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Treacherous Words

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Treacherous Words Treacherous Words How Climate Change Conspiracy Sceptics use Conceptual Metaphors to Extinguish our Future Ida-Maria Chvostek Student Vt 2019 Examensarbete för kandidatexamen, 15 hp Engelska Abstract This study examined the metaphors used in contemporary American conservative discourse between October 2018 and March 2019, focusing on material published by conservative think tanks (CTTs) and tweets made by Republican senators in relation to climate change. For the CTTs, a domain-specific corpus (36,388 words) was compiled and a smaller corpus (3967 words) was assembled based on 135 tweets. These datasets showed that conspiracy scepticism was the most common type of scepticism used to discredit climate change data, scientists and environmental policies. In addition, the datasets indicate that conservative agents frequently used metaphors of WAR, RELIGION, HEALTH, BUILDING, JOURNEY, WATER and PRODUCT to convey negative frames. These domains linked to the conceptual key LIFE IS A STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL and were presented in a moral context. In response to these findings it is suggested that the scientific community incorporate emotional language, metaphors and moral values when communicating environmental issues. Keywords: United States of America, conservative think tanks, critical metaphor analysis, IPCC, framing Table of contents 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 3 1.1 Background ..................................................................................................................... 3 1.1.1 Anthropogenic warming and the IPCC ...................................................................... 3 1.1.2 SR15 and the global community ................................................................................ 4 1.1.3 Conservative agents and climate change scepticism .............................................................. 4 2 Aim and research questions ..................................................................................... 6 3 Theoretical framework ............................................................................................. 7 3.1 Thought control and hegemony ....................................................................................... 7 3.2 Metaphors and frames ..................................................................................................... 7 3.2.1 Critical Discourse Analysis ........................................................................................ 9 3.2.2 Critical Metaphor Analysis ........................................................................................ 9 4 Material and method ............................................................................................... 11 4.1 Domain-specific corpus: the ACCC .............................................................................. 11 4.1.1 Targets of scepticism ................................................................................................ 12 4.1.2 Identifying conspiracy metaphors ............................................................................ 12 4.2 Social impact: Republican senators on Twitter ............................................................. 13 5 Results and analysis ................................................................................................ 14 5.1 The ACCC: metaphor identification and classification .................................................. 14 5.1.1 War metaphors ......................................................................................................... 15 5.1.2 Religious metaphors ................................................................................................. 16 5.1.3 Health metaphors ...................................................................................................... 17 5.1.4 Building metaphors .................................................................................................. 19 5.1.5 Journey metaphors .................................................................................................... 20 5.1.6 Water metaphors ....................................................................................................... 21 5.1.7 Product metaphors .................................................................................................... 23 5.2 Twitter: metaphors and political action ......................................................................... 24 6 Discussion ................................................................................................................. 27 6.1 A war on Earth ............................................................................................................. 28 6.1.1 Science: responsibilities and collaborations ............................................................. 29 6.1.2 Environmentalism: heuristic techniques .................................................................. 29 6.2 A war for the future ....................................................................................................... 31 7 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 32 8 References ................................................................................................................ 33 1. Introduction For decades, a small portion of humanity has warned us that we are heading towards a catastrophe. While not on the palisades screaming their message, climate scientists have continuously affirmed that our actions are threatening the very planet on which our existence depends (e.g. Haeberli & Beniston, 1998; Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007; Nerem et al., 2018). Nevertheless, climate change research is frequently ignored, questioned and scorned by conservative politicians and interest groups who use their power to silence rather than listen to these expert voices (e.g. Jacques et al., 2008). In America, this has resulted in environmental agencies being censored, international agreements being abandoned, and the general public remaining sceptical of climate change (Barron, 2018; The White House, 2017; Capstick et al., 2015). In order to reverse this trend, it has been suggested that the environmental community must tailor how they communicate climate change to shift the public’s operational ideology from conservative to progressive values (Zia & Todd, 2010). One way of achieving this switch is through interdisciplinary collaborations, where scientists from multiple fields contribute their unique expertise to strengthen climate change messages by addressing socio-ecological issues (e.g. Bifrost, n.d.). As a contribution to this field this paper will examine the metaphors and frames used by climate ‘sceptics’ when discussing global warming. However, before we begin to analyse sceptic discourse, let us start with a short summary of the risks and impacts associated with anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and the key players involved in the climate change debate. 1.1 Background 1.1.1 Anthropogenic warming and the IPCC Our understanding of man-made global warming has grown immensely over the last 200 years, and in 1988 the UN General Assembly established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to review the available scientific literature on climate change. Since then, the IPCC has released five assessment reports, as well as multiple special reports, making recommendations based on the most current climate change research (IPCC, n.d.). In October 2018, IPCC released special report SR15 detailing the severe impacts associated with a global mean temperature of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (IPCC, 2018). According to this report, which is based on more than 6000 peer reviewed papers and compiled by 91 scientists from 40 countries, this degree of anthropogenic warming will have devastating effects on natural as well as human systems. As our planet has already warmed with 1°C due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are at risk of disintegrating in the next few decades, causing global sea levels to rise and displacing millions of people. In addition, as extreme weather 3 events increase, we will face large-scale species loss as well as increasing food insecurity. These scenarios are not just doomsday prophecies; at 1°C above pre-industrial temperatures species are already going extinct, corals are struggling to survive and persistent droughts have caused an upsurge in asylum applications to the European Union (Gynther et al., 2016; Hughes et al., 2017; Missirian & Schlenker, 2017). The scientific community is clear; if greenhouse gas emissions continue unmitigated the environmental consequences will be both costly and deadly. 1.1.2 SR15 and the global community In order to limit global warming to 1.5°C humanity must drastically reduce carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions, with the IPCC recommending wide-ranging policies, practices and innovations on national and international levels to achieve this goal. However, while some governments have responded to SR15 by asking for advice on how to achieve net zero carbon by 2050 (e.g. Cunningham et al., 2018), some major stakeholders have instead refused to take action by question the report’s legitimacy (e.g. Hewson, 2018). Among these countries is the U.S. who in 2018 refused to welcome the IPCC to the United Nations’ annual climate change conference, provoking
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