Kieran Mulvaney's blog

If you've been reading our Tide Reports or our blog posts, the you've almost certainly seen graphs like this:

And this:

And even some pie charts like this:

These are the results of taking a lot of data from the wonderful world of the Interwebs, feed it into a Machine That Goes Ping AKA Radian6, and watching what it spits out. In fact, we think that the way in which we constantly monitor online social conversations about ocean issues, and then crunch the numbers and distil them into a few lines on a graph or slices in a pie chart, is one of the more important things we do at Upwell. So we thought we'd take a few minutes to explain our 'big listening' methodology.

First, Make Some Tea ...

Each morning as the tea is brewing, we fire up a program called Radian6, which we use to search for all online mentions of a number of different topic profiles. (Think of Radian6 as Google on steroids. A lot of steroids. But without the occasional eruptions of rage.) Radian6 users create their own topic profiles to monitor, and the ones that we have established so far are:

• MPAs
• Overfishing / Sustainable Seafood
• Cetaceans
• Tuna
• Gulf of Mexico
• Ocean Acidification
• Sharks

and a more general catch-all category which we dub, with starling originality,

• Ocean

Additionally, we can and do create more narrowly-focused search areas to focus on specific issues or breaking news - for example, the International Coral Reef Symposium, or the International Whaling Commission. 

Start Broad ...

Within those topic profiles, we create keyword groups, and for most of the topics we cover, those keywords are relatively straightforward and predictable. When it comes to sharks, however, we have had to be more creative, because a) of all the ocean-themed topics we monitor online, sharks are by some distance the most popular; and b) because the shark 'brand' is spread throughout culture: there are shark-named products, shark-named sports teams, and shark idioms.

Graph showing sea level rise along North Carolina coast, adapted from Kemp et al, via Skeptical Science

"From Cape Hatteras, N.C. to just north of Boston, sea levels are rising much faster than they are around the globe," reports Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press:

Along the region, the Atlantic Ocean is rising at an annual rate three times to four times faster than the global average since 1990 ... It's not just a faster rate, but at a faster pace, like a car on a highway "jamming on the accelerator," said the study's lead author, Asbury Sallenger Jr., an oceanographer at the [United States Geological Survey] ... By 2100, scientists and computer models estimate that sea levels globally could rise as much as 3.3 feet. The accelerated rate along the East Coast could add about 8 inches to 11 inches more, Sallenger said. "Where that kind of thing becomes important is during a storm," Sallenger said. That's when it can damage buildings and erode coastlines."

Any pragmatic, concerned local authorities along the eastern seaboard would be looking to prepare for the worst-case-scenario, surely? Wellll, not so much, especially in North Carolina.

The ongoing discussion in the Tar Heel State to legislate away sea-level rise has been well documented over the past couple of weeks (Cliff Notes version: Some state lawmakers want to ban coastal planners from using scientific models that show accelerated rises in sea level), and has even been the target of primetime televised mirth:

At least the state House last week rejected a bill passed by the Senate, which would have forbidden the use of accelerated sea-level rise predictions in coastal planning. Not that the story is necessarily over: some lawmakers countered that they might instead float the idea of a five-year moratorium, rather than an outright ban, pending a review of the available science. 

It is to the misfortune of the wish-it-all-away members of the North Carolina legislature that