Findings Are Based on Nearly 19 Million Publicly Available Tweets A study led by Stony Brook University political scientists and published in PNAS analyzed nearly 19 million publicly available tweets from 2019 to 2021, and they found consistently that as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths increased, fewer tweets about climate change occurred. Additionally, tweets about climate change during those periods are characterized by less fear, anger and negative sentiment on the issue. Oleg Smirnov, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and lead author, says that the data from their research illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the discussion on climate change on Twitter. He and co-author Pei-Hsun Hsieh, a PhD student in political science, adopted Weber's psychological theory of the "finite pool of worry," which suggests that people avoid dealing with multiple negative events at the same time. And their research results "support the finit
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