International audienceThis article proposes an original analysis of the international debate on climate change through the use of digital methods. Its originality is twofold. First, it examines a corpus of reports covering 18 years of international climate negotiations, a dataset never explored before through digital techniques. This corpus is particularly interesting because it provides the most consistent and detailed reporting of the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Second, in this paper we test an original approach to text analysis that combines automatic extractions and manual selection of the key issue-terms. Through this mixed approach, we tried to obtain relevant findings without imposing them on our corpus. The originality of our corpus and of our approach encouraged us to question some of the habits of digital research and confront three common misunderstandings about digital methods that we discuss in the first part of the article (section ‘Three misunderstandings on digital methods in social sciences’). In addition to reflecting on methodology, however, we also wanted to offer some substantial contribution to the understanding of UN-framed climate diplomacy. In the second part of the article (section ‘Three maps on climate negotiations’) we will therefore introduce some of the preliminary results of our analysis. By discussing three visualizations, we will analyze the thematic articulation of the climatic negotiations, the rise and fall of these themes over time and the visibility of different countries in the debate

The election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States reminded us that climate deniers are anything but endangered species. In this short paper, we discuss President Trump's position on climate change in the wider context of climate controversies and denial. In particular, we put it into perspective with other notorious contrarian leaders and their influence on national and international climate politics. Finally, we provide a brief analysis of President Trump discourses on climate change and discuss them in light of reflections about posttruth politics.

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This article investigates practices through which consensus is reached on policy-relevant scientific conclusions in intergovernmental assessment bodies. Using the case of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the production of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the Synthesis Report published in 2014, it sheds light on the procedural, visual, and rhetorical arrangements in the weaving of an intergovernmental expert consensus. Drawing on ethnographic methods, the main point of the article is that the consensus emerging from the approval of the SPM is best understood as an accumulation and juxtaposition of scientific/diplomatic consensuses. It shows that these consensuses result from a layering of compromises negotiated at various stages in the assessment process and contingent on the issues at stake and the strategies of actors. In this context, consensus is not reached on individual statements but on the document as a whole, as both authors and governments seek to have their perspectives reflected. Finally, the article draws attention to the entanglement between the scientific and diplomatic rhetoric in the fabric of the SPM, which tends to construct climate change as a decontextualized and nonpolitical problem.