Climate: A Hot Crisis?

The climate change controversy: due to a row of remarkable events, such as hurricane Katrina, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, Live Earth and the IPCC’s frightening forecasts, climate change has become an issue of immense international interest. From the Netherlands all the way to the US and back, it is now one of the most prominent topics within politics, the media and the public arena. And although science has come to consensus that humans have considerably contributed to climate change, these days there appears to be an enormous increase in criticism towards climate change. Did we really cause it? Is it a crisis? Is it an issue in the first place? And so, should we solve it? Everywhere everyone evermore has a certain image of, hence a certain opinion on climate change. And the number and nature of signals is nothing but increasing. Researching the way climate change controversy is constructed, hence the way in which the world deals with climate change, is socially significant for climate change is a particularly current affair, that sooner or later, concerns every single one of us. Moreover, researching the way climate change controversy is constructed is scientifically significant, for most of the previous pieces address either media discourse or public discourse. This thesis, on the other hand, researches the way these different discourses influence one another, by applying a theoretical framework in which they finally forgather. It begins by giving a broad, but general definition of “discourse”, a term which turns out to be very various and versatile, which is why it initially implements the regarding reigning, and besides logical and surveyable twofold and divides discourse into “public discourse” and “media discourse”. Then it defines “discourse analysis”, which would be the marginal area where method and methodology meet. After again beginning by giving a general definition of “discourse analysis”, whereupon it goes into the evolvement of the term, from the study of a static system into the study of an influenced influence, being both the public and the media and the other way around, the term “discourse analysis”, just like the term “discourse”, turns out to refer to multiple meanings, or at least lots of approaches, of which it attends to two. By defining and subsequently combining CDA, which is generally used to analyze media discourse, and CDP, which is generally used to analyze public discourse, it can create an appropriate method for the regarding research on the different discourses on climate change. In accordance with the theory, the method first makes a twofold, in which the US and Dutch media discourse and the US and Dutch public discourse are analyzed separately. When it comes to the media, one article every day during the month of March of respectively The New York Times and De Volkskrant is selected. When it comes to the public, interviews are held with respectively Berkeley University students and Erasmus University students. On the concerning media discourses and public discourses a combined CDA-CDP analysis is applied, describing the distinct different views on the definition, causes, effects and solutions to climate change and how these views are validated. Subsequently, this thesis crosswise compares the different domains of discourse (that is, media discourse and public discourse) and the different countries in which these different domains of discourse occur (that is, the US and The Netherlands). So that at last, it can indeed answer the overall research question: What is the media discourse and public discourse on climate change within both the US and the Netherlands, and what is the relationship between the two kinds of discourse and between the two countries?