The Copenhagen Climate Control Treaty

People who worry about the US losing its sovereignty got all excited about the Copenhagen climate control treaty in the middle of October. The negotiations had been going on for months. On October 22 The Washington Post reported that China was ready to work with the US to forge a treaty they could both work with. That may have precipitated some of the comments of the opponents -- though they do not mention China very frequently.

I decided to follow this stream because it seemed to be almost exclusively a 'right wing' communication stream. And sovereignty and the president selling out to world government is a good 'right wing' theme.

I used the phrase "Copenhagen treaty" because that seemed to be the collection of words being used in the messages. Adding more words just cut out messages that seemed to be the same stream of communication.

This is the Archivist figure for October 13 through October 24.

The big numbers are October 21, 22, and 23; after that it tails off quickly. It is down to zero on the 25th because I made the figure at 12:15 a.m. Not many tweets in the first few minutes. But it does look like it is going to be a seven day spike that might have been building on itself -- going viral fashion, but viral at a very low level. Would 'going viral' imply more retweets? or references that are not to media?

At 1:40 a.m. January 1, 2010 the number of messages that had been found was 8,113. The Archivist trendline is

The trendline begins well before the meeting in Copenhagen. It peaks several times before the meeting. Then the highest number of messages per day happens at the height of the meeting. After that the stream dies quickly. This started and remained largely a negative stream of messages with a strong emphasis on sovereignty.

The .txt file ready for reading by Excel is copenhagen treaty.txt.