A few years ago, the servers in the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University were hacked and thousands of emails from the climate scientists working there were copied. The emails were anonymously uploaded onto various servers and subsequently delivered to the media. The timing was coincident with a major climate change policy meeting (the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen) and portions of text form the emails were selected so as to make it appear that the scientists were engaging in scientific misconduct. The story quickly gained traction in the international media. Multiple different independent investigations found no evidence for misconduct on the part of the scientists whose emails had been illegally accessed, but this process took many months. How do we study the interest in, and impact of, such events on the public's perception of climate science? 

My colleague Bill Anderegg and I have been using Google Trends to try to make sense of events and trends in climate science communication. The result is a new (open access) paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Effectively, Google Trends allows us to look at how the number of searches in Google for climate change related queries varies across space and time. A couple of ideas to take away from our results:

1) Public interest in climate change, as measured by the volume of searches for the issue, has decreased significantly since a peak in 2007. The evidence for serious anthropogenic climate change has only gotten worse during this time. 

2) The public searches for "global warming," not the more comprehensive "climate change." As a community, we need to use the search terms that are being engaged by the public.

3) Major climate communication events, positive or negative, generally have a very short half-life in the media. A few days at best. 

4) Google Trends is the harbinger of a new era for the study of effective science communication, in that it can provide open access to historical and real time information on public interest in a topic. It's a great complement to traditional survey methods. 

Ultimately, my hope is that our research serves as an example of how Google Trends can help improve the dialogue around climate change by providing insight into what the public is searching for information about, where they are, and when they are searching. 

Anderegg, W.L. and G.R. Goldsmith 2014. Public interest in climate change over the past decade and the effects of the 'climategate' media event. Environmental Research Letters 9, 054005.

Peel off the bark of your nearest pine tree, fasten it to a source of dirty water, and wait for the clean water to come out the other side. 

Providing a simple, cheap, and sustainable method for filtering dirty water is that simple, according to a new study published this week in PLoS ONE. The study demonstrates that a 2 cm long piece of branch with a 1 cm diameter can filter 99.9% of the E. coli out of a water sample and that each segment could be effective for a few liters a day. Not surprisingly, it needs to be fresh branch wood, not dried.

The plant's xylem, and more specifically the torus-margo pit membrane,  is responsible for all of the action. Xylem is the series of tubes that water travels through in a branch --- torus-margo pits are tiny closable valves between tubes. The interesting thing about the torus-margo pits is that they have the appearance of a spiderweb, with a pancake in the middle (the best description I can come up with...), and that spiderweb is where all of the E. coli is captured. Torus-margo pits serve a vital function in the plants, when there is not enough water the spiderweb flexes so that the pancake presses against the connection between the two tubes, effectively isolating one (empty) tube from another (full tube). It's very cool to consider another possible function, albeit totally unintended, for this anatomical feature. 

Boutilier et al. 2014. Water filtration using plant xylem. PLoS ONE 9(2): e89934.