The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate
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The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate

Kjersti Flottum, Kjersti Flottum

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The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate

Kjersti Flottum, Kjersti Flottum

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About This Book

This volume takes a distinctive look at the climate change debate, already widely studied across a number of disciplines, by exploring the myriad linguistic 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, metaphors, 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 represented, 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 science, climatology, and media studies.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781315456911

1 Language and Climate Change

Kjersti Fløttum

Introduction

In a situation where calls for urgent action on global climate change are heard around the world, is language something that really matters? This rhetorical question constituted an implicit point of departure for the studies presented in this book. Language does of course matter, but the question was, and still is, in what way and to what extent. Current research shows that the meaning people ascribe to climate change (e.g., their understanding of the phenomenon, their perception of the risks involved, the value judgments they make, and the emotional reactions they experience) is closely related to how climate change is portrayed in various contexts of climate communication (Fløttum 2014; Fløttum, Dahl, and Rivenes 2016; Hulme 2009; Leiserowitz 2005; Lorenzoni and Pidgeon 2006; Moser 2010, 2016; Nerlich, Koteyko, and Brown 2010; Pearce et al. 2015; Tvinnereim and Fløttum 2015). Language not only reflects and expresses facts and observations; it also influences attitudes and behavior. Language thus constitutes a vital component of the cultural prerequisites underlying societal development, and it is indispensable for interaction and participation—also in the climate change issue. The importance of language is further emphasized through two factors: (1) the complexity of the phenomenon of climate change itself, developed from being understood mainly as physical to becoming political, social, cultural, ethical, and communicational, and (2) the particularly multivoiced and multifaceted nature of the climate change debate, with a wide range of actors and voices, which causes multiple communication challenges due to the high number of stakeholders, interests, opinions, and attitudes represented.
In order to find out more about how language matters in the climate change issue, various kinds of linguistic analyses have been undertaken: studies of words, of combination of words, and of entire texts from different contexts, such as scientific reports, political documents, and media texts (Fløttum 2016). The aim of this book is to present a broad linguistic and discursive view on various questions that arise: How do actors at different levels of decision and in different sectors construct their climate agenda linguistically? How are different voices manifested linguistically? How are arguments and messages organized in entire texts and talks? How is this heterogeneity of information and often value-laden knowledge understood by laypeople? The book aims at answering these questions and showing the crucial role of language in the climate change debate, focusing on both representations and interpretations of climate discourse. Through qualitative as well as quantitative methodological approaches, including a multimodal approach, automatic text analysis, and new data-driven approaches, the eight subsequent chapters cover text material that spans a variety of genres: scientific documents, policy reports and debates, corporate annual reports, newspaper articles, editorials, op-eds, blogs, and ‘survey discourse’. The authors take into account different levels of analysis, from a micro-perspective, focusing on particular linguistic phenomena (words, sentences), to a macro-perspective, integrating entire texts and the context they are produced in. Topics that are developed include linguistic polyphony (multivoicedness), epistemic and deontic modality, lexical choices, metaphors, narration (storytelling), and framing. Through genres representing non-expert discourse, there will also be perspectives on attitudes and emotions as manifested in public opinion. The book assumes a global perspective, corresponding to the nature of the climate change issue, through studying empirical material from five continents—Europe, Africa, North America, Asia, and Australia.
The contributing authors are researchers working within, or associated with, the LINGCLIM project (“Linguistic representations of climate change discourse and their individual and collective interpretations,” 2013–2016; www.uib.no/en/project/lingclim), based at the University of Bergen, Norway. Under the common overarching research question about the role of language in the climate change debate, new and relevant insights are obtained, contributing substantially to the knowledge base of climate change, in particular to the understanding of public opinion formation. These results constitute much needed input for decision making on what measures to undertake in order to tackle the many challenges of climate change.
There is a growing interest in language related to climate change (Fløttum 2016; Moser 2010, 2016; Nerlich, Koteyko, and Brown 2010), a perspective needed to fill the current knowledge gap on issues related to linguistic representations of climate change knowledge and their interpretations. The present book will address this lack of linguistic and discursive studies and show how climate change text and talk work. The book will thus provide increased awareness of the “human” side of climate change. It aims to highlight the use of language and the development of opinions and attitudes, which will also be of value for current and future decision-making debates. Through increased knowledge and awareness of the role of language, policymakers may be better equipped to deal with the complexities at stake. Explorations of how text and talk about climate change are constructed, circulated, and interpreted may not only add to our knowledge as such but also stimulate increased reflection on relevant concepts and practices.
The book is structured in four parts: “Frames and Narratives” (chapters 2, 3, and 4), “Metaphors” (chapters 5 and 6), “Language of Climate Action” (chapters 7 and 8), and “New Methods to Study the Language of Climate Change” (chapter 9). Short presentations of chapters 2–9 are given below.

