Examining Climate Change And The Media

Scientists and politicians are increasingly using the language of risk to describe the climate change challenge. Some researchers have argued that stressing the 'risks' posed by climate change rather than the 'uncertainties' can create a more helpful context for policy makers and a stronger response from the public. However, understanding the concepts of risk and uncertainty - and how to communicate them - is a hotly debated issue. In this book, James Painter analyses how the international media present these and other narratives surrounding climate change. He focuses on the coverage of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of the melting ice of the Arctic Sea, and includes six countries: Australia, France, India, Norway, the UK and the USA.

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.

For many years, the objective of environmental campaigners was to push climate change on to the agenda of political leaders and to encourage media attention to the issue. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it appeared that their efforts had been spectacularly successful. Yet just at the moment when the campaigners’ goals were being achieved, it seemed that the idea of getting the issue into mainstream discussion had been mistaken all along; that the consensus-building approach produced little or no meaningful action. That is the problem of climate change as a ‘post-political’ issue, which is the subject of this book. Examining how climate change is communicated in politics, news media and celebrity culture, Climate Change and Post-Political Communication explores how the issue has been taken up by elites as potentially offering a sense of purpose or mission in the absence of political visions of the future, and considers the ways in which it provides a focus for much broader anxieties about a loss of modernist political agency and meaning. Drawing on a wide range of literature and case studies, and taking a critical and contextual approach to the analysis of climate change communication, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental studies, communication studies, and media and film studies.

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.

The volume provides a timely, state of the art collection of studies examining climate change communication in the era of digital media. The chapters focus on a broad range of topics covering various aspects of both practice and research in climate change communication, ranging from the use of online platforms, to blogs, and social networking sites. Climate change communication has increasingly moved into Internet-based forums, and this volume provides a comprehensive overview of research into Internet and climate change communication. The studies share valuable methodological insights in this relatively new field of research and shed light on the opportunities and challenges underlying the collection and analysis of online climate change-related data. This book was previously published as a special issue of Environmental Communication.

This book looks at the media’s coverage of Climate Change and investigates its role in representing the complex realities of climate uncertainties and its effects on communities and the environment. This book explores the socioeconomic and cultural understanding of climate issues and the influence of environment communication via the news and the public response to it. It also examines the position of the media as a facilitator between scientists, policy makers and the public. Drawing extensively from case studies, personal interviews, comparative analysis of international climate coverage and a close reading of newspaper reports and archives, the author studies the pattern and frequency of climate coverage in the Indian media and their outcomes. With a special focus on the Western Ghats, the book discusses the political rhetoric, policy parameters and events that trigger a debate about development over biodiversity crisis and environmental risks in India. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of environmental studies, especially Climate Change, media studies, public policy and South Asian studies, as well as conscientious citizens who deeply care for the environment.

This book reveals how journalists in the Global North and Global South mediate climate change by examining journalism and reporting in Australia and Bangladesh. This dual analysis presents a unique opportunity to examine the impacts of media and communication in two contrasting countries (in terms of economy, income and population size) which both face serious climate change challenges. In reporting on these challenges, journalism as a political, institutional, and cultural practice has a significant role to play. It is influential in building public knowledge and contributes to knowledge production and dialogue, however, the question of who gets to speak and who doesn’t, is a significant determinant of journalists’ capacity to establish authority and assign cultural meaning to realities. By measuring the visibility from presences and absences, the book explores the extent to which the influences are similar or different in the two countries, contrasting how journalists’ communication power conditions public thought on climate change. The investigation of climate communication across the North-South divide is especially urgent given the global commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and it is critical we gain a fuller understanding of the dynamics of climate communication in low-emitting, low-income countries as much as in the high emitters, high-income countries. This book contributes to this understanding and highlights the value of a dual analysis in being ably draw out parallels, as well as divergences, which will directly assist in developing cross-national strategies to help address the mounting challenge of climate change. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change and environmental journalism, as well as media and communication studies more broadly.