Wednesday 3 October 2012

Buzz Words of Doom

WUWT has a graph showing the use of "correlation" and "causation" in Google Books from 1800 on. I did a similar search in Google Scholar back in February (don't remember exactly why...). I searched for "global warming" and "anthropogenic climate change", adding "acid rain" afterwards. Here's how often those phrases were used from the 1980s on.



Looks like "global warming" is not as popular a phrase as it used to be. Now, if you do something similar in Google Books, you get this:



(The quality of these snips is not great, but you get the drift. Note also that I've added "ozone layer" to the second graph. The Google Books graph ends in 2008, whereas that for Scholar ends in 2011.)
Acid rain hasn't really gone away, despite peaking in Google Scholar in the early 80s. But if you look at the articles that get thrown up, you see that their geographical coverage is different - they are now focused in places like China, for example.