Demonstrating and Debating Climate Change

Abstract

Since climate influences our culture, it is not surprising that climate change has also become a part of the human world after decades of scientific, public, and political discourses from the second half of the twentieth century (Hulme 2016(Hulme , 2021. Climate change has improved scientific knowledge, but it has also become a veritable cultural and social construct by integrating into our communications -into thinking, talking, discussing, writing, and imagining. Hence, it has also incorporated itself into language through new words and expressions such as climate crisis, climate emergency, climate strike, climate anxiety, climate refugees, global heating, climate hysteria, carbon market, carbon footprint, carbon diet, and many others (Koteyko 2015). Various "word of the year" assessments have reflected this development.Climate change thus forms a major part of environmental communication that relays complex information from various scientific disciplines to the public. On the one hand, we use this kind of communication to convince and motivate people toward climate action. On the other hand, we also utilize it to persuade and debate with people holding opposing views. Hence, studying several aspects of climate change communication is an intriguing pursuit (Nerlich et al. 2010;Pearce et al. 2015). Climate change discourses and narratives have become important issues in the expanding field of climate change communication, in which rhetorical aspects have also been highlighted. Non-experts in rhetoric have conducted some rhetorical studies on climate change. These sorts of studies have melded with the general discursive or linguistic approaches. For that reason, this chapter presents rhetorical studies of climate change in dialogue with research on discourses and narration. It seeks to understand how we talk and write about climate change, how climate change discursively forms our perceived world, how we argue, and how we debate climate change using oral and written language ranging from scientific texts to public "climate talks".