website.net.nz

There was an interesting post on the Celcias blog about a huge surge in awareness of climate change a while back. I’ve been wondering whether this is a trend that will continue.

I’ve always been interested in how ideas spread, especially important ideas. And I’ve always been interested in ways of tracking how widely an idea is spreading over time.

It’s only a certain type of person who blogs so using the blogsphere as a measure of general consciousness is flawed. Nevertheless, there are a lot of bloggers out there, and when you look at what they are saying over a given period of time you can get a useful measure of how an idea is spreading.

So I thought I’d pop over to Technorati to see how often the term ‘climate change’ is being mentioned in the blogsphere. This handy little graph shows that massive surge talked about on Celcias. It doesn’t look like the increased interest was a permanent change but there is a definite trend.

It would be interesting to look at what was happening at the time of that big spike.

Here’s some related real time graphs.

Posts that contain "climate Change" per day for the last 30 days.

Posts that contain "global Warming" per day for the last 30 days.

Posts that contain "global Warming" And Greenpeace per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

There’s nothing better than seeing a big corporate fall hook line and sinker. And that’s just what Solid Energy have done for the Save Happy Valley Campaign (SHVC). The small grass roots conservation group have put out a report called the ‘Solid Energy Environment Report’ that is “a little more honest than usual”. It’s revealing, it’s funny and it’s cutting.

Here’s an extract :

This year solid energy successfully extracted more than 4.7 million tons of coal, contributing 10.3 million tonnes of climate changing carbon dioxide to the global atmosphere. we made progress with our mountain top removal project (despite significant delays), and used a legal loophole in the Court to continue driving an endemic New Zealand species to extinction…

The best the folks at solid energy could have hoped for was that the report wouldn’t get too much publicity and we wouldn’t notice … but instead they began publicising it themselves by trying to have it quashed in the court. Not only did they draw attention to the report’s existence but they failed.

The report can be downloaded from the Save Happy Valley website in two parts at high res but there is a more bandwidth friendly version posted on the NZ indymedia site