Finite pool of worry and emotions in climate change tweets during COVID-19

Whether the COVID-19 pandemic diverted public attention away from the issue of climate change is a topic that divided scholars in recent years. Two competing theories have emerged: the ‘finite pool of worry’, which asserts that concerns over the pandemic have overshadowed those for climate change, and the ‘finite pool of attention’, which argues that although attention to climate change has waned, worry has remained steady or even intensified – in line with affect generalization theory. Survey research appears to support the latter hypothesis more strongly. In this study, we investigate this theoretical discourse and revisit these conclusions by conducting an emotional content analysis on a novel dataset of nearly 24 million Twitter posts related to climate change from 2018 to 2022. Employing three lexicons—LIWC, NRC Lex, and VADER—we find that climate change tweets exhibit a decline in expressions of fear, anxiety, and other negative emotions concurrent with COVID-19 surges. Our daily-level analysis incorporates controls such as media coverage of climate change, the occurrence of climate-related disasters like hurricanes and wildfires, and the impact of major political events, including the 2020 presidential election. The negative association between COVID-19 severity and climate change worry was strongest in 2020, weakening progressively in 2021 and 2022.