¿Esto es por el cambio climático? Los fenómenos meteorológicos extremos en la prensa española (2000-2010): ocurrencia y atención mediática

Abstract

The occurrence of extreme weather events (EWE) ranks second in the list of risks associated with climate change (CC) according to the IPCC. based on the theoretical approach of the social amplification of risk, the press coverage on this causation connection would contribute to ‘amplify’ the feeling of vulnerability and exposure to these natural disasters and, ultimately, to facilitate and speed up mitigation and adaptation measures. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of the press coverage on climate science as a vehicle for popularizing the causation connection between CC and EWE. For this purpose, the occurrence and the impacts of the EWE along with a sample of news coverage on climate science in the spanish press (2000-2010) are monitored. Results show that CC-EWE connection is discursively included in more than one third of the cases, either associated with the increase of temperature or with socioeconomic impacts, among others; its inclusion in the media discourse on climate science seems to depend not on the newspaper as on the time frame, since certain media permeability has been detected those years when major disasters happened.