Further evidence that public interest in Global Warming is cooling has been unveiled by the science news website EurekAlert!, who have released their list of the top ten most read science articles this year. Climate change and global warming doesn’t feature on the list at all, nor on their list of top five most shared articles. (h/t Watts Up With That)
Health science dominated the list, with six of the ten articles being on health-related topics including reports on research into sleep, a possible HIV vaccine, and the benefits of green spaces on mental health. However, it was a report on the unintended consequences of disclosing public officials’ wages that topped the list, with 180,000 page-views in 2014 making it the most popular article on the site this year.
Two articles on the use of genome sequencing to identify new species also took slots in the top ten, whilst the list was rounded out by a report analysing arrest rates in the US. In total, the ten articles racked up 1.2 million views between them between January 1st and December 5th 2014.
EurekAlert! is a science-news service operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nonprofit scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. Founded in 1996, it is an editorially independent online news service focused on science, medicine and technology. This year EurekAlert! filed 25,672 news releases which were eligible to be included in the list; amongst them, a number reporting on climate change and the possible effects of a changing climate.
Three of the top ten most read articles also made it into the list of the top five most shared articles, which also featured an article on the benefits of eating dark chocolate, and the lack of association between video game violence and social violence. None of the article on either list had anything to do with climate change or global warming, suggesting that the public simply aren’t interested in the topics.
The lists therefore add weight to the growing sense that, for all the scaremongering on climate change, people simply aren’t buying it. Earlier this month Breitbart London reported on a poll of 6.5million people conducted by the UN which put climate change dead last on a list of 16 issues of most concern to people around the world. Only in westernised countries did it rank any higher, although nowhere did it make it more than half way up the list.
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