Climate Change Media Culture

The acceleration of global climate change creates a nexus for the examination of power, political rhetoric, science communication, and sustainable development. This book takes an international view of twenty first century environmental communication to critically explore mediated expressions of climate change.

Focusing on cultural values and norms as they are translated into politics and policy outcomes, this book presents a unique contribution in combining research from varied disciplines and from both the developed and developing world. This collection draws from multiple perspectives to present an overview of the knowledge related to our current understanding of climate change politics and culture. It is divided into four sections – Culture and Values, Communication and Media, Politics and Policy, and Future Directions in Climate Politics Scholarship – each followed by a commentary from a key expert in the field. The book includes analysis of the challenges and opportunities for establishing successful communication on climate change among scientists, the media, policy-makers, and activists. With an emphasis on the interrelation between social, cultural, and political aspects of climate change communication, this volume should be of interest to students and scholars of climate change, environment studies, environmental policy, communication, cultural studies, media studies, politics, sociology.

Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This brief examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Synthesizing evidence from sociology, psychology, and political science, Andrew J. Hoffman lays bare the opposing cultural lenses through which science is interpreted. He then extracts lessons from major cultural shifts in the past to engender a better understanding of the problem and motivate the public to take action. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate makes a powerful case for a more scientifically literate public, a more socially engaged scientific community, and a more thoughtful mode of public discourse.

This book is a broad and detailed case study of how journalists in more than 20 countries worldwide covered the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment (AR5) reports on the state of scientific knowledge relevant to climate change. Journalism, it demonstrates, is a key element in the transnational communication infrastructure of climate politics. It examines variations of coverage in different countries and locations all over the world. It looks at how IPCC scientists review the role of media, reflects on how media relate to decision-making structures and cultures, analyzes how key journalists reflect on the challenges of covering climate change, and shows how the message of IPCC was distributed in the global networks of social media.

Mediating Climate Change explores how practices of mediation and visualisation shape how we think about, address and act upon climate change. Through historical and contemporary case studies drawn from science, media, politics and culture, Doyle identifies the representational problems climate change poses for public and political debate. She explores how climate change can be made more meaningful and calls for a more nuanced understanding of human-environmental relations.

This edited collection addresses climate change journalism from the perspective of temporality, showcasing how various time scales—from geology, meteorology, politics, journalism, and lived cultures—interact with journalism around the world. Analyzing the meetings of and schisms between various temporalities as they emerge from reporting on climate change globally, Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time asks how climate change as a temporal process gets inscribed within the temporalities of journalism. The overarching question of climate change journalism and its relationship to temporality is considered through the themes of environmental justice and slow violence, editorial interventions, ecological loss, and political and religious contexts, which are in turn explored through a selection of case studies from the US, France, Thailand, Brazil, Australia, Spain, Mexico, Canada, and the UK. This is an insightful resource for students and scholars in the fields of journalism, media studies, environmental communication, and communications generally.

Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives recognizes that climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is also a question of political and communicative capacity. This book enquires into which approaches to journalism, as a particularly important form of public communication, can best enable humanity to productively address climate crisis. The book combines selective overviews of previous research, normative enquiry (what should journalism be doing?) and original empirical case studies of environmental communication and media coverage in Australia and Canada. Bringing together perspectives from the fields of environmental communication and journalism studies, the authors argue for forms of journalism that can encourage public engagement and mobilization to challenge the powerful interests vested in a high-carbon economy – ‘facilitative’ and ‘radical’ roles particularly well-suited to alternative media and alternative journalism. Ultimately, the book argues for a fundamental rethinking of relationships between journalism, publics, democracy and climate crisis. This book will interest researchers, students and activists in environmental politics, social movements and the media.