The social construction of global climate change

This research traces the history of the climate change issue from the late 1950s through the late 1980s as it developed within the scientific, policy and environmental movement spheres. Overall its aim is to locate climate change discourse within the context of American environmentalism and offer an account of the issue's emergence, and the factors that influenced its development. These include the advent of a series of global resource crises in the 1970s which brought climate to the attention of policy makers, and the increased professionalization and bureaucraticization of the environmental movement which enabled it to take on complex and highly technical issues like climate change. A shift away from issues requiring regulatory intervention where the movement's activities had been stymied by policy gridlock was also a factor. This dissertation argues that these and other factors led the mainstream environmental movement to adopt a rationalized market based rhetoric to assert claims about global warming. The implications of such a rhetoric, notably the degree to which it depoliticizes global warming discourse is also discussed.;The research offers a theoretical critique and re-working of the constructionist approach to social problems and broadens understanding of the environmental movement. On this level, the study argues for a constructionism that pays attention to the historical setting within which claims emerge since, as the work shows, social context constrains the range of rhetorical strategies available to social problems claims-makers.