Media and the Politics of Arctic Climate Change : When the Ice Breaks

Combining multidisciplinary perspectives and new research, this volume goes beyond broad discussions of the impacts of climate change and reflects on the current and historical mediations and narratives that are part of creating this new social and scientific reality. The Arctic sea-ice reached record lows in 2007, and again in 2012. In the international news media, these moments were reflected via striking images of polar bears, crumbling ice chunks and the use of more alarmist metaphors about global climate change. Through these narratives, and despite the periodic disappearance of climate change from media reports due to issue fatigue, a sharper narrative of climate change has entered public discourse : a new global reality where the future is no longer a given. Going beyond media studies as well as descriptive or highly scientific accounts of the impacts of climate change in the Arctic, this book explores how both historical and contemporary mediations, scientific narratives and satellite technology simultaneously capture and reconstruct this new reality of the Anthropocene, where human activities shape the planet. By highlighting the linkages between science, media, environmental change and geopolitics, the informed contributors to the volume invite the reader to reflect on what is local and what is global in today's connected mediatized world Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Globalization, Climate Change and the Media: An Introduction....Pages 1-25 Arctic Climate Change and the Media: The News Story That Was ....Pages 26-51 Eyes on the Ice: Satellite Remote Sensing and the Narratives of Visualized Data....Pages 52-69 An Ice Free Arctic Sea? The Science of Sea Ice and Its Interests....Pages 70-92 Signals from a Noisy Region....Pages 93-113 A Question of Scale: Local versus Pan-Arctic Impacts from Sea-Ice Change....Pages 114-127 Under the Ice: Exploring the Arctic’s Energy Resources, 1898–1985....Pages 128-156 Changing Arctic — Changing World....Pages 157-171 Back Matter....Pages 173-182