ABSTRACT
Of all the stories told these days of impending environmental destruction, few have aroused such grand rhetoric and powerful images as global warming.1 For New Yorker writer Bill McKibbon (1989), global warming means that ‘we are at the end of nature’. Respectable scientific conferences report that the ‘ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war’.2 The popular literature on global warming is rife with fictionalized futures of drought, famines, floods, wars, locusts and the general collapse of civilization. Such rhetorical flourishes can be easily justified in the interests of motivating a jaded public and recalcitrant political apparatus to action. Such overtly literary and exhortatory techniques might also, it would seem, be easily distinguished from the hard scientific, economic and policy analyses and theories from which they derived their ‘factual’ basis. However, the distinction between fact and fiction, between scientific theories and journalistic stories, is not so sharply drawn, and whatever the nature of their difference, there is much traffic between them. This chapter examines some more pedestrian stories, or constructions, of the global warming issue in ‘serious’ scientific, economic and policy circles. It explores the influence of scientific, economic and policy discourses on the construction of the issue of global warming, and problematizes aspects of the currently dominant construction.
