Australian Attention to Climate Change Following Extreme Weather Events, 2008-2020

A dataset analyzing national attention to climate change using the Google Trends search intensity index for the terms 'climate change' and 'global warming'. The data is structured at the state-month-year level for Australia between 2008 and 2020, following extreme weather events identified via the Australian Disaster Resilience Knowledge Hub. It was created by Christopher Crellin and is available under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Modeling public attention shifts based on search intensity following extreme weather events.
• Comparing the impact of different types of extreme weather events on climate change discourse.
• Analyzing temporal and state-level variations in climate change concern in Australia.

Strengths

• Data covers a 13-year time range from 2008 through 2020.
• Uses a defined proxy (Google Trends Intensity Index) for measuring public attention.
• Applies a difference-in-identification strategy to analyze attention following events.
• File size is 1.4 MB, indicating a manageable download.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias inherent to the Google Trends platform and Australian focus.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Regression of Google Trends search intensity index against extreme weather events from the Australian Disaster Resilience Knowledge Hub.

Time Range

2008 through 2020

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-03 08:05:36; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australia, at the state level