The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate

194 Pages·2017·0.761 MB·

by  Kjersti Fløttum (ed.)

The Role of Language in
the Climate Change Debate
This volume takes a distinctive look at the climate change debate, already
widely studied across a number of disciplines, by exploring the myriad lin-
guistic and discursive perspectives and approaches at play in the climate
change debate as represented in a variety of genres. The book focuses on
key linguistic themes, including linguistic polyphony, lexical choices, meta-
phors, narration, and framing, and uses examples from diverse forms of
media, including scientific documents, policy reports, op-eds, and blogs, to
shed light on how information and knowledge on climate change can be rep-
resented, disseminated, and interpreted and, in turn, how they can inform
further discussion and debate. Featuring contributions from a global team
of researchers and drawing on a broad array of linguistic approaches, this
collection offers an extensive overview of the role of language in the climate
change debate for graduate students, researchers, and scholars in applied
linguistics, environmental communication, discourse analysis, political sci-
ence, climatology, and media studies.
Kjersti Fløttum is professor of French linguistics at the Department of for-
eign languages, University of Bergen. Her research fields are text and genre
theory and discourse analysis, with a special focus on linguistic polyphony
in scientific, political, and climate change discourse as well as on narrative
structures in climate change discourse. Fløttum has headed several cross-
disciplinary projects (KIAP, EURLING, LINGCLIM). She is coauthor of
the books ScaPoLine (2004) and Academic Voices (2006) and editor of
Speaking to Europe (2013). She has published in international journals such
as Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Language and Politics, Language &
Communication, Text & Talk, Climatic Change, Global Environmental
Change, Nature Climate Change and in Oxford Research Encyclopedias.
Together with Anwar Saab, “1001Films,” Fløttum is co-producer of the
documentary film “Talking about climate,” available at https://vimeo.com/
178449717.
Routledge Research in Language and Communication
1 The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate
Edited by Kjersti Fløttum
The Role of Language in
the Climate Change Debate
Edited by Kjersti Fløttum
First published 2017
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Contents
List of Tables and Figures vii
Foreword ix
MIKE HULME
Acknowledgements xiii
List of Contributors xv
1 Language and Climate Change 1
KJERSTI FLØTTUM
Frames and Narratives 11
2 Verbal and Visual Framing Activity in Climate Change
Discourse: A Multimodal Analysis of Media Representations
of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report 13
TRINE DAHL
3 Competing Climate Change Narratives: An Analysis of
Leader Statements during COP21 in Paris 31
ØYVIND GJERSTAD
4 Stories about Climate Change: The Influence of Language on
Norwegian Public Opinion 49
MICHAEL D. JONES, KJERSTI FLØTTUM, AND ØYVIND GJERSTAD
Metaphors 69
5 Metaphors in Online Editorials and Op-Eds about
Climate Change, 2006–2013: A Study of Germany,
the United Kingdom, and the United States 71
DIMITRINKA ATANASOVA AND NELYA KOTEYKO
vi Contents
6 Conceptual Metaphors Associated with Climate
Change in Corporate Reports in the Fossil Fuels Market:
Two Perspectives from the United States and Australia 90
OLEKSANDR KAPRANOV
Language of Climate Action 111
7 Willingness of Action 113
KJERSTI FLØTTUM
8 The Paris COP21 Agreement—Obligations for 195 Countries 130
KJERSTI FLØTTUM AND HELGE DRANGE
New Methods to Study the Language of Climate Change 149
9 Data-Driven Approaches to Climate Change Discourse,
Illustrated through Case Studies of Blogs and International
Climate Negotiation 151
ANDREW SALWAY
Biographical Notes on Contributors 171
Index 175
Tables and Figures
Tables
2.1 Main Frame Exploited, Headlines 24
2.2 Main Theme, Visuals (Pictures Only) 25
2.3 Main News Values, Headlines and Pictures 25
3.1 Propositions by the Four Leaders 41
4.1 Pretreatment Variables, Sample Descriptive Statistics 54
4.2 Narrative Elements within the Cultural Narrative
Treatments 56
4.3 Posttreatment Dependent Variables, Descriptive
Statistics, by Narrative Treatment 58
4.4 The Individualist Cultural Narrative and Character Affect 59
4.5 The Egalitarian Cultural Narrative and Character Affect 59
4.6 The Individualist Narrative: Character Affect,
Text Veracity, Risk, and Willingness to Regulate GHGs 61
4.7 The Egalitarian Narrative: Character Affect,
Text Veracity, Risk, and Willingness to Regulate GHGs 62
5.1 Metaphor Keywords, by Domain 75
5.2 Frequency of Metaphor Use, by Newspaper 76
6.1 Conceptual Metaphors in Corporate Reports and
Disclosures by BHP from January 1, 2015, until
July 1, 2016 99
6.2 Conceptual Metaphors in Corporate Reports and
Disclosures by ExxonMobil from January 1, 2015,
until July 1, 2016 100
8.1 Frequency of Modal Auxiliary Verbs 137
8.2 Frequency of Verbs Co-occurring with Modal Auxiliary 138
9.1 Three of the Patterns Derived from Manual
Inspection of Word Clusters and Sorted
Concordances by Fløttum et al. (2014) 160
viii Tables and Figures
Figures
3.1 Common Narrative Structure 35
9.1 Part of a Sorted Concordance for the Word “future,”
Which Reveals the Pattern “a WORD future”; Similar to
That Used by Fløttum et al. (2014) 159
9.2 Ten of the Top-Level H-groups That Were Induced
Automatically from the NTAP Corpus by Salway and
Touileb (2014) 162
9.3 The Top Ten H-groups by RRF for the Climate Change
Blog Chimalaya, Generated by Touileb and Salway (2014) 164
9.4 Seven of the H-groups Automatically Induced from Earth
Negotiations Bulletin Texts by Salway, Touileb, and
Tvinnereim (2014) 166
Foreword
In March 2015, the BBC screened a 90-minute TV documentary titled
“Climate Change by Numbers.” The program 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 under-
gone since 1880), 95 (the percent confidence climate scientists have that
at least half this warming is human caused), and 1,000,000,000,000 (tons
of carbon it is estimated humans can burn to avoid “dangerous climate
change”).
Climate change in just three numbers? There is of course the long-
standing convention that holds that climate can be defined statistically, as
the aggregation and average of (usually) 30 years of standardized meteo-
rological measurements in a place. If one allows for ten weather variables,
measured twice daily over 30 years, then the climate of a location would
then be described by 219,000 numbers. But that is before one recalculates
these numbers over a different period of time to determine how the climate
of that place has changed between two periods. So, 438,000 numbers. And
that is just the climate of one location on a planet with many different cli-
mates in different places.
My own early fascination with climate and its changes was triggered by
just this love of numbers and the many ways of manipulating them. As a boy
I would pore over the daily weather statistics in the local newspaper, and
then later, as a university geography student, I would gather together his-
torical weather data from UK meteorological stations to calculate trends in
UK winter climate. It was this that placed me on a course of study that was
to lead to my career as an academic geographer and professor of climate.
And it is through enumerating the physical processes of the Earth system
and how these processes can be represented by mathematical equations and
solved in computer models that the scientific knowledge assessed by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has come into being.
These IPCC knowledge assessments have informed and been interpreted by
government officials and negotiators at successive meetings of the parties to