#ClimateCriminals: Discursive constructions of climate change prior to and during Black Summer

Abstract

The 2019-20 Australian bushfire season, colloquially termed Black Summer, was the most catastrophic bushfire season in Australian history. While 33 people and over one billion animals died, and 17 million hectares of land burned, it was climate change that dominated public discourse. Numerous studies have examined the role of extreme weather events in shaping the public’s climate change perceptions yet scant few have taken a discursive approach. This study attempted to address this paucity by collecting, analysing, and comparing Australian Tweets posted before and during Black Summer. Using the statistical analysis program R and its package Rtweet (Kearney, 2019), 2,181 Tweets were collected within the time period of 25th-31st August 2019 and 16,184 Tweets were collected within the time period of 5th-11th January 2020. A framework analysis was conducted to compare the key climate change frames present in the discourse across both time periods. This revealed a sharp increase in political and media and ideology frames during Black Summer, and driving these increases were themes of blame and accountability. A discursive psychological approach was employed to explore the way these themes were constructed by the public across political, media, and individual spheres. It was found that the public consistently directed blame at individual actors such as Prime Minister Scott Morrison, while also managing a discursive repertoire which focused on the ideological forces behind climate change inaction. This study broadens the understanding of how the public make sense of climate change in regard to a catastrophic extreme weather event.