Climate Change: a Hot Crisis?: a Critical Content Analysis of Media Discourse and Public Discourse on Climate Change Controversy in the Us and the Netherlands

The climate change controversy: due to a row of remarkable events, such as hurricane Katrina, Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", Live Earth and the IPCC's frightening forecasts, climate change has become an issue of immense international interest. From the Netherlands all the way to the US and back, it is now one of the most prominent topics within politics, the media and the public arena. And although science has come to consensus that humans have considerably contributed to climate change, these days there appears to be an enormous increase in criticism towards climate change. Did we really cause it? Is it a crisis? Is it an issue in the first place? And so, should we solve it? Everywhere everyone evermore has a certain image of, hence a certain opinion on climate change. And the number and nature of signals is nothing but increasing. Researching the way climate change controversy is constructed, hence the way in which the world deals with climate change, is socially significant for climate change is a particularly current affair, that sooner or later, concerns every single one of us.