Global Public Interest in Climate Change: Seasonal and Geographical Patterns

This study investigates the characteristics of global public interest in key search terms related to climate and energy, based on data from Google Trends across three thematically distinct but interconnected groups of search phrases for the decade 1/2015-12/2024. Each group was carefully selected to capture different aspects of the environmental discourse. The first group consists of 'Sustainability', 'Climate Change', and 'Global Warming', which serve as umbrella concepts for many subtopics with climate policy and physics. The second group, 'Greenhouse Gases', 'CO2 Emissions' and 'Carbon Emissions' reflects a better understanding of the climate drivers. And the third group consists of 'Renewable Energy', 'Fossil Fuels', and 'Nuclear Energy' addressing the major debate over how societies should power themselves while transitioning to a sustainable future. The analysis of Google Trends time series for these keywords and for "all categories", "science" and "news", i) reveals that public interest follows a strong biannual seasonal cycle for all of these climate-related terms with the peaks taking place in spring and autumn months ii) enables the identification and interpretation of various spikes over time iii) identifies the countries with the highest relative search activity for each keyword iv) examines the correlations in searches between these search terms. The understanding of people's interest and perceptions can be useful for the design, announcement and implementation of environmental policies.