Do controversies about the trustworthiness of climate science lead to greater levels of climate skepticism? A new study turns to people’s internet searches to try and find out.

In 2009, a hacker attained emails between scientists at the University of East Anglia. Subsequent reports claimed the email’s contents undermined the trustworthiness of climate science, and the episode became high profile enough to warrant its own moniker: climategate. A few months later, the discovery a data error regarding Himalayan glacier melt in a major UN report catalysed similar headlines.

A study published Environmental Research Letters this week shows such controversies can cause a brief spike in public interest, but the attention quickly fizzles out. So does that mean climategate’s impact on skepticism was only fleeting, as some reports suggest? A closer look at the data suggests it’s not so clear cut.

Search trends

The researchers looked at Google searches around the time of the controversies.They found searches for “global warming” (the black line on the graph below) and “global warming hoax” (the blue line) both increased when the stories broke.

The impact of climategate was notably stronger than the effect of the Himalayan glaciers story, the researchers say – though the latter also caused a small spike.

It’s not just negative stories that got people Googling. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases a series of reports on the state of climate science every six or seven years. Searches for “global warming” spiked around the reports’ releases, the researchers found. The release of Al Gore’s film on the scientific basis of climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, also had an impact.

Not all climate-related news had an impact on the searches, however. For instance, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy – which some news stories attributed to climate change, however problematically – didn’t lead to more searches, the paper notes. That could be because the links between big weather events and climate change are unclear. Or it could be because people searched directly for hurricanes rather than climate change, the researchers say.

Despite the spikes, the data suggests the public’s attention doesn’t last. The researchers found the number of searches dropped significantly within a matter of weeks after big events. In fact, they tended to drop to lower levels than before.

That follows a general downward trend in searches for climate change information since 2007, the researchers say.

That might be because people are bypassing Google to find information on climate change (we’re sure you’ve all got Carbon Brief bookmarked by now). Or it could be because people are simply less interested in exploring contrasting views as they become more exposed to the science.

Either way, the paper notes a “strong decline in public attention to climate change” only occasionally punctuated by controversies.

Interpreting data

So does the research show controversies challenging climate science only had a fleeting impact on climate skepticism? Not really.

In an email exchange with Carbon Brief, one author, Dr Greg Goldsmith, said people need to be “very careful … about not interpreting the particular motivations for people to search for information based on this type of data”.

For starters, it’s hard to know how internet searches equate to attitudes. The article itself is clear the data “does not provide insight into changes in opinion that might have occurred” as a result of climategate or the Himalayan glacier story.

Likewise, it’s tough to establish whether people searching for information on an alleged hoax are looking for evidence of wrongdoing or simply some context. For instance, rebuttal website Skeptical Science is the fifth listing for a “climategate” search (when we try, anyway).

Perhaps the paper’s strongest message is public interest – in the form of Google searches – tends to follow big media moments, and attention to climate change is no different. A quick analysis of search patterns for the “Somerset floods” or “Ukraine” shows similar spikes and tail-offs once the media moves on. Other studies have shown how big media moments – like the IPCC reports – can stimulate social media activity, too.

In conclusion: When it comes to stimulating public interest media moments work a charm, though attention may be fleeting. But to get a deeper understanding of the impact of controversies on public perceptions, the researchers acknowledge you’ll probably have to look beyond Google trends.