Correction: The original version of this post said the scientist got 31.5 million followers as a result of Obama’s tweet. I got that wrong. He potentially got that many readers for his study because that’s how many followers Obama has. Sorry. The researcher did get worldwide attention.
That tweet, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, which went to 31,541,507 people, was about a study by Australian climate change researcher John Cook on Twitter.
Cook, a fellow at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute and founder of the website skepticalscience.com, had led a team of researchers who reviewed scientific papers about climate change. The peer-reviewed survey, published by Fairfax Media, concluded that more than 97 per cent of researchers on climate change endorsed the view that humans are to blame for global warming, the Morning Herald said. Cook was besieged by requests for interviews after the tweet.
Cook was quoted as saying:
It was pretty cool news. It was out of our expectations.