Abstract
Max Boykoff’s Who Speaks for the Climate is the most serious effort thus far to chart the interface between climate change science and the mass media, in particular the news media. It provides a comprehensive review of climate change news from the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, with particular attention to the political pressures and institutional norms that have persistently distorted public understanding of climate change science.
To me, one of the most striking aspects of the book is the figure on page 25, which shows the combined climate change coverage in five US newspapers from 2000 to 2010. Aside from a spike during the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, the general trend throughout this period has been downward. The overall number of articles for the five papers falls from around 350 in 2007 to the present total of 150. Max Boykoff’s updated graphs at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu) indicate that this decline has slowed, but it has not reversed. The volume of news addressing climate change remains stuck at less than half what it was in 2007. While it is important to ask how much this decline is symptomatic of the overall decline in newspaper size over the past few years (Perez-Pena, 2008), there is clearly a disjuncture between the growing urgency of climate change as a matter of scientific interest and the stagnating production of climate news. The public debate on the subject is deeply divided in large part, thanks to a multibillion dollar disinformation campaign.
The contributors to this forum are unanimous in their approbation for Boykoff’s contribution but would like to see him broaden his engagement and pursue both the causes and the consequences of this situation. Diana Liverman points to the unknown role of emerging communication opportunities such as blogs and online public commentaries at news sites. Michael Goodman similarly draws attention to new media and social media while also raising questions about emotion and affect. James McCarthy would like to see more sustained attention to the economic relations driving the production and dissemination of misinformation about climate change, and he questions the utility of appealing to collective self-interest rather than concentrating on structural relationships between different social actors. David Demeritt questions whether this kind of research is not, in fact, a matter of putting old thematic wine in new (epistemological) bottles and calls for greater attention to geographic variability of interpretative strategies. Karl Zimmerer recommends greater attention to the ways in which discourses inherently frame the scale of climate issues, linking national-scale to individual-scale environmental politics, and both of these to climate change’s potentially overwhelming global scale. The highly respected participants in this forum bring their varied expertise to bear on the key question ‘who speaks for the climate?’