Communicating climate change: how (not) to touch a cord with people and promote action

Hermine Penz

doi:10.1515/text-2020-0081

Abstract

Abstract Climate science has established human activity as the major cause of climate change. The successive reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have also provided future scenarios of the detrimental effect of rising temperatures. Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus, the voices of climate deniers are still given ample space in the media. Moreover, the urgency of the problem and the importance of taking action are difficult to communicate to the public. This paper analyses the communication strategies employed by climate scientists, climate deniers and climate activists to identify similarities and differences, in particular with regard to expressing (un)certainty. The data are media reports from major British and US newspapers, IPCC reports and the speeches of climate activists, in particular Greta Thunberg. The data are analysed by means of qualitative (eco)critical discourse analysis. The aim is to draw conclusions about how climate change could be communicated more effectively to the general public to promote action.

Highlights

Climate change has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time and has been hotly debated among various audiences
The fifth IPPC report has established very clearly that climate change is anthropogenic to a high degree
The findings of this study have demonstrated that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s well-intentioned attempt to use verbal uncertainty expressions has not been successful and may have resulted in a language which is too vague to promote action

Summary

Introduction

Climate change has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time and has been hotly debated among various audiences. Human activity has been established as the major cause of climate change, which means that there is widespread scientific consensus on the anthropogenic character of this phenomenon. Despite the ubiquity of climate change, communicating its consequences to different audiences has turned out to be a difficult undertaking. A problematic aspect has been the issue of uncertainty This relates both to the findings of climate science and the question of how uncertainty is communicated to various audiences. Uncertainty was related to the question of whether climate change is anthropogenic (i.e. caused by humans) or not (see Nerlich et al 2010). It has been demonstrated that in the US, media representations have tended to portray the results of climate science with a higher degree of uncertainty than scientific consensus would allow (Boykoff 2007)

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