An analysis of the frequency of the term

This graphic captures the percent of posts in blogtopia that mention a particular topic. I plotted “peak oil” v. “global warming” v. “climate change” in this graph over the past six months. “Peak oil” is the bottom blue line, meaning that on average, one one-hundredth of 1% of all blog posts mentioned “peak oil”…and “peak oil” was mentioned about 15 times less than “global warming” at its peak, but only about four times more at baselines. (If you want to do your own or another comparison, go to blogpulse).

The massive imbalance between peak oil and the other two topics rather shocked me…but it does remind/indicate to me how little PO gets talked about in relative terms. (I also do not mean to imply that these two subject matters are adversaries, if only for the “oxygen” of effort of discussion in the blogosphere, in fact, I perceive the two problem sets as quite complimentary.)

One thing you can do with the blogpulse tool is to click on the graph (when it’s on the blogpulse page, not in this copy) and find out what are the drivers of these discussions. The two latest spikes for the global warming/climate change discussions were the result of discussions of G8/Kyoto and a bit on the US energy bill…but even after those discussions, the graphs returned to their baseline for all terms.

Even more disconcerting is this graph of just “peak oil”…

More pictures and handwringing after the jump at The Oil Drum.