Between Truth and Meaning: Cultural Contexts of Climate Change Communication (K3 Kongress, Salzburg 26 Sep 2017) (original) (raw)
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(Still) Disagreeing About Climate Change: What Way Forward?
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 2015
Why does climate change continue to be a forceful idea which divides people? What does this tell us about science, about culture and about the future? Despite disagreement, how might the idea of climate change nevertheless be used creatively? In this essay I develop my investigation of these questions using four lines of argument. First, the future risks associated with human-caused climate change are severely underdetermined by science. Scientific predictions of future climates are poorly constrained; even more so the consequences of such climates for evolving human socio-technological and natural ecosystems. Second, I argue that to act politically in the world people have to pass judgements on the facts of science; facts do not speak for themselves. Third, because these judgements are different, the strategic goals of policy interventions developed in response to risks associated with future climate change are inevitably multiple and conflicting. Finally, reconciling and achieving diverse goals requires political contestation. ‘Moving forward’ on climate change then becomes a task of investing in the discursive and procedural pre-conditions for an agonistic politics to work constructively, to enable ways of implementing policies when people disagree.
Communication plays a fundamental role in shaping our understanding of complex issues such as climate change. Too often scientists and journalists complain that the public does not fully comprehend climate change as they cannot see it. Adhering to calls for a need to propel away from media representations of climate change to a focus on more case-specific research, this Master Thesis analyses the aspect of visualisation within climate change communication with a focus on a contemporary example, the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), as a case-specific study. EIS give a visual voice to our planets changing eco-systems, where an emphasis is placed on visually documenting the adverse effects climate change has on the planets glaciers, through conventional photography and time-lapse photography. Adhering to the need for further studies of visual representations towards the environment this thesis deploys an image analysis to investigate how meaning is framed through the EIS’s photographs and time-lapse videos. A collective reading between the photographs and their accompanying written captions highlighted contradictive frames of beauty and uncertainty. Additionally, as climate change is predominately seen as an abstract entity, a metaphor analysis was also applied to open further frames of thought into more comprehensible understandings. Integrating both still images and moving images into the study provided different results. Time-lapse videos were analysed to open up new developments of seeing and to extract potential frames of unfolding narratives, perspective and time.
Climate change is, arguably, the global threat of the twenty-first century (IPCC, 2014a, 2014b). Therefore, humanity is called to action. All action starts with perception, cognition, emotion, communication. In short, it starts with framing (e.g. Bilandzic, Kalch & Soetgen, 2017). However, depending on the frame (e.g. ‘economic challenge frame’ versus ‘human rights frame’), other causes and problems are foregrounded, other ethical considerations come to the fore, other actions become likely, feasible or even indispensable (Entman, 1993, 2004). As surveys (e.g. Eurobarometer, 2014) have shown that people’s engagement and willingness to act are at a low ebb, researchers have called for more effective types of frames which are better able to encourage the public to think and act in ‘favourable ways’ (e.g. Lakoff, 2010). In this dissertation, however, I will criticize this dominant ‘anthropocentric’ type of framing for ‘depoliticizing’ the climate debate (e.g. Pepermans, 2015): They approach the audience as passive consumers, who must be ‘steered’ towards the so-called ‘rational consensus’. However, this view mainly supports and reproduces the interests of small groups of elites. Put differently, they fail to fundamentally criticize the development thinking of the capitalist-liberalist project (Brulle, 2010). Nevertheless, only few researchers recognize the hegemonic colour of their frames (e.g. Maeseele, 2010). This may, at least partly, be due to the ways in which framing and frames are often conceptualized and operationalized. For instance, frames are often separated from their underlying argumentations and, thus, ideological interests. Also, the visual and verbal modes are usually separated, while the full – and often subtle, ideological – meanings of a frame can only be found in the interaction of both modes (e.g. Coleman, 2010). Furthermore, many researchers do not allow (their) hegemonic views to interact with alternative perspectives, which are more likely to appear in the context of, among others, (progressive) alternative media. I will use the ‘machine’ metaphor (Verhagen, 2008) – clustering features like decontextualization, hierarchy, unilateralism, quantity – to define both the anthropocentric character of the dominant (sub)frames as well as the dominant framing (theories, ) methods and empirical applications. Accordingly, I will argue that both the climate and the academic (framing) debate