Page 138 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

11 Climate Change as an Element of Sustainability Communication 121

communication, climate change communication mostly takes place in public. This
is not to say there is no private communication about it. Indeed, communication in
networks among lay persons may form an important basis for societal communication
about climate change.
In line with communication-based concepts in sociology (e.g. Luhmann 1995),
climate change communication takes place in societal subsystems, the most impor-
tant being the media, politics and science (Weingart et al. 2000). Discourse analysis
is employed to characterise specific kinds of communication within these spheres,
and how they ‘irritate’, or interact with, one another.
It was only in the course of the emancipation of the bourgeoisie from the aristoc-
racy in England and France in the eighteenth century that a ‘public sphere’ emerged,
involving the growing idea of free citizens with the right to form their own opinion
of public affairs and to participate in the public process of opinion formation
(Habermas 1981). In those days, the ‘public’ consisted largely of personal commu-
nication. Reaction times were quite long, and only certain groups could participate
in it. It was not until the development of mass media – press, radio, television
and later the internet – that a broader kind of public came into being by enabling
ordinary citizens to receive (and disseminate) politically relevant information
(McQuail 1994).
The mass media thus constitute an essential element of today’s public sphere and
serve an important function in public communication and discourse. Typically,
media communication centres around particular issues and follows a logic inherent
to the media system (Luhmann 1971). Regarding complex environmental and sus-
tainability issues such as climate change, the mass media tend to ignore their inher-
ent uncertainties, transforming them into a sequence of events leading to catastrophe
and requiring immediate action (Weingart et al. 2000).
Clearly, climate change has become a highly important issue for the public
sphere, also internationally. In quantitative terms, since autumn 2006 hundreds of
articles have been printed per month in a single newspaper, the conservative German
daily newspaper ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’ or F.A.Z. (Fig. 11.1). Although
other Western countries report lower amounts of newspaper attention (e.g. Gavin
2009 for the UK), overall issue salience has shown an enormous rise. A distinctive
theme ‘career’ can be identified (see Fig. 11.1).
In contrast to classic assumptions about media attention, the climate change issue
does not show a distinct ‘issue attention cycle’ (Downs 1972). Rather, there was a
build-up of attention that reached, for the time being, its peak in early 2007, months
after two events of crucial importance: the October 2006 publication of the Stern
Review Report (Stern 2007), holding that the economic costs of climate change
exceed those of an effective mitigation many times over, and the publication of the
spring 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007),
likewise stressing the harmful effects of anthropogenic climate change. In addition,
Al Gore’s documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ had a powerful impact when it was
broadcast in May 2006 and (Egner 2007).
Media communications research provides a number of partly competing expla-
nations for the immense rise in media attention. In a purely realist approach, the
strength of public or media attention would mirror real-world events. In the case of