Climate change has garnered much interest in many disciplines, and Kjersti Fløttum brings the debate to the area of linguistics with reflections from different authors. The collection is organized into four parts: ‘Frames and narratives’, ‘Metaphors’, ‘Language of climate action’, and ‘New methods to study the language of climate change’. The book brings readers closer to the essentials of linguistic theory and communication practice as it pertains to climate change and tries ‘to find out what climate change means to different people, in different places and in different times’ (x).
Fløttum opens the book with a broad linguistic and discursive view of climate change from a linguistic interface, liaising this with public decision making in the hope of providing increased awareness of the human side of climate change (CC). This is followed by Trine Dahl's multimodal analysis of media representations of IPCC's 5th Assessment Report, in which she demonstrates how linguistic/thematic/news value analyses within modal contexts can be done (ch. 2). The main finding is that verbal and visual modes and themes reinforce the headline frames of the accompanying texts, while verbal cues equally play a vital role in contextualizing the visuals. She does this using a discursive news values analyses framework (DNVA; see Monika Bednarek & Helen Caples, News discourse, 2012).
Øyvind Gjerstad, in ‘Competing climate change narratives’ (ch. 3), identifies how different story lines resemble or differ in policy documents. Selected COP21 speeches are reviewed through a prototypical narrative structure of an initial situation, complication, reaction, and resolution, to a final situation. In ‘Stories about climate change’ (ch. 4), Michael D. Jones, Fløttum, & Gjersted identify villains, heroes, and victims as main actors of the CC narrative and uphold that ‘hero affect’ (or effect?) is vital in CC narrative persuasion in the US and Norway.
Dimitrinka Atanasova & Nelya Koteyko (ch. 5) and Oleksandr Kapranov (ch. 6) establish that varied metaphors characterize the conceptualization of climate change in different contexts. This generates positive communicative outcomes from new creative and evocative conceptual metaphors. Using metaphors is salient but requires caution and a better alignment between decision makers and citizens.
In ‘Willingness of action’ (ch. 7), Fløttum indicates the unanimity on the need for action against climate change. She picks out rejection, lists, and story as modes of participants’ responses and establishes some constraints and opportunities for climate action. In ‘The Paris COP21 Agreement—Obligations for 195 countries’, Fløttum & Helge Drange (ch. 8) crown the section with a critique of the rhetorical tone at the Paris COP21 Agreement, which establishes the necessity of political action against CC. In the final chapter, using data-driven approaches to climate change discourse, Andrew Salway (ch. 9) proposes that automated text-analysis techniques ‘must be incorporated into research methods in order to deal with the volume of climate change texts’ (151).
In all, Fløttum has brought together perspectives from different authors who have analyzed the role of language in the climate change debate. These range from a micro-linguistic perspective to a macro-linguistic perspective and a proposal as to appropriate methods in the analysis of the vast quantities of data that characterize climate change debates.
