explorer
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About
Stances, not sentiment
Those who support solar geoengineering research often do so reluctantly, so stances ("pro-research" or "anti-research") are more useful than sentiment ("positive" or "negative") for this topic. We plan to consider other positions in the future, such as attitudes towards deployment.
Data
- Prior to April 2023: Collected by Pushshift
- April 2023 - January 2024: Collected by u/raiderbdev and u/Watchful1
- February 2024 onwards: Collected by Alina Park
Keywords:
Posts could not contain the word chemtrails.
Data used:
- Comments that contained at least one keyword
- Submissions that contained at least one keyword in the submission's selftext
- Submissions that contained at least one keyword in the title and had a selftext
- Comments whose parent submissions contained at least one keyword in the submission's selftext or title
Updates
This website will be updated once a month with data from up to 4 months prior, data availability permitting.
People
This project is built and maintained by Sidney Hough and Alina Park. If you would like to contribute, please email [email protected].