Climate Change: A Rhetorical Analysis

Climate change is one of today’s most hotly debated topic. Scientists for many decades have made supposed claims that current energy creation and reliance on fossil fuels will lead to inevitable changes to the planet. Today, climate change denial is still a popular to most of the world despite the mounds of evidence to support that it exists. The climate change issue suffers from being mismanaged by various parties through focusing on the wrong issues and the lack of true commitment from the general public, according to Sandra Steingraber.

In his essay titled “Climate of Denial”, Al Gore, a well known environmental advocate and former vice president, verifies the reality of climate change and global warming. The piece is an attack on corrupt companies and news outlets that attempt to persuade the public that global warming is not a critical issue. Gore also earnestly conveys our environment’s current state and offers possible solutions that would increase awareness about global warming and begin to revert the planet back to a healthier, more sustainable state. The overarching purpose of Gore’s work is to call attention to the widespread climate change that is occurring. However, he also focuses on the corruption and bias within the media, and their attempts to conceal the truth about global warming. Writing to those who are conflicted about who to believe, he makes a valid argument that defends the beliefs of he and his fellow activists and encourages others to become more active in the climate change issue.

In 2010, Al Gore wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times claiming that global warming is a matter our generation must concentrate on in order to halt the rapid increases of change to our planet’s climate. He creates a strong, convincing argument by addressing and exemplifying issues pertaining to global climate change.

As a kid who has cared about nature his entire life, and an avid modern environmentalist for four years and counting, this issue has been at the center of my psyche for quite some time. I have seen public perspective on this issue change before my eyes. From the original rejection of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth movie on “global warming” to personally marching alongside 300,000 people in our nation's capital to raise awareness on climate change. However, despite all of these avenues the issue is still spoken about as this distant idea that eventually will be a disaster. Many politicians and news networks speak of the need for slow implementation of policies and programs to right our environmental wrongs. The best way to paraphrase the common narrative of this issue would be to say, climate change is going to happen down the road, it will probably be bad and trying to fix it in the near future would be a good idea. That weak call to action shoves climate change onto the long to-do list of the leaders of our world. Not only does it not create the urgency needed to actually curb the effects of our environmental ignorance, but it does not accurately describe the threat of a changing climate. Treating this like a political issue will not allow for the rigorous changes needed to address such a problem in the timely manner that is required.

Media coverage of climate change has effects on public attitude on the issue, as it mediates scientific opinion on climate change. The media uses interactions between climate science, policy, statistical scientific texts, data, scientific language and the appearances of scientific personalities. Such as work and stories from scientists that are personally known. It is clear that science and policy shape media reporting and public understanding. Whether people believe in it or not is their

The problem that the pro- global warming theorists have created is that of social standing and little else. While there may be scientific backing to support some of the theory, the media presents the problem with great sensationalism. Global warming and energy conservation has thus become a trend and losses some of its validity through this. The scare tactics used by the media to “promote awareness” are just that, a linguistic ploy to gain favor. “Awareness of this global threat reinforced public concern and environmental problems and thereby provided environmental activists, scientists, and policy makers with new momentum in their efforts to promote environmental protection.” (McCright, 2000) This statement draws line to the potential benefits that would be received if the pro-global warming theorists were to draw enough attention to the issue. Driven by social empowerment and conviction to environmental protection, these activists misrepresent the actual threat and paint it as being much more

The argument about man’s role in climate change and the role of government, the role of industry and the role of citizens is a significant challenge that crosses all levels of government, crosses all geopolitical boundaries and crosses all sectors of business. National governments across the globe are dealing with the issue in different ways, but one overarching aspect of control and mitigation can be seen in the oversight and regulation of the electric energy industry. One significant challenge facing each nation is the cost to lower carbon emissions and the question of who will pay the additional cost for compliance. Though the cost issue is significant, a much more difficult question is whether any decision on lowering emissions can make

Climate change has been a subject of discussion in the media for many years, supported with the use of arguments against oil polluting the environment and extreme scare tactics of Polar ice caps flooding civilians backyards. The issue has been ignored by the majority of lay people as seeming too complicated, and with all the conflicting information in the media in the past, who can blame them? However, scientifically, climate change and what perpetrates it is fairly simple to understand and society as a whole is beginning to come to a clear consensus on climate change. Thanks in part to more readily available forms of media and information, people have become cognizant of the fact that climate change is a legitimate problem which requires immediate amelioration. While this may seem melodramatic, society is realizing that climate change is an issue which can no longer be denied if the human race wishes to continue.

