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('large oil companies are needlessly endangering the non-human
world') (see Daley and O'Neill, 1991). More recently, Boykoff and
Mansfield's (2008) analysis of British tabloids 2000-6 shows that
the reporting of climate change was framed predominantly through
extreme weather events, the future of mega-fauna and arguments
among personalities (like leading politicians). Frames highlighting the
geographical injustice of likely climate change impacts, for example,
rarely featured at all.
Reporting anthropogenic climate change and
ventriloquising science
Climate change (or what was once more commonly termed 'global warm-
ing') is perhaps the best-known 'environmental issue' of our time - not
least because it's been linked to a plethora of other environmental issues
(like melting ice sheets and sea-level rises). The long-run emission of green-
house gases (GHGs) into the global atmosphere over the past three centuries
(but especially since 1950) appears to be increasing mean air temperatures
worldwide. The volume of current and projected GHGs in the atmosphere
suggests an average temperate rise of some 4 C by the end of this century.
Though this may sound like a small number to non-specialists, for envi-
ronmental scientists of various stripes, it takes the earth surface well beyond
the 'game changing' point in a biophysical sense. This is why 'the Anthro-
pocene' has come into currency as a description of our epoch. As the former
head of the British Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Kevin
Anderson, recently concluded in a co-authored evidence-based study of
future scenarios:
There is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in global
...
temper-
ature at below 2 C
...
Moreover, the [biophysical] impacts associated with
[this] have been revised upwards
so that it now more appropriately rep-
resents the threshold between dangerous and extremely dangerous climate
change.
...
(Anderson and Bows, 2011: 41)
By 'dangerous', the authors mean that anthropogenic climate change will
trigger environmental transformations likely to pose a significant threat
to current political-economic arrangements and settlement patterns world-
wide. Much of the planet may become inhospitable for human habitation,
while the biophysical character and geography of the habitable parts will
change very significantly. Our entire way of life may have to be transformed
in fundamental ways. Note that Anderson and Bows are scientists, they're
not wearing the 'environmentalist' hat of someone like Paul Watson, and
scientists aren't usually given to using inflammatory rhetoric in their peer
 
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