Contact: [email protected]

Based on a University of Michigan analysis of 200,000 Twitter posts between 2012 and 2022, people are very good at identifying peak pollen season, indicated by a large volume of tweets about pollen at the same times as pollen counts hit their highest numbers. Another finding is that more liberal users were more likely than conservative users to correlate shifting pollen patterns over the years with climate change. 

Yiluan Song, a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society (MIDAS) and the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), is lead author of the report, and SEAS Associate Professor Kai Zhu is a senior author.

“We already know that people’s political beliefs shape how they think about climate change—that’s been shown in many studies. But what’s new here is that more and more people are struggling with pollen allergies,” said Zhu. “When people feel the impact of pollen in their own lives—sneezing more or cleaning pollen off their cars—it becomes personal. That experience can help connect the dots to climate change, which can feel abstract or distant. Instead of talking about a degree or two of global warming, we can focus on things people face directly in their daily lives.”

Despite this gap, the research team says that there are opportunities to communicate the real-world impacts of climate change. 

The study’s other U-M authors included Nathan Fox, an AI scientist with MIDAS; Derek Van Berkel, an associate professor at SEAS; and Arun Agrawal, an emeritus professor at SEAS. Adam Millard-Ball, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was another key contributor.

Read the full press release on the Michigan News website.

Study: Political ideology and scientific communication shape human perceptions of pollen seasons (DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf386)