Climate change communication has become a salient topic in science and society. It has grown to be something of a boom industry alongside more established 'communication enterprises', such as health communication, risk communication and science communication. This article situates the theory of climate change communication within theoretical developments in all three fields. It discusses the importance of and difficulties inherent in talking about climate change to different types of public using a various types of communication tools and strategies. It engages with the difficult issue of the relationship between climate change communication and behaviour change and it focuses in particular on the role of language (metaphors, words, strategies, frames and narratives) in conveying climate change issues to stakeholders. In the process, it attempts to provide an overview of emerging theories of climate change communication, theories that, quite recently, have begun to proliferate quite dramatically. We end with an assessment of how communication could be improved in light of the theories and practices discussed in this article. Introduction:The importance of communicating about climate change to 'publics'The topic of climate change communication has recently become more salient in society and among social scientists, resulted in 'the recent explosion of climate change communication from movies to grassroots movements'.1 Analyses of climate change communication and its impact on 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 F o r P e e r R e v i e w 2 the general public have been proliferating in communication and related discipline journals since the late 1990s. Despite this, carbon emissions continue to increase both globally and domestically, and society continues to be vulnerable to climate variability. This raises questions about the effectiveness of current communication efforts, and about the ability of their audiences to implement change in response to these communications. This concerns the persuasiveness of the messages, but also concerns the structure of society and considerations of the extent to which citizens are empowered to make effective change.In this paper however we will concentrate on recent analyses of communications about climate change and highlight some key findings. We provide an overview of a selection of government, citizen, and science-led approaches to climate change communication, identify trends in media portrayals of climate change, and we will revisit the role of language in constructing messages about the topic. Because of the sheer volume of climate change communication studies, the scope of this review is limited, and does not include every peerreviewed, or popular press article on the subject. Nevertheless, this review of applied and research case studies will provide a framework with whic...

Climate change has been the subject of increasing scientific efforts and growing interest from policymakers, international bodies and a variety of non-government organizations. The past decade has seen climate change in the headlines not only in conventional print and broadcast media but also in new electronic social fora. These developments have been aligned with shifts in the nature of climate change communication and with changes in how researchers study it and how a variety of actors try to influence it. This article situates the theory and practice of climate change communication within developments that have taken place since we first reviewed the field in 2009. These include the rise of new communication technologies, the development of new theories of science/climate communication, and the emergence of new climate communication practices. We focus in particular on continuing tensions between the desire on the part of communicators to inform the public and alternative strategies such as engaging stakeholders in dialogue. We also consider the tension between efforts to promote the idea of a consensus in climate science versus approaches that attempt to engage with uncertainty more fully. Throughout the article we explore the value of more participatory models of climate change communication that exploit, rather than shun, residual uncertainties in climate science in order to stimulate debate and deliberation. IntroductionWe drafted a first version of this article in 2009 1 in the midst of events such as the failure of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen in 2009 (Conference of the Parties 15), Climategate 2-6 , numerous other '-gate' affairs 7-9 , and repercussions from a global recession which shifted ordinary people's attention and priorities from saving the planet to saving money. Around 2009 there was hope that 'better' climate change communication would increasingly and relatively straightforwardly lead to better global and local climate change policies and a popular uptake of such policies. Such hopes have been dented in the intervening years and public interest in climate change has dwindled, at least as measured through trends for search terms on Google 10 .At the same time a different trend has emerged in scholarly attention to 'climate change communication'. Here one can observe an upward trend that accelerated after 2010 when our article was published. According to the Scopus database, as of May 2015, 311 articles have been published on 'climate change communication', with the most 'relevant' being our 2010 article entitled 'Theory and language of climate change' (cited 42 times on Scopus, 78 times on Google Scholar). 235 articles have appeared on the topic since the beginning of 2010. In this second edition of the article we do not attempt to review all these new articles, 2 especially since searching Scopus for 'climate change communication' does not necessarily capture all articles on the topic and not at all more practical climate chan...

Climate change has rarely been out of the public spotlight in the first decade of this century. The high‐profile international meetings and controversies such as ‘climategate’ have highlighted the fact that it is as much a political issue as it is a scientific one, while also drawing our attention to the role of social media in reflecting, promoting or resisting such politicisation. In this article, we propose a framework for analysing one type of social media venue that so far has received little attention from social scientists – online reader comments. Like media reporting on climate change, reader comments on this reporting contribute to the diverse, complex and contested discourses on climate change, and can reveal the meanings and discursive resources brought to the ongoing debate by laypeople rather than political elites. The proposed framework draws on research in computer‐mediated communication, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis and takes into account both the content of such ‘lay talk’ and its linguistic characteristics within the specific parameters of the web‐based context. Using word frequencies, qualitative study of co‐text and user ratings, we analyse a large volume of comments published on the UK tabloid newspaper website at two different points in time – before and after the East Anglia controversy. The results reveal how stereotypes of science and politics are appropriated in this type of discourse, how readers’ constructions of climate science have changed after ‘climategate’, and how climate‐sceptic arguments are adopted and contested in computer‐mediated peer‐to‐peer interaction.

Lexical combinations of at least two roots around 'carbon' as the lexical hub, such as 'carbon finance' or 'carbon footprint', have recently become ubiquitous in discourses on climate change in English speaking science, politics, and mass media. They are part of a new language evolving around the issue of climate change that can reveal how it is framed as a public issue by various stakeholders, how public attitudes and perceptions are shaped and which solutions to climate change and global warming are being proposed, contested and debated. In this article, we study the role of some of these 'carbon compounds' as tools of communication in different online discourses dealing with issues of climate change mitigation. By combining a quantitative diachronic analysis of their occurrences with a qualitative analysis of the contexts in which the compounds were used, we identify three clusters of compounds focused on finance, lifestyle, and attitudes, and then elucidate the different communicative purposes to which they were put between the 1990s and the early 21st century, reflecting a temporal shift in the debate. This approach may open up new ways of analyzing the different framings of climate change mitigation initiatives in the public sphere.

We explore peer-to-peer discussions which took place in a UK-based diabetes 'Virtual Clinic' online community. In particular, we seek to understand the rhetorical nature and content of exchanges over a period of six months from the community's inception. Data were captured weekly and analysis based on thematic discourse analysis. Two key issues emerged regarding how the community shaped the nature of the discussion forum. First, the identity of the forum was established, and boundaries drawn about what was, and was not, acceptable. Second, participants sought to present themselves as reliable and authoritative sources of information. Internet discussion communities are shaped in important ways early on by the community of users, including how the character and focus of discussion is formed, and how both information and users can be constructed as authoritative and reliable.