Climate delay discourses present in global mainstream television coverage of the IPCC's 2021 report

Recent scholarship suggests that groups who oppose acting on climate change have shifted their emphasis from attacking the credibility of climate science itself to questioning the policies intended to address it, a position often called 'response skepticism'. As television is the platform most used by audiences around the world to receive climate information, we examine 30 news programmes on 20 channels in Australia, Brazil, Sweden, the UK and USA which included coverage of the 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the Physical Science. Using manual quantitative content analysis, we find that skepticism about the science of climate change is still prevalent in channels that we have classified as 'right-wing', but largely absent from channels classified as 'mainstream'. Forms of response skepticism are particularly common in 'right-wing' channels, but also present in some 'mainstream' coverage. Two of the most prominent discourses question the perceived economic costs of taking action and the personal sacrifices involved. We explore the implications of our findings for future research and climate communication. Questioning of necessary responses to climate change is now the dominant form of skepticism on mainstream television, but skepticism of the science behind climate change persists, suggests an analysis of television news programmes in five countries

Automated summary

Recent research shows that groups opposed to climate change action have shifted their focus from attacking climate science to questioning the policies aimed at addressing it, known as 'response skepticism'. An analysis of 30 news programs on 20 channels in Australia, Brazil, Sweden, UK, and USA, which covered the 2021 IPCC report on the Physical Science, reveals that skepticism about climate change science is still prevalent in 'right-wing' channels, but less common in 'mainstream' channels. The most common forms of response skepticism are concerns about the economic costs and personal sacrifices of taking action. The implications of these findings for future research and climate communication are explored.