Research project overview
From Greenhouse Effect to Climategate: A systematic study of climate change as a complex social issue
Investigators:
Brigitte Nerlich, University of Nottingham, School of Sociology and Social Policy, Institute for Science and Society @BNerlich
Iina Hellsten, VU Amsterdam, Faculty of Social Sciences, Organization Sciences
Nelya Koteyko, University of Leicester, Department of Media and Communication
Research programme funded by the ESRC and NWO ORA fund (2011-2014)
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, sustainablility, 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 project investigates climate change both across longer periods of time (diachronically) and at specific points in time (synchronically). We conduct various longitudinal public attention analyses 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 analyse in more depth and detail the meanings 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.
Related research projects
Carbon compounds - on the language of climate change (finished)