Frames and Narratives

In chapter 2, “Verbal and Visual Framing Activity in Climate Change Discourse: A Multimodal Analysis of Media Representations of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report,” Trine Dahl reports on a framing study of media representations related to climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (see also Dahl 2015). She undertakes a qualitative analysis of news items (text and images) appearing in the two UK newspapers, The Guardian and the Daily Mail, linked to the recently published IPCC Assessment Report 5. The overarching aim of the study is to explore how multimodal news texts may be analyzed in a framing perspective through combining a linguistic (verbal) and a theme-based (visual) approach. With a point of departure in Entman’s (1993) classical definition of framing as relating to selection and salience, she identifies traces of the news producers’ framing activity in both the verbal and the visual elements of their texts. The verbal material is discussed mainly in the context of the Appraisal framework developed by Martin and White (2005), with an additional view toward the Discursively Constructed News Values framework outlined in Bednarek and Caple (2012). The visual material is discussed in terms of themes (e.g., O’Neill 2013) along with the visual analysis of news values suggested in Bednarek and Caple (2012). Dahl finds that, in the Guardian material, the Settled Science frame (see O’Neill et al. 2015) is clearly the most frequently exploited, while no one frame dominates in the Daily Mail material. The themes identified in the visual elements in most cases reinforce the framing undertaken through the verbal elements, with the Impacts theme the most frequent by far in both newspapers. In terms of methodological considerations linked to the study of interaction between the two meaning-making resources, Dahl finds that linguistic cues provided through the image captions in many cases play a vital role in contextualizing the visuals, reflecting the challenge of visualizing climate change impacts, many of which have not yet been experienced.
In chapter 3, “Competing Climate Change Narratives: An Analysis of Leader Statements during COP21 in Paris,” Øyvind Gjerstad seeks to combine a narrative framework (Fløttum & Gjerstad 2013, 2016) with the analysis of linguistic polyphony or ‘multivoicedness’ (Nølke, Fløttum and Norén 2004) in official statements made by China, India, South Africa, and the United States on climate change policies during the Conference of the Parties in Paris (COP21). The narrative framework helps map converging and diverging stories, while the polyphonic analysis of linguistic markers such as reported speech, argumentative connectives, and negations has the potential to uncover more or less ‘hidden’ voices in texts that relate to such a heterogeneous political context (see Fløttum and Gjerstad 2013; Gjerstad 2013). By means of these two approaches, Gjerstad aims to answer the following questions: How do the delegations of the world’s two largest emitters and those of newly industrialized nations represent the problem of climate change and its potential solutions in their statements? Who are presented as the main actors (i.e. the heroes, villains, and victims), and, more specifically, what are the roles of various countries in the different narratives? Do the narratives on climate change reflect underlying national and international inequities as well as conflicts regarding historical responsibilities? Gjerstad concludes that the main difference between the four statements is not in policy content but rather in their style. He also finds that the US statement stands out, in that it more clearly resembles a story than the other three. It dramatizes COP21 as a pivotal point in the climate change narrative and paints vivid pictures of possible worlds in the case of both success and failure. As such, the statement appears to be more motivational than policy oriented.
The narrative perspective is taken further in chapter 4, “Stories about Climate Change: The Influence of Language on Norwegian Public Opinion,” by Michael D. Jones, Kjersti Fløttum, and Øyvind Gjerstad. Starting with the fact that the general public is exposed to multiple narratives, or ‘stories’, about climate change, the authors claim that the way these narratives are constructed and linguistically formulated may influence people in various ways (Jones 2014; Jones, Shanahan, and McBeth 2014). The study investigates how differences in the language used in narratives and the structure of narratives may influence people’s preferences and perceptions of risk related to climate change. The authors report on an experiment undertaken in March 2015 through a national survey by the Norwegian Citizen Panel, with approximately 335 respondents. The results are analyzed in light of similar experiments undertaken in the United States (Jones 2014). The study is based on two theoretical frameworks: First, the basis for the narrative perspective (inspired by Adam 1992, 2008) relies on the theoretical and methodological text linguistic framework developed by Fløttum and Gjerstad (Fløttum 2013; Fløttum and Gjerstad 2013). Second, the experiment design relies on the Narrative Policy Framework (Jones, Shanahan, and McBeth 2014), which enables an assessment of the role of narrative communication and culture in shaping how information about climate change influences preferences and perceptions of risk. Their findings indicate that the hero character in each story plays a central affective role in determining the persuasiveness of a story.
From the macro-perspective of frames and narratives, the second part of the book moves on to the perspective of words and word combinations creating metaphors in various text genres.