With today’s broad spectrum of opposing political ideals, climate change is one of the most polarizing and argued points. In an article entitled “Why Some Conservatives Can’t Accept That Climate Change Is Real” by Carolyn Gregoire, we are presented the supposed thought process and biases held by modern conservatives. The author, Carolyn Gregoire, serves as a senior science and health writer at The Huffington Post. Though challenging competency is a common attack used on both sides of the political isle, this piece sidesteps petty mudslinging and instead takes root in the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Inherently, as a political piece, this article criticizes the conservative thought camp. In doing so, this article (like a majority of articles on the Huffington Post) is written towards a sympathetic, liberal audience. Pertaining mainly to psychology, there is no doubt logos is the appeal used by the author. Furthermore, with logos often comes strong, inductive reasoning. As we delve deeper into this article, we also will examine and explore several fallacies implemented by the author. Also

A technique that Gore used to get his message across to the readers was that the tone of the story was both motivational and disgusted. Throughout the story Gore tone was disgusted in that he was baffled on how we could have let global warming start in the first place. Another thing that Gore did was that he used real life examples of the catastrophic events that happened in our world such as hurricane Katrina that was a category 5 hurricane that killed a lot of people. Another thing Gore did was that he did not just talk about catastrophic events that happened in the United States he talked about events that were happening across the world such as record rainfall that happened in India that killed more than one thousand people. Gore did this to not only captivate America but help captivate the world because as a whole we can help stop Global Warming.

In the article “Taking Politics Out of Climate Change,” Christina Couch talks about the effects that politics has on environmental issues including climate change. The author mentioned that America is divided into two groups of people with differing opinions on what steps should be taken. This division makes climate change a very controversial subject, and it is difficult to decide what should be done to prevent the negative effects of it. As the country gets split apart on the subject, it will make it even more difficult to make decisions in the future that everyone will be happy with.

Throughout history climates have drastically changed. There have been shifts from warm climates to the Ice Ages (Cunningham & Cunningham, 2009, p.204). Evidence suggests there have been at least a dozen abrupt climate changes throughout the history of the earth. There are a few suspected reasons for these past climate changes. One reason may be that asteroids hitting the earth and volcanic eruptions caused some of them. A further assumption is that 22-year solar magnetic cycles and 11-year sunspot cycles played a part in the changes. A further possibility is that a regular shifting in the angle of the moon orbiting earth causing changing tides and atmospheric circulation affects the global climate (Cunningham & Cunningham, 2009,

Climate change is hitting places at unequal effects. Not everyone is impacted as much of the people living in the arctic. Norgaard's study, the wide variety of people she interviewed all were pessimistic or felt helpless because of the large scale of cooperation between countries. Governments were unable to reach agreement. Norgaard looked at the silence around climate change and found climate change was a very disturbing topic. It generates a lot of negative emotions that people try to avoid. She ended up focusing on guilt, sense of helplessness, and fear about the future. people avoided these feelings she observed. The people she studied in the community changed the topic of conversation, tried to avoid talking about climate change, and kept it off the agenda of political meetings. Norgaard found that for the highly educated and politically residents of Bygdaby, knew about global warming was common and shocking. Norgaard believes this comes from emotions to cultural norms to political econom.Her study results exemplify that you don’t have to be educated and wealthy to care about climate change, and most people are oblivious to it or just don’t care. There are some limitations to her study. While she interviewed multiple people, there wasn’t enough data to fully get the opinion of everyone. I’m sure there were some people of Bygdaby, that did care about the warming temperatures. While Rikoon analyzes the conflict between the national park service and wild horses in Missouri, and how to properly manage the horses on the range. Rikoon explains that the national park system determined that the horses are feral and should be removed. However the horse league on the other hand believed that the horses

•Climate change has become an ideological issue in the U.S. at the exact instant we have to build up an agreement about the actualities of human effect on our ecosystems.

The issue is simple and rather obvious; climate change is real and a problem. With a changing climate comes rising sea levels, hotter days, and stronger and wilder storms, and long painful droughts. What most people can’t seem to agree on is whether or not human activity is playing some role in it. From media outlets to internet forums, the debate is being fought on all fronts. Most of these arguments, however, are just personal opinions and poorly-made observations from the comfort of a gas-guzzling SUV. Honestly, it doesn’t take a genius to look up a legitimate scientific paper and see the data for yourself. Human activity is influencing the global climate in a negative way, with plenty of evidence to prove it and very little disagreement in the scientific community.