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From Greenhouse effect to Climategate: Climate change as a complex social problem
Funded by ESRC/ORA in collaboration with NWO, 2011-2014
PI Brigitte Nerlich
PI Iina Hellsten
CI Nelya Koteyko
CI Juliane Riese
Climate change is a complex social issue, involving a wide range of social actors and organizations -- including scientists, policy makers, industry, the mass media, NGOs, activist groups and lay people. Debates about climate change or global warming have been characterized both by long periods of slow, mainly consensus-dominated phases and by a series of sudden changes in attention to, and the social, cultural and political meaning of, 'climate change'. In recent decades, the public debate surrounding man-made climate change has evolved from climate scientists' warnings about the 'greenhouse effect' in the 1990s to public distrust of 'climategate' in 2009. Furthermore, climate change resonates with a wide scale of other debates, such as biodiversity conservation, sustainability, and energy security. This multiple complexity makes climate change not only a fascinating case for research into the relation between science and society, the dynamics of communication, the emergence and development of protest movements, but also for a systematic, comparative study of the dynamics of change social systems.
The proposed project will investigate climate change both across longer periods of time (diachronically) and at specific points in time (synchronically). We will conduct a longitudinal public attention analysis from 1992 to 2010, i.e. from the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 to the aftermath of climategate and the United Nation's Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen 2009. We will then analyse in more depth and detail the meaning of climate change attributed to and negotiated between actors and organizations at various key-events and turning points of the debate. In this context the rise of the web is doubly important. On the one hand it provides increased opportunities for social actors to influence the debate using social media and communication fora, developments that have begun to change climate change communication quite profoundly; on the other hand this complex spread of information generates both new challenges for social scientific theories and methods and new opportunities, insofar as new types of databases become available that can be analysed and compared across time and at certain key points in time.
Theoretically, the project is embedded in three interrelated layers of sociological research dealing with: (1) the dynamics of slow processes and sudden bursts of social systems (social change and stability); (2) the power and politics of namings, framings and metaphors (the struggle over meaning); (3) the role of Web dynamics in public debate. Methodologically, the project will usea combination of quantitative and qualitative text analysis with qualitative interviews, discourse and metaphor analysis, and develop new methods for the automated analysis of the meaning and spread of concepts on the Web.
Collaborating between the UK (University of Nottingham; University of Leicester) and the Netherlands (VU University Amsterdam) will allow us to combine converging theories and methods that have so far been used separately. The results will be useful for academics interested in media, communication, framing, metaphor and the dynamics of social systems; as well as policy-makers, journalists, and activists trying to understand the dynamic conceptual landscape in which they work.