ABSTRACT
As part of their Global Trends Survey, Ipsos Mori asked people in various countries whether they agreed with the description ‘The climate change we are currently seeing is largely the result of human activity’ (Mori 2014). The results showed that 93 per cent of respondents in China agreed, 64 per cent in the UK agreed, while in the US, only 54 per cent agreed. Most of these respondents are not basing their convictions about whether climate change is caused by humans on direct readings of temperature data or ice core samples, but on the texts that they have been exposed to. Texts (whether written, oral or visual texts) have a dual role – they put forward descriptions such as ‘humans cause climate change’ and represent these descriptions as true, false, certain or uncertain. In other words, they place descriptions of the world on a spectrum of facticity, from absolute truth at one end to absolute falsehood on the other, with a range of levels of uncertainty in between. In doing so they play a potential role in influencing readers’ convictions, which are (in this book) stories in people’s minds about whether certain descriptions of reality are true, certain, uncertain or false. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, presents
the description ‘humans cause climate change’ high up the spectrum of facticity in its Fifth Assessment Report:
It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century (EN13:17).
