intergovernmental panel on climate change

The twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) has convened in Paris this week to agree on global solutions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The goal is to achieve a legally binding international agreement aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The last such treaty signed 18 years ago, the Kyoto Protocol, failed to meet many of its objectives since it was not ratified by the US and other developed nations did not fulfill their commitments.

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prepares to release its fifth assessment report, they asked for reviewers to read the draft and comment. Nearly anyone can sign up as and “expert reviewer” as long as they agree to confidentiality. In early December, one reviewer by the name of Alec Rawls decided the document he reviewed provides evidence that humans are not the primary cause of recent climate change. Thus, it was his responsibility to get the word out. Breaking his confidentiality agreement, he leaked the IPCC’s report.

A few days ago, I got notice about a special issue in Environmental Communication on “Media Research on Climate Change: Where have we been and where are we heading?”  One article in particular caught my attention: “How Grammatical Choice Shapes Media Representations of Climate (Un)certainty” by Bailey et al.  The article offers a comparison of U.S.