Metaphors

In chapter 5, “Metaphors in Online Editorials and Op-Eds about Climate Change, 2006–2013: A Study of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States,” Dimitrinka Atanasova and Nelya Koteyko discuss the most frequently used climate-change-related metaphors in 527 editorials and op-eds from three countries that are key to the climate change negotiations (van der Wurff 2009)—Germany, the UK, and the United States. Drawing on the concept of discourse metaphors and using the critical metaphor analysis approach (Charteris-Black 2004), the authors find that the most preferred domain for metaphors is Illness in Sueddeutsche.de, War in theguardian.com, and Journey in NYTimes.com. Atanasova and Koteyko argue that the prominent use of Illness metaphors in Sueddeutsche.de opinion-page content, War in theguardian.com, and Journey in NYTimes.com is an indicator that diverging national efforts to communicate the gravity of anthropogenic climate change are closely intertwined with national contexts and cultures, political identities, and policy making. Such tailoring to national identity and culture can be seen as a positive step to maximize public resonance by appealing to a set of recognizable values and norms. But there also is a potential danger in this prominent use of those metaphors, as Illness, War, and Journey are deeply entrenched in political communication. The authors suggest that the transfer of these metaphors to climate change discourse risks turning the issue into “politics as usual”—a development that defies advocacy for new and creative metaphors as a way to provoke climate change action.
Metaphors are also the object of study in chapter 6, “Conceptual Metaphors Associated with Climate Change in Corporate Reports in the Fossil Fuels Market: Two Perspectives from the United States and Australia,” where Oleksandr Kapranov undertakes a qualitative analysis of conceptual metaphors associated with the issue of global climate change identified in annual reports by ExxonMobil (US) and BHP Billiton (Australia). The material of the study involves these corporations’ official 2014–2015 annual reports, available to the public online. The analysis involves identification of conceptual metaphors viewed through the lenses of cognitive linguistics. Within this framework, conceptual metaphor is regarded as a robust means of discursive space construction. The qualitative study further presented in this chapter seeks to juxtapose conceptual metaphors associated with climate change in corporate discourse by ExxonMobil and BHP Billiton, respectively. The data analysis reveals that the conceptual metaphors involved in the framing of climate change discourse by BHP and ExxonMobil is represented by several identical conceptual metaphors—e.g., ‘Climate Change as a Challenge’, ‘Climate Change as a Risk’, ‘Climate Change as a Low-Carbon Future’, and ‘BHP/Exxon as a Climate Change Aware and Responsible Corporation’. However, ExxonMobil’s discursive space is also characterized by the corporation-specific conceptual metaphors ‘Climate Change as an Energy-Efficient Future’ and ‘Climate Change as Natural Gas Future’. These findings are suggestive of two approaches adopted by these corporations. Specifically, ExxonMobil construes its climate change discourse via conceptual metaphors associated with natural gas and efficient energy consumption, and BHP frames its climate change discourse by means of conceptual metaphors evocative of climate change mitigation as a process, a path, which requires knowledge and investment.
After investigating how climate change is represented in various genres and from various perspectives in parts one and two, part three of the book focuses on how actions to tackle climate change are viewed both by the general public and by politicians.

Language of Climate Action

In chapter 7, “Willingness of Action,” Kjersti Fløttum takes as a point of departure the multiple voices expressing diverse points of view according to interests, values, and worldviews in the public debate on climate change. From being to a large extent focused on the causes of climate change (the attribution issue), the debate has now become much more oriented toward what measures to undertake to meet the many predicted challenges at different levels (local, national, and global). In order to obtain new knowledge about the opinions and attitudes of the public in this matter, the following open-ende...

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