need politicization in order to go beyond the (hegemonic) consensus view. Citizens from all kinds of backgrounds must be allowed to interact and actively participate in climate discussions. They may collectively help to instigate fundamental change, questioning the hegemonic perspectives and providing alternatives in the interest of the whole ecological system. I will connect this type of framing to a biocentric worldview, which has the ‘organism’ as a pivotal metaphor (e.g. Verhagen, 2008). The features that characterize the organism – debate, openness, interaction, inclusiveness, equality, complexity, contextualization – may also constitute a guiding line for the ways in which the framing (concept, ) method and empirical application may be approached and operationalized. Firstly, in an attempt to approach framing in a more ‘organic’ way, I will present a multi-level and multimodal framing analysis toolkit, drawing on earlier proposals and a wide range of insights from backgrounds like critical discourse analysis, (eco)linguistics or photography and film studies. Each of the levels will deal with one of the functions or workings of frames, while the model will also shed more light on the various ways in which the visual and verbal modes may elaborate, enhance or extend each other. I will, in particular, try to contribute to the further development of multimodal reasoning devices and salience enhancing devices: Both issues are not – or only lightly – touched upon by most other (empirical) framing studies. As such – operationalizing the presented theoretical views on framing – this study may help to fill a (methodological) gap in the framing literature. This methodological toolkit will be tested and applied on a corpus of 1.256 climate news articles published in three mainstream newspapers (De Standaard (broadsheet, centrist), De Morgen (broadsheet, leftist) and Het Laatste Nieuws (popular, liberal roots)) and two progressive alternative outlets (the online outlet DeWereldMorgen and the news website of the magazine MO*) in Flanders. This empirical application will allow to propose and discuss an extensive set of five climate change frames, ten ideologically coloured subframes and two masterframes which, I believe, may help to illustrate and make tangible the hegemonic struggles in the context of frames (Carragee & Roefs, 2004). Besides, I will show how the Biocentric Subframes are more likely to engage a broader audience – employing strategies such as deconstruction-reconstruction, global awareness, collective responsibility, contextualized conflict or resonant values – without depoliticizing the debate. A brief quantitative discussion will highlight the prevalence of the various types of (sub)frames across the media outlets, particularly the mainstream and alternative outlets. Finally, two case studies will discuss the Environmental Justice and Cycles of Nature Frames in more detail, illustrating how exactly (sub)frames take shape in multimodal texts and how the framing analysis toolkit may help to excavate the underlying ideological struggles among anthropocentric and biocentric worldviews. The differential approaches to and operationalizations of justice – a key concept in the climate discussion – will be dealt with in greater depth. Finally, I will transfer the ‘machine-organism’ dualism to the context of frame-building. Directly connecting journalist frames and the influences that affect the decision-making with the climate change frames in news texts, I will attempt to (partly) trace the Anthropocentric and Biocentric Subframes throughout the framing process. This is important, as insights into the origin of frames may help us to better grasp the (ideological / hegemonic) implications and potential meanings of frames. The multi-method approach will combine interviews with 26 ‘climate journalists’ with a framing analysis of 114 climate change articles produced by the reporters. Presenting mainstream newsrooms as ‘machines’ and alternative newsrooms as ‘organisms’, I will empirically illustrate and explicate the thesis that mainstream media are more likely to depoliticize the debate while (progressive) alternative media are more inclined to politicize it. Based on these findings, the dissertation will conclude by providing six points of advice which may help all communicators – working in academia, journalism, non-profit, politics or society at large – to evolve towards a more organic and constructive type of communication: modesty, transparency, inclusiveness and interaction, contextualization, deconstruction-reconstruction, quality over quantity.
Mass Media Roles in Climate Change Mitigation
Handbook of Climate Change Mitigation, 2012
News media portrayals of climate change have strongly influenced personal and global efforts to mitigate it through news production, individual media consumption, and personal engagement. This chapter explores the media framing of mitigation strategies, including the effects of media routines, factors that drive news coverage, the influences of claims-makers, scientists, and other information sources, the role of scientific literacy in interpreting climate change stories, and specific messages that mobilize action or paralysis. It also examines how journalists often explain complex climate science and legitimize sources, how audiences process competing messages about scientific uncertainty, how climate stories compete with other issues for public attention, how large-scale economic and political factors shape news production, and how the media can engage public audiences in climate change issues.
