From “Climate Change” to “Climate Crisis”?

Climate change is one of the core challenges of humankind – and legacy news media continue to be important sources of information about the issue for many people around the globe. Accordingly, how news media portray climate change is important for public awareness and perceptions of the issue. The labeling of the topic – which may rely on more neutral terms like “climate change” or “global warming” or more alarming terms like “climate crisis”, “climate emergency” or “global heating” – is an important facet in this respect. In step with the increasing importance of the issue, outlets such as the British “Guardian” have switched to these more urgent terms in their coverage of climate change. But it is unclear, so far, how pronounced this switch is, and which media have followed suit. Relying on an automated content analysis of climate change coverage from 16 news outlets in eight countries around the world between 1996 and 2021 (N = 89,887), our study investigates the use and proliferation of “climate change compounds” such as “climate crisis”, “global heating”, or “global warming” used to describe the phenomenon. We find that news media still use neutral terms – especially “climate change” – more often than alarming labels. However, the use of the latter has increased strongly since 2019, presumably due to country-specific events and changes in editorial guidelines of national outlets

Communicating environmental sustainability within New Zealand news media and Wellington educational institutions A 60-credit Journalism Project presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Journalism at Massey University

As a country, New Zealand produces only about 0.17 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, per person, New Zealand is the fourth-highest emissions contributor globally (Sims, 2015). With the growing need to change lifestyle habits in order to lower emissions and reduce future costs involved with adapting to climate change impacts, it seems essential the public be well-informed and resourced in order to face the future. In order to meet the New Zealand Government’s environmentally-driven goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent below the 2005 levels by 2030, the overall population needs to practise environmentally sustainable lifestyles around the country. This research aimed to explore how environmental sustainability is communicated by key influencers in New Zealand, educational institutions and news media. This is illustrated through a long-form journalism article on how educational institutions in Wellington are helping young people develop environmentally sustainable life-practices crucial to their future resilience and survival. This study is informed by interviews to help understand how a select number of educational institutions of various levels integrate environmental sustainability in their classroom; how this topic is communicated to students; and how New Zealand government agencies and local authorities support such efforts in educational institutions. Through interviews with New Zealand environment reporters and a critical analysis of environment reporting, this research discusses the power the media has in terms of climate change action and how journalists in New Zealand have coped with the challenge of covering environment in the context of a restructuring news industry. Without a strong presence of information-sharing through the education system and news media, New Zealand may not be ready to face the impacts of climate change

Climate Change Frames and Emotional Responses on Reddit

Climate change remains a highly polarized topic in the United States. Research suggests that the divide in climate change beliefs is partly a result of news media’s representation of select aspects of the problem, or framing. Frames influence individuals’ attitudes, emotions, and behaviors towards climate change. Overwhelming representation of certain climate change frames has led to a lack of emotional connection to the issue, resulting in inaction or dismissal. Climate change researchers have investigated the presence and effects of frames on both news media and select social media sites, particularly Twitter. However, little research has investigated the climate change conversation on other social media sites, such as Reddit. Reddit is a community-based social media site whose users represent a unique demographic in the United States. Reddit users rely heavily on Reddit for news and are highly engaged with the site. Unlike Twitter, Reddit does not have a small character limit on posts, allowing for longer conversation and a potential for greater peer influence. Using both human coders and computer-aided textual analysis, this thesis investigated which climate change frames are the most popular on Reddit and which emotions appear most frequently in the discussion sections of those posts. This study sampled posts from six subreddits that represent a range of climate change stances. The data found that political/ideological struggle was the most common frame and that anger was the most expressed emotion. Further results and implications are discussed

Images of extreme weather: symbolising human responses to climate change

Extreme weather events have been increasingly in the news, accompanied by images. At the end of 2011, when such reports were ever present, the International Panel on Climate Change published a draft report on extreme weather and climate change adaptation. This report itself was covered in the news and illustrated with images. Some of these depicted ‘extreme weather’, in particular with relation to floods, droughts and heat waves, hurricanes and ice/sea-level rise. For this article, these images were studied using visual thematic analysis, with a focus on examining the way they may symbolise certain emotional responses, such as compassion, fear, guilt, vulnerability, helpless, courage or resilience. Climate change communicators have examined the way that evoking such emotions in verbal communication can lead to engagement or disengagements with the topic of climate change. However, while researchers have also become increasingly interested in climate change images, they have not yet studied them with respect to symbolising certain emotions. Various typologies of images have been proposed in the past, distinguishing, for example, between human and natural impact images or iconic and geographically specific images. The images studied here do not neatly map onto these distinctions. They symbolise human suffering and loss and they are sometimes geographically and socially distinctive, but they are also iconic of climate change and they are symbols of its natural impacts. They all, to some extent, symbolise helplessness and may thus lead to disengagement rather than engagement with the issue of climate change

How do UK politicians respond to the climate emergency? : a critical discourse analysis of the Party Leaders’ Climate Debate

Climate change has become a significant political priority in modern day election campaigns in the United Kingdom. Environmental issues are being discussed more openly and directly within society. But how do politicians respond to the climate emergency? How do they communicate their political promises to the public on such a complex and multifaceted issue? This research study analysed the discourse that is created between the interaction of the Channel 4 News presenter and five political party leaders during the first ever Party Leaders’ Climate Debate. A Critical Discourse Analysis inspired by Norman Fairclough’s framework was conducted to provide an insight into how party leaders present their rationale for what actions they believe are needed to address environmental issues. By using this Critical Discourse Analysis framework, the research showed how the leaders’ constructed their responses to questions about climate change by protecting their party values, connecting economics with the environment in a positive way and reproducing mainstream media and political discourses. The leaders also produced a patriotic tone within their responses, which could reflect the societal attitudes at the time of the debate. The responses were ambiguous when it came to environmental responsibility, which highlighted the importance of transparency on this topic in the field of politics. By looking at how the party leaders communicate on the topic of climate change, this research study provides an insight into what solutions the leaders believe are needed to help alleviate the global environmental issues that we are facing today

