| 英文摘要: | We must not fall victim to decontextualized and ahistorical media accounting of climate trends. In August 1968, protestors from the Students for a Democratic Society — an activist movement in the United States — repeatedly hurled the phrase 'the whole world is watching' outside the hotel in Chicago where the Democratic National Convention was being held. As Columbia University professor Todd Gitlin later documented in a book1 titled by the same phrase, media coverage of the clashes accompanying the refrain then served to draw wider visibility to their antiwar activities and claims. He found that implications from the media representations were twofold: first, coverage largely framed the protests as a fringe action promoted by marginalized actors; however, second, the increased media coverage of the Students for a Democratic Society actions actually boosted awareness and bolstered member enrolments in the student-led movement. These insights from Gitlin, along with those of other scholars across a range of perspectives, help inform considerations of the interactions between climate science, policy, media and the public today. Specifically, these findings guide our thinking about the swirling media discourses of a global warming pause, or hiatus or slowdown, that gained momentum, especially in this past year. Discourses are essentially sets of categories, ideas and concepts that give meaning to phenomena. Maarten Hajer has pointed out that they can “frame certain problems ... [and can] dominate the way a society conceptualizes the world”2. Through media representations, framing processes have had important effects on marginalizing some discourses while contributing to the amplification of others. Among early media discourses that sought to explain this climate phenomenon, environmental scientist Bob Carter penned an op-ed in The Telegraph of London in 2006 called 'There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998'3 where he pointed to University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit records of stalled global surface temperatures. Blog posts and media stories in the years that followed (for example, Real Climate, Watts Up With That, Tom Nelson, Andrew Revkin at DotEarth and the New York Times) logically sought to better understand this trend. So while this meme had been circulating sporadically for a number of years before, media attention to this phenomenon really picked up steam in 2013. Basic searches of 'global warming' or 'climate change' and 'pause' or 'hiatus' — across 50 media sources in 20 countries over the past decade — show this trending in media discourse (Box 1).
Box 1: Trend in media discourse on the climate slowdown.
- Gitlin, T. The Whole World is Watching (Univ. California Press, 1980).
- Hajer, M. in The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Policymaking (eds Fisher, F. & Forester, J.) 45–46 (Duke Univ. Press, 1993).
- Carter, B. There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998. The Telegraph (9 April 2006); http://go.nature.com/D9CSlh
- Kosaka, Y. & Xi, S-P. Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling. Nature 501, 403–407 (2013).
- Hansen, J., Sato, M. & Ruedy, R. Global temperature update through 2012. (15 January 2013); http://go.nature.com/loo2Iv
- Balmaseda, M. A., Trenberth, K. E. & Källén, E. Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content. Geophys. Res. Lett. 40, 1754–1759 (2013).
- Hall, S. Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices (Sage, 1997).
- Luntz, F. The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America 131–146 (The Luntz Research Companies, Straight Talk, 2003).
- Naming Global Warming (ActionMedia, 2005).
- Hilgartner, S. & Bosk, C. L. The rise and fall of social problems: a public arenas model. Am. J. Sociol. 94, 53–78 (1988).
- Ogburn, S. P. How media pushed climate change 'pause' into the mainstream. Energy and Environment Daily (4 November 2013); http://go.nature.com/3rxT35
- Morano, M. UK Daily Mail: 'Global warming stopped 16 years ago' according to UK Met Office 'quietly released' report — 'Pause' in warming lasted about same time as when temps rose, 1980 to 1996. (Climate Depot, 13 October 2012); http://go.nature.com/T9opcu
- Lloyd, G. IPCC head Pachauri acknowledges global warming standstill. Global Warming Policy Foundation (23 February 2013); http://go.nature.com/rnQLMt
- Pappas, S. Climate change disbelief rises in America. LiveScience (16 January 2014); http://go.nature.com/ki1Dma
- Mooney, C. Global-warming denial hits a 6-year high. Mother Jones (17 January 2014); http://go.nature.com/TvkUsz
- Boykoff, M. & Olson, S. Wise contrarians' in contemporary climate science–policy–public interactions. Celebrity Stud. 4, 276–291 (2013).
- Brulle, R. J. Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of US climate change counter-movement organizations. Climatic Change http://doi.org/f2pdbh (2013).
- Delacourt, S. Putting on and taking off that election face. Toronto Star (7 December 2005).
- The Hindustan Times An ecological disaster waiting to happen. The Hindustan Times (24 October 2010).
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Affiliations
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Maxwell T. Boykoff is at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (CSTPR), UCB 488 CIRES CSTPR, University of Colorado, 1333 Grandview Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
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