ABSTRACT
Climate change has been one of the most controversial issues in politics in the last 30 years. Political parties have given different priorities to climate change over time, ranging from the frontline of anthropogenic climate change supporters, such as Al Gore and Kevin Rudd, to the scepticism and active obstructionism of George W. Bush or John Howard. The investigation focuses on climate change by analysing the resources used to express evaluation in online quality newspapers. The Populist Climate Change Corpus (PCCC) was compiled by including texts from the NewsBank database covering the years 1996–2017. Scientific findings on climate change constitute specialized knowledge that is generally conveyed with caution and uncertainty. The analysis has confirmed the suggestion that, although scholars have reached a high level of consensus on anthropogenic climate change, the scientific perspective on climate science is largely misrepresented in newspaper discourse due to the influence of news values, such as dramatization.
