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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.