I was pondering the usage of the term "climate change" and how it seems to have taken over from "global warming" as a shorthand for the crise-du-jour. Is it really taking over, or have I just imagined it.
After searching around for a suitable tool to test the theory, I discovered that Google News now has an archive facility. This will let you do a search on a particular site and for a particular year. (If anyone knows of a better way to do this, do let me know. Google Trends won't do it because that's searches, not mentions on a site).
This is how things are at the BBC:
Which pretty much confirms what I'd thought. The growth in the BBC coverage is also startling. AGW has been a news issue for a long time now, so it's hard to come up with a rational explanation of these figures that is not conspiratorial.
Then, on the offchance, I thought I'd compare the growth of the total of the two terms in the BBC to all news organisations. This was quite interesting too:
You'll notice that the two lines are plotted on different vertical axes, but what it shows is that the two phrases were relatively more prevalent much sooner at the BBC than they were at other organisations.
So is this evidence of the BBC pushing an agenda? Perhaps. Probably, even. In order to prove it we would have to discount the possibility of a growth in the number of news organisations, or perhaps even the BBC getting having a relatively larger internet presence sooner than its competitors.
Gut feel says that this chart confirms my belief that the BBC has been acting as the publicity arm of the environmental movement.