From causes to consequences, from chat to crisis. The different climate changes of science and Wikipedia

Abstract

Understanding how society reacts to climate change means understanding how different societal subsystems approach the challenge. With the help of a heuristic of systems theory two subsystems of society – science and mass media – are compared with respect to communications about climate change over the last 20 years. With text mining methods metadata of documents from two databases – OpenAlex and Wikipedia – are generated, analyzed, and visualized. We find substantial differences as well as similarities in the social, factual, and temporal dimensions. While Wikipedia shows a much greater variety of concrete organizations, social movements, media outlets, and persons, science is more concerned with abstract interrelations of human action. In both systems, there is a shift in attention from describing the very phenomenon to questioning how to deal with this fact. This demonstrates for science a discursive shift from causes to consequences and for mass media a shift from chat to crisis. Science shows an ongoing growth process, while the attention of mass media appears cyclical.