Foreword for "The role of language in the climate change debate" (ed. Kjersti Flottum)
In March 2015 the BBC screened a 90 minute TV documentary titled 'Climate Change by Numbers'. The programme aimed to improve public understanding of climate change by focusing on " just three key numbers that clarify all the important questions about climate change ". The three numbers were 0.85 (the degrees Celsius of warming the planet has undergone since 1880), 95 (the percent confidence climate scientists have that at least half this warming is human-caused) and 1,000,000,000,000 (tonnes of carbon it is estimated humans can burn to avoid 'dangerous climate change'). But there are other languages beyond numbers and mathematics that matter for public debates about climate change. Understanding the public meanings of climate change, and therefore the basis for Ban Ki-Moon’s demanded “action”, requires more than just numbers or scientific knowledge. Studying the ways in which climate change is talked and written about through semantic, visual and embodied languages, and in different vernaculars, is necessary if the multiple meanings of climate change are to be excavated. And only through the construction and articulation of meaning is personal and collective political action on climate change possible. Science or numbers alone is never enough.
This thesis employs Hedlund-de Witt’s (e.g. 2012) Integrative Worldviews Framework as an interpretative lens to explore the ways in which diverse ontological, epistemological and axiological assumptions about the role and nature of ‘nature’ and human agency can be interpreted from ‘geoengineering’ discourse. It does so through an opportunistic case study of the 2012 Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation’s ocean fertilization project. The HSRC case study, anchored in notions of place and identity, marks a novel entry point into social research on geoengineering and facilitates a more situated engagement with geoengineering in keeping with the traditions and tools of ethnography and geography. Through an ‘informed grounded theory’ approach to analysis of the case-study discourse, bolstered by an interpretivist application of Q-Methodology, this thesis develops 7 issue-frames and 3 Qfactors that invoke different interpretations about what it means to be human, about the ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ quality of technological mediation of the environment and about how knowledge gains legitimacy. This thesis suggests that ‘geoengineering’ will always be performed and expressed through unique ‘surface contents’ and contextually specific meanings. However, interpretative resources described in relation to a range of other geoengineering proposals and through more abstract entry points into thinking about geoengineering also find salience through the study frames. ‘Geoengineering’ in Haida Gwaii connects with wider cultural meanings and literatures that consider the human relationship with nature. Furthermore, the study factors are suggested to have some interpretative overlap with ideal-typical ‘worldview’ heuristics described in earlier literatures that have sought to describe dominant currents of cultural meaning in contemporary Western society. These factors therefore may serve as useful orienting heuristics for conceptualising general homologies of deeper, shared forms of reasoning about the role and nature of ‘nature’ and human agency shaping wider public contestation about geoengineering. Such ‘ecological worldview’ heuristics might help facilitate greater reflexivity in decision-making, but their limitations must remain at the heart of their application. Further research is needed to establish their usefulness for other geoengineering technologies and in other cultural contexts.
Handbook of Climate change Communications, 2017
The aim of this paper is to extend current research on climate change communication by zoning in on communication about societal responses to climate change or Low Carbon Transition (LCT). Specifically, it contributes to thinking about communication strategies to foster public discussion about reducing carbon emissions. To do so, the research examines how news media represent LCT and thus act as resources for public talk about tackling climate change. This paper argues news media representations of LCT offer essential insights about the range of processes for LCT that are being made publically available and are therefore highly significant in terms of building carbon literacy and encouraging public conversations about carbon reduction activity. In particular, it highlights why communications strategies for developing climate 'smart' publics in response to COP21 must consider the implications of how news media normalise LCT as a local, social issue. Drawing on an Irish case study, this research presents a novel method for analysing press representations of LCT and shows that press treatment constrains carbon literacy by deploying a limited range of topics and failing to socially (re)contextualise the issues. The paper concludes by offering insights for communication strategies aimed at building carbon literacy: it shows how broadening the resources for public talk about LCT and thus fostering public discussion about the lived experience of climate change can contribute to public engagement with climate change.