In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 report, the first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using statistical methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report, and how Twitter users formed communities around their conversational connections. In short, the paper presents the topics and tweeters at this particular moment in the climate debate. The most used hashtags related to themes of science, geographical location and social issues connected to climate change. Particularly noteworthy were tweets connected to Australian politics, US politics, geoengineering and fracking. Three communities of Twitter users were identified. Researcher coding of Twitter users showed how these varied according to geographical location and whether users were supportive, unsupportive or neutral in their tweets about the IPCC. Overall, users were most likely to converse with users holding similar views. However, qualitative analysis suggested the emergence of a community of Twitter users, predominantly based in the UK, where greater interaction between contrasting views took place. This analysis also illustrated the presence of a campaign by the non-governmental organization Avaaz, aimed at increasing media coverage of the IPCC report.

Social media is a transformative digital technology, collapsing the “six degrees of separation” which have previously characterized many social networks, and breaking down many of the barriers to individuals communicating with each other. Some commentators suggest that this is having profound effects across society, that social media have opened up new channels for public debates and have revolutionized the communication of prominent public issues such as climate change. In this article we provide the first systematic and critical review of the literature on social media and climate change. We highlight three key findings from the literature: a substantial bias toward Twitter studies, the prevalent approaches to researching climate change on social media (publics, themes, and professional communication), and important empirical findings (the use of mainstream information sources, discussions of “settled science,” polarization, and responses to temperature anomalies). Following this, we identify gaps in the existing literature that should be addressed by future research: namely, researchers should consider qualitative studies, visual communication and alternative social media platforms to Twitter. We conclude by arguing for further research that goes beyond a focus on science communication to a deeper examination of how publics imagine climate change and its future role in social life. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication

Seventy six senior academics from 11 countries invite The BMJ’s editors to reconsider their policy of rejecting qualitative research on the grounds of low priority. They challenge the journal to develop a proactive, scholarly, and pluralist approach to research that aligns with its stated mission

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Climate change has been the subject of increasing scientific efforts and growing interest from policymakers, international bodies and a variety of non-government organizations. The past decade has seen climate change in the headlines not only in conventional print and broadcast media but also in new electronic social fora. These developments have been aligned with shifts in the nature of climate change communication and with changes in how researchers study it and how a variety of actors try to influence it. This article situates the theory and practice of climate change communication within developments that have taken place since we first reviewed the field in 2009. These include the rise of new communication technologies, the development of new theories of science/climate communication, and the emergence of new climate communication practices. We focus in particular on continuing tensions between the desire on the part of communicators to inform the public and alternative strategies such as engaging stakeholders in dialogue. We also consider the tension between efforts to promote the idea of a consensus in climate science versus approaches that attempt to engage with uncertainty more fully. Throughout the article we explore the value of more participatory models of climate change communication that exploit, rather than shun, residual uncertainties in climate science in order to stimulate debate and deliberation. IntroductionWe drafted a first version of this article in 2009 1 in the midst of events such as the failure of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen in 2009 (Conference of the Parties 15), Climategate 2-6 , numerous other '-gate' affairs 7-9 , and repercussions from a global recession which shifted ordinary people's attention and priorities from saving the planet to saving money. Around 2009 there was hope that 'better' climate change communication would increasingly and relatively straightforwardly lead to better global and local climate change policies and a popular uptake of such policies. Such hopes have been dented in the intervening years and public interest in climate change has dwindled, at least as measured through trends for search terms on Google 10 .At the same time a different trend has emerged in scholarly attention to 'climate change communication'. Here one can observe an upward trend that accelerated after 2010 when our article was published. According to the Scopus database, as of May 2015, 311 articles have been published on 'climate change communication', with the most 'relevant' being our 2010 article entitled 'Theory and language of climate change' (cited 42 times on Scopus, 78 times on Google Scholar). 235 articles have appeared on the topic since the beginning of 2010. In this second edition of the article we do not attempt to review all these new articles, 2 especially since searching Scopus for 'climate change communication' does not necessarily capture all articles on the topic and not at all more practical climate chan...