Analysing Climate Change Arguments Using Subjective Logic

Climate experts have agreed that global warming is at least partially caused by certain human activities. Different from experts, this agreement has not reached all the public arena yet. That is, people have different views and therefore argue about climate change issues. We are interested in analysing people's arguments on global warming. The large number of conveyed arguments need somehow to be aggregated in order to have a top level view on what people believe. To build such collective opinion, we use subjective logic. Based on subjective reasoning we are able to assess the expectance that a debate topic be accepted by a given community or arguers. We collected arguments on climate change from three debates sites: Debatepedia, For and Against and Debate.org. We can analyse the differences between such communities. We use the consensus operator in subjective logic to aggregate similar opinions from distinct debate communities. Moreover, various debate topics can refer to the same issue but with different phases. We apply the affinity propagation algorithm to cluster the debates. Our approach for analysing people arguments can be applied in different domains, other than the one exemplified here, that is climate change.