Every year, thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles about climate and energy are published, and of those thousands, there are those which capture the attention of journalists and bloggers, and get shared across the internet. In 2022, despite heavy competition from war, death and economics, climate change and energy still commanded quite a bit of attention.
Here are the top ten most referenced and shared climate studies of 2022, as determined by Altmetric, an organization that scores academic papers according to their online mentions.
While studies related to the coronavirus dominated the list overall, climate research earned the highest Altmetric scores yet, with the top climate study receiving more than 10,000 Twitter mentions from more than 9,000 accounts, which collectively have almost 39 million followers. This paper, “Climate change increases cross-species viral transmission risk”, was published in the journal Nature in April. The other studies in the top ten included:
- Climate change tipping points
- The astonishing speed of Arctic warming
- The Greenland ice sheet and sea level rise
- Climate change and human disease pathogens
- Catastrophic scenarios in the climate endgame
- Record-setting ocean warming
- The Lancet‘s annual countdown in health and climate change
- The North American megadrought that may be the worst in 1,.200 years
- The loss of Amazon rainforest resilience over the past 20 years
The top journals to publish these papers were Nature Climate Change, Nature and Science.
While the findings may be alarming, it’s definitely a positive step that these serious assessments of various aspects of climate change have gained so much attention in our short attention span world.
You can read more about this on the Carbon Brief website here.
