Climate scepticism - is it primarily found in the English-speaking world, and if so, why?

Climate Change and Environment Seminar Series: Summer Term

The presentation focused on the prevalence of climate scepticism – in its various forms – in the print media around the world. Most previous academic research on climate scepticism has tended to focus on the way it has been organised, and its impact on policy outputs, rather on the types of scepticism and the individuals who represent them.

The paper laid out the different forms of scepticism, and gave examples of the differences between them. It then drew on extensive content analysis of a large database of newspaper articles in Brazil, China, France, India, the UK and the USA, taken from two separate three-month periods in 2007 and 2009/10. It showed the country variations in the quantity, type and professional backgrounds of sceptics quoted in the press.

It concluded that climate scepticism is largely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, found most frequently in the US and British newspapers, and explored some of the reasons why this may be so.

Speaker: James Painter, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford