September 19, 2010
The International Language of Climate Change
Climate change is possibly the most widely debated issue of our time. It is also one of Graham Smart’s primary research interests.
Smart, an associate professor in
Carleton’s School of Linguistics and Language Studies, is working on an international study of how arguments on climate change are constructed and communicated.
His principal collaborator is Aditi Bhatia,
an assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong. Together they are examining the official positions on climate change advanced by the governments of Canada, the U.S., China, and India.
We’re studying how each government communicates its position on climate change to its citizens.
“We’re asking why each of the governments takes the position that it does. We’re exploring the particular constellation of historical, socio-cultural, and ideological influences that has shaped each government’s position over time,” says Smart. “As well, we’re studying how each government communicates its position on climate change to its citizens as well as on the international stage.”
Over the last six years Smart and Bhatia have collected some 15,000 Internet-published texts from sources such as policy think-tanks, environmental groups, government agencies, and industry. They also gathered data at the Copenhagen climate-change conference last December. They plan to expand on their corpus of textual data with interviews and participant observations in different organizations in Canada, the U.S., China, and India that regularly make attempts to influence their government’s position on climate change.
“We’re also looking at several communication issues related to how science is used in arguments on climate change,” says Smart. “For example, when the media mention climate science, they usually talk as if it were a single discipline. Actually, scientists in many fields are working separately on climate change, including atmospheric physicists, earth scientists, oceanographers, and biologists. The question then becomes—how do we make sense of all this research, with scientists in different fields employing different methodologies and making varying and sometimes conflicting claims about climate change?
“In the end, we’re hoping to contribute to developing a form of ‘argumentational literacy’ on climate change to help policy-makers, academics, activists, and citizens understand and evaluate what can be extremely complex arguments.”
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