Values, Assumptions and Beliefs in British Newspaper Editorial Coverage of Climate Change

In his recent book on the Politics of Climate Change (2009), the British sociologist Anthony Giddens argues that climate change differs from any other problem faced today, due partly to the fact that it is ‘mainly about the future’, since if left ‘unchecked’, the consequences will be ‘catastrophic’ for human life on earth. Yet, as climate scientist Mike Hulme claims in his own book, climate change is not the sort of thing that can be ‘fixed’ in any straightforward sense (Hulme 2009). Any representations of scientific knowledge and, in particular, climate change, alongside its impacts and consequences, are closely intertwined with specific imaginaries, as well as political concerns, carrying with them distinct values, assumptions and beliefs. Combining tools and techniques of corpus linguistics with the methodological and analytical tools of CDA, the research in this chapter is a diachronic extension of previous work on how one of the most emblematic issues of global environmental discourse shaping our new century is discursively constructed and negotiated in the UK and US quality press (Bevitori 2010, 2011a, 2011b) and on how readers are ‘dynamically‘ positioned (Coffin and O’Halloran 2005) to experience this socio-political event in particular ways.