Climate of Opinion: Public and Media Discourse on the Global Environment

Abstract

Global environmental issues are among the most serious problems facing humankind at the end of the 20th century. This research focuses on what people understand about climate change. It compares the New Zealand public's discourse on climate change with media coverage in the preceding year. Instances of overstatement, over-certainty and confusion in the media texts are identified and analysed. There remains considerable mismatch between media reporting of scientific information and the public's understanding of that information. People greatly overestimate scientific scenarios for temperature and sea-level rises, a reflection of public concern about global environmental risks. They confuse the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion, blending information in a fashion typical of comprehension meltdown between related topics. People know little about the causes of the greenhouse effect. This misunderstanding is socially and politically disabling because it misleads people away from dealing with an issue at the heart of western consumer society—the consumption of fossil fuels.