ABSTRACT While climate change grows as an environmental and societal emergency, misinformation about climate change continues to hinder necessary action. An important step towards neutralizing climate misinformation is identifying the misleading rhetorical techniques used to confuse the public. We expand on previous critical thinking research, developing a detailed methodology for deconstructing and analyzing real-world misinformation. Applying our extended methodology to a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarian claims, we find reasoning fallacies in all analyzed claims. The most common fallacies were slothful induction, cherry picking, and oversimplification. Contrarian claims regarding climate solutions, while more nuanced than explicit science denial, are still rife with misleading fallacies. 91% ofanalyzed contrarian claims required hidden assumptions which committed reasoning fallacies, underscoring the limitations of conventional fact-checking. The ubiquity and complexity of misinformation in online spaces and public discussion necessitates holistic, interdisciplinary solutions that can be scaled to meet the immensity of the problem. This research is an example of such an interdisciplinary approach, building on existing natural language processing research with critical thinking, climate science, and climate solutions scholarship. Our results act as a resource for countering contrarian claims, particularly useful to automated applications that detect and fact-check online climate misinformation in real time.

ABSTRACT Media discourses on environmental disasters play a crucial role in shaping public opinion, perceptions of the disaster, policy formation, and management strategies. This study employed a computational approach to examine the African media agenda and sentiments surrounding flood disasters in Ghana over 20 years (2004–2024). Findings uncovered media discourses around the complex climate change paradox, government disaster preparedness, and risk management, as well as rural/urban practices and their effects. Results also indicated that the majority of coverage was positive (69.45%), whereas less than half (30.55%) was negative, with no neutral coverage. In addition, the study observed positive sentiments regarding the coverage of the proactive steps taken by the government and its agencies in responding to the disaster. In contrast, negative sentiments focused on the loss of lives and the destruction of property. The study discussed the role of cultural norms in these findings to contribute to the praxis of media and environmental disaster communication.

ABSTRACT Disabled people and caregivers face distinct risks in a changing climate, yet their voices remain underrepresented in climate discourse and emergency preparedness. This qualitative study explores how disabled people and caregivers perceive climate change threats through the lens of Protection Motivation Theory. Eight focus groups (N = 58) revealed that participants view climate change as a personal, immediate, and life-threatening issue. They expressed acute anxiety over extreme weather, power outages, and evacuation barriers, with many questioning first responders’ ability to meet their needs. Participants also reported low self-efficacy, citing feeling overlooked and excluded from mainstream sustainability efforts. Findings indicate a pressing need for inclusive, accessible, and empowering climate communication strategies and emergency planning. This study highlights the urgent call for co-created interventions that restore trust, build efficacy, and center the lived experiences of disability communities in climate resilience efforts.

ABSTRACT This study examines Modern Cloth Nappy (MCN) Facebook Groups as digital spaces where sustainable parenting practices, maternal leadership, and everyday climate action and environmental care can be cultivated. Drawing on qualitative focus groups with 11 women who lead Australian-based MCN communities, I explore how mothers collectively support alternative infant hygiene practices and engage with broader practices of sustainability and climate responsibility. The analysis demonstrates how environmental care is organized and sustained through mothers’ digital caring labor during the transition to parenthood. It shows how MCN Facebook Groups support the ongoing use of cloth nappies by circulating practical knowledge, normalizing flexible and pragmatic approaches, and coordinating collective efforts to address barriers such as cost, access, and confidence. Conceptualized as hybrid activist collectives, these groups function as spaces of connective action where everyday parenting practices are collectively maintained and extended through peer support, community leadership, and informal advocacy. The study also highlights the precarity of contemporary digital infrastructures, showing how reliance on commercial social media platforms both enables and constrains community-led environmental care. Overall, the paper contributes to research on environmental communication by foregrounding mothers’ digital caring labor and community leadership as vital, though often overlooked, forms of everyday climate action.

ABSTRACT As climate change intensifies, extreme heat events are becoming more frequent and severe, posing growing risks to human health, ecosystems, and infrastructure. In a large-scale survey experiment (N = 3,960 U.S. adults) we examine how the emotional valence of imagery – negative, neutral, or positive – in social media-based news about heat waves influences worry about heat waves, beliefs about climate change’s role in extreme heat, and willingness to share information about heat waves. Results show that identical messages accompanied by either negative or neutral imagery increased worry about heatwaves and strengthened beliefs that climate change is exacerbating heat waves, whereas the same messages accompanied by positive imagery did not. The influence of different images varied within each emotional valence category, highlighting the importance of stimulus sampling. These findings underscore the importance of strategic visual framing in climate communication, especially in multimodal, digital contexts.

ABSTRACT In this introductory essay, guest editor Hanna E. Morris outlines the theoretical and methodological contributions of the Special Issue (SI) Backlash, Borders, and Bunkers: Antidemocratic Politics and Climate Change Communication. The essay begins with a reflection on the recent trend of climate policy rollbacks across borders since the start of “Trump 2.0,” despite most people wanting their governments to do more to address climate change. Predominant social science theories of polarization, populism, and disinformation are failing to adequately explain these rollbacks. This is because these theories, this essay argues, often deflect blame onto “the people” at the expense of reckoning with the deeply inequitable structures of power that effectively criminalize and delegitimize historically marginalized groups and activists. This deflection, in turn, sidelines justice-oriented responses to climate change that fundamentally question technocratic, market, and engineering “fixes” that keep asymmetrical structures of power in place. This SI showcases the kind of critical climate change communication scholarship that is needed to interrogate these “fixes” and move past limited theories to open paths for more nuanced scholarship and robustly democratic responses to climate change that see “the people” as they really are – as complex subjects with diverse knowledges, lived experiences, and expertise.

ABSTRACT This article examines the speculative climate futures fabricated by population-focused environmental charities and non-profit organizations, to explore how they draw on NGO Science Fiction (SF) capital and eco-emotions to promote neo-Malthusian ideas and interventions. Using a demopopulationist lens, the article focuses on scenarios, interactive media tools, audiovisual media and texts, and the contemporary discursive and affective tools used to propose family planning as a low-cost climate mitigation strategy. It contributes toward scholarship on demopopulationism by turning attention to SF capital and eco-emotions. The significance of this study is that it builds on critical feminist scholarship which documents the violence of population alarmist “solutions” to climate crisis to consider the role of the speculative and eco-emotions in what I term the “populationist climate futures industry”. With populationist arguments once again on the rise alongside pronatalism, it is vital to be attentive to how the populationist climate futures industry promotes neo-Malthusian ideas and interventions, co-opts the language of reproductive and environmental justice, and mobilizes eco-emotions. It is critical for the field of climate communication to attend to these ecofascist visions, the role played by the speculative in the circulation of populationist ideas across media and discourses, and vital to begin to understand how eco-emotions – a central concern in contemporary climate activism – can be weaponized for reactionary ends.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the present-day, post-2016 conjuncture of rising authoritarianism and reactionary politics through an analysis of news media and the symbolic criminalization of climate campaigners, Indigenous land and water defenders, and climate justice activists across major publications of record in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Drawing upon Stuart Hall’s influential work on media fearmongering and Othering and his “conjunctural analysis” approach