Open Access Open Access  Restricted Access Subscription or Fee Access

Language and Climate Change Discourse: The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C

Robert Dormer

Abstract


This research reviews how methodologies in Applied Linguistics have been applied to major aspects of climate change and sustainability discourse. Subsequently, a selection of those methods is applied to the most recent IPCC ‘Special Report’ on Global Warming of 1.5°C. Through comparison with existing data on the AR-Series Reports, a number of insights into the unique nature of the Special Report are achieved. Moreover, the Register Analysis framework, pervasive in wider Applied Linguistics, is shown to be efficacious, and this paper thereby constitutes a foundation upon which the increasingly proliferate reports of both the IPCC and also other key sustainability texts can be approached.


Keywords


Applied Linguistics, Climate Change Discourse, IPCC, Register Analysis

Full Text:

PDF

References


Stern, P., Dietz, T. (2015). IPCC: social scientists are ready. Nature, 521(161).

Agrawala, S. (1998a). Structural and Process History of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climatic Change, 39, 621–642.

Bodansky, D. (2001). The History of the Global Climate Change Regime. In U. Luterbacher, D. Sprinzs (Eds), International Relations and Global Climate Change (pp. 23–40). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Borie, M., Mahony, M., Hulme, M. (2015). Somewhere between everywhere and nowhere: the institutional epistemologies of IPBES and the IPCC. London: STEPS.

Koteyko, N., Atanasova, D. (2016). Discourse Analysis in Climate Change Communication. Climate Science.

Nerlich, B., Koteyko, N., Brown, B. (2009). Theory and language of climate change communication. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews.

Painter, J. (2013). Climate Change in the Media: Reporting Risk and Uncertainty. London: IB Tauris & Co.

Boykoff, M., Boykoff, J. (2004). Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the US Prestige Press. Global Environmental Change, 14, 125–136.

Agrawala, S. (1998b). Context and Early Origins of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climactic Change, 39, 605–620.

Lee, H. (2015, Nov 30). IPCC. Retrieved from Statement by Hoesung Lee at IPCC Side Event on Communications Paris: https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/outreach/documents/327/1448968927.pdf

Dowell, N., Graesser, A., Cai, Z. (2016). Language and Discourse Analysis with Coh-Metrix: Applications from Educational Material to Learning Environments at Scale. Journal of Learning Analytics, 3(3), 72–95.

Fløttum, K., Dahl, T. (2014). IPCC communicative practices: A linguistic comparison of the Summary for Policymakers 2007 and 2013. LSP Journal, 5(2), 66–83.

IPCC. (2018). Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, Paris: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

IPCC. (2019, March 8). Scenario Process for AR5. Retrieved from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change: http://sedac.ipcc-data.org/ddc/ ar5_scenario_process/RCPs.html

Budescu, D., Por, H., Broomell, S., Smithson, M. (2014). The Interpretation of IPCC Probabilistic Statements About the World. Nature Climate Change, 4(6), 508.

Priest, S. (2016). Communicating Climate Change: The Path Forward. London: Springer.

Schäffer, M., O'Neill, S. (2017). Frame Analysis in Climate Change Communication. Climate Science.

Stocker, T., Plattner, G. (2016). Making use of the IPCC's powerful communication tool. Nature Climate Change, 6, 637–638.

Medimorec, S., Pennycook, G. (2015). The language of denial: text analysis reveals differences in language use between climate change proponents and skeptics. Climatic Change, 133(4), 597–605.

Biber, D., Conrad, S. (2009). Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brysse, K., Oreskes, N., O'Reilly, J., Oppenheimer, M. (2013). Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama? Global Environmental Change, 23, 327–337.


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2020 Research & Reviews: Journal of Ecology

eISSN: 2278–2230