Climate change from the political and scientific perspectives : a critical discourse analysis

الملخص EN

Being one of the most global challenges, climate change has been the concern of many international conferences.

It is believed that the politicians' perspectives of climate change are different from the scientists' perspectives.

This study attempts to fill in this gap through employing the textual and the ideological analyses to investigate the political and the scientific speeches about climate change.

It aims at: investigating the textual features of the political and the scientific climate change discourses, examining the ideologies behind the presidents' and the scientists' speeches and shedding light on the differences between the political and the scientific discourse on climate change.

The study employs a qualitative analysis by utilizing Fairclough's three dimensional framework (2001) as a tool to analyse two representative political and scientific speeches.

The ideological analysis of the political and the scientific discourse shows that the former is mainly concerned with giving a bright image of the country of the speaker, whereas the latter emphasises on facilitating the perception of such a complex notion as climate change and everyone could contribute in taking action against global warming.

Finally, it is shown that the scientists do not deviate the genre of climate change discourse, whereas the presidents go beyond this genre to talk about terrorism and immigration.