Analyzing Trends in Public Sentiment Regarding Climate Change Through Posts on X [formerly Twitter]

The purpose of this paper is to view how public sentiment regarding climate change has shifted over time and to identify any trends in opinion that could prove useful for future climate change and general sentiment analysis.Positive sentiment is defined as the post having a positive emotion while a negative sentiment is defined as a post having a negative emotion.The primary hypothesis was that the average sentiment would remain slightly negative over time (H1).This study analyzes the relationship of location, popularity metrics, and emojis to sentiment in posts from the social media platform X, formerly known as tweets on Twitter.The hypothesis for emojis' relationship to the sentiment of a post (H2) was that a post with an emoji is more likely to have a positive sentiment.This hypothesis was to determine if emojis can be used as a sentiment indicator in the future.For the locations, the prediction (H3) was that even in countries/groups, there would not be a consensus or similar sentiment.The results did not align with H1; instead of a continuous slightly negative view, the average remained neutral over the years 2015-2022.However, the results did confirm H2 by showing the sentiment of a post with an emoji tended to have a higher sentiment than a post without one.A "weighted popularity", which accounted for likes in addition to the original post's sentiment, was used to confirm the findings of average sentiment per year.The results regarding location show a distribution of sentiment that doesn't lean one way or another when close together, which aligns with the location-related hypothesis (H3).