How academic research and news media cover climate change: a case study from Chile

IntroductionClimate change has significant impacts on society, including the environment, economy, and human health. To effectively address this issue, it is crucial for both research and news media coverage to align their efforts and present accurate and comprehensive information to the public. In this study, we use a combination of text-mining and web-scrapping methods, as well as topic-modeling techniques, to examine the similarities, discrepancies, and gaps in the coverage of climate change in academic and general-interest publications in Chile.MethodsWe analyzed 1,261 academic articles published in the Web of Science and Scopus databases and 5,024 news articles from eight Chilean electronic platforms, spanning the period from 2012 to 2022.ResultsThe findings of our investigation highlight three key outcomes. Firstly, the number of articles on climate change has increased substantially over the past decade, reflecting a growing interest and urgency surrounding the issue. Secondly, while both news media and academic research cover similar themes, such as climate change indicators, climate change impacts, and mitigation and adaptation strategies, the news media provides a wider variety of themes, including climate change and society and climate politics, which are not as commonly explored in academic research. Thirdly, academic research offers in-depth insights into the ecological consequences of global warming on coastal ecosystems and their inhabitants. In contrast, the news media tends to prioritize the tangible and direct impacts, particularly on agriculture and urban health.DiscussionBy integrating academic and media sources into our study, we shed light on their complementary nature, facilitating a more comprehensive communication and understanding of climate change. This analysis serves to bridge the communication gap that commonly, exists between scientific research and news media coverage. By incorporating rigorous analysis of scientific research with the wider reach of the news media, we enable a more informed and engaged public conversation on climate change

Mathematical Modeling of Public Opinion using Traditional and Social Media

With the growth of the internet, data from text sources has become increasingly available to researchers in the form of online newspapers, journals, and blogs. This data presents a unique opportunity to analyze human opinions and behaviors without soliciting the public explicitly. In this research, I utilize newspaper articles and the social media service Twitter to infer self-reported public opinions and awareness of climate change. Climate change is one of the most important and heavily debated issues of our time, and analyzing large-scale text surrounding this issue reveals insights surrounding self-reported public opinion. First, I inquire about public discourse on both climate change and energy system vulnerability following two large hurricanes. I apply topic modeling techniques to a corpus of articles about each hurricane in order to determine how these topics were reported on in the post event news media. Next, I perform sentiment analysis on a large collection of data from Twitter using a previously developed tool called the hedonometer . I use this sentiment scoring technique to investigate how the Twitter community reports feeling about climate change. Finally, I generalize the sentiment analysis technique to many other topics of global importance, and compare to more traditional public opinion polling methods. I determine that since traditional public opinion polls have limited reach and high associated costs, text data from Twitter may be the future of public opinion polling

Text Analytics Techniques in the Digital World: a Sentiment Analysis Case Study of the Coverage of Climate Change on US News Networks

This paper analyses nearly 600 news segments relating to climate change broadcast on 3 American news networks over a period of 8 years. The paper demonstrates the typical steps involved in a text analytics solution. It shows how the text data was sourced and imported into a software program. The steps carried out in pre-processing the text data are outlined as well as explaining key terms in the text analytics pipeline. A sentiment analysis is applied using a lexicon and further processing is carried out to answer the original questions posed such as what words drive a particular sentiment category, how the news topic vocabulary varies by news network and how sentiment changes over time. It is argued here that the use of an externally provided lexicon in sentiment analysis is not without its pitfalls. It is also shown how the lexicon can be altered by the implementer and the subsequent effect on the results. The stop words list used also affects the text content downstream which will influence the sentiment score. As such, the integrity of the results output in a sentiment analysis solution can be called into question when the source code itself is not publicly visible and available for inspection

Media coverage of climate change mitigation in the spanish press

This article analyzes how the Spanish press covers the mitigation of climate change. We have used the search engine MyNews to study in El País and El Mundo, the newspapers with the largest circulation in Spain during the years 2016 and 2017, the news that includes the words "mitigacion" o "reducción de emisiones", y "cambio climatico” o “calentamiento global" in the most circulation newspapers in Spain in 2016 and 2017: El País and El Mundo. To explain how mitigation is covered by the Spanish press, we have used a series of categories and variables. As a result, we find an important difference between the urgency expressed by the scientific community and the reduced presence of this topic in the Spanish press

Using Twitter to Understand Public Interest in Climate Change: The case of Qatar

Climate change has received an extensive attention from public opinion in the last couple of years, after being considered for decades as an exclusive scientific debate. Governments and world-wide organizations such as the United Nations are working more than ever on raising and maintaining public awareness toward this global issue. In the present study, we examine and analyze Climate Change conversations in Qatar's Twittersphere, and sense public awareness towards this global and shared problem in general, and its various related topics in particular. Such topics include but are not limited to politics, economy, disasters, energy and sandstorms. To address this concern, we collect and analyze a large dataset of 109 million tweets posted by 98K distinct users living in Qatar -- one of the largest emitters of CO2 worldwide. We use a taxonomy of climate change topics created as part of the United Nations Pulse project to capture the climate change discourse in more than 36K tweets. We also examine which topics people refer to when they discuss climate change, and perform different analysis to understand the temporal dynamics of public interest toward these topics.Comment: Will appear in the proceedings of the International Workshop on Social Media for Environment and Ecological Monitoring (SWEEM'16