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COMMUNICATION STUDIES

Climate change through an editorial lens

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 459–460 (2018)Cite this article

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Editorials provide an opportunity for international science journals to exert influence on professional scientists and wider public discourse. Now research shows how editorials on climate change in Nature and Science respond to societal events and reflect the national contexts in which these journals are situated.

Hulme and colleagues set out to reveal patterns of attention and, in particular, patterns of framing6 with regards to how climate change is portrayed in these editorials, and how these patterns are related to wider political and scientific events. The authors identified frames by reading and discussing nearly 500 editorials on climate change (333 in Nature, 160 in Science) published in the two journals between 1966 and 2016, extracted using search terms such as ‘climate’, ‘greenhouse’, ‘carbon’, ‘warming’, ‘weather’, ‘atmosphere’ and ‘pollution’. Articles were meticulously and iteratively coded allowing Hulme et al. to hone in on two types of frames that they called ‘challenges’ and ‘attributes’. Challenges were economic/financial, developmental, national/international security, ethical/moral, technological/energy, institutional/governance, scientific and communication. Attributes were global/collective scale, urgency and policy.

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Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the support of the Leverhulme Trust (RP2011-SP-013).

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  1. Institute for Science and Society, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Brigitte Nerlich

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  1. Brigitte Nerlich
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Correspondence to Brigitte Nerlich.

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Nerlich, B. Climate change through an editorial lens. Nature Clim Change 8, 459–460 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0179-9

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