Bad weather fuels negative tweets, finds study

Bad weather is not just bad for mood but it even generates plenty of negative tweets. A study has found that weather influences what we share on Twitter. Negative tweets go dramatical up when it’s too hot, too cold or too much rain.

The study is also a warning on what climate change means for mental health, a much less-talked-about problem arising out of extreme weather conditions.

Kelton Minor, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University, studied the lexical content of 7.7 billion tweets from 190 countries and over 43,000 unique counties between 2015 and 2021. Minor compared tweets sent out during extreme weather events like heavy rainfall or heat waves with those during normal weather from the same locations.

The study found that tweets during extreme weather conditions were noticeably more negative than the ones made when the weather was normal. It linked nearly 8 billion tweets from every country with weather data from 2015- 21.

It was found that tweets during the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave in North America and extreme rainfall in western Europe during the same period amplified negative sentiment "and reduced positive sentiment by amounts far greater than the historical average heatwave and extreme precipitation effects observed between 2015 and 2020."

"Climate change is increasing the frequency of heat and precipitation extremes that span across county, regional and country borders, posing diverse risks to mental well-being on a planetary scale," the study says.

To ascertain sentiment accurately, the study used an online tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count.

The report is an addendum to a previous study conducted on climate change and its negative impact on mental health.

"Climate-related exposures can harm individuals by directly disrupting the environment they live in and also produce indirect lingering psychological distress through many pathways," the previous study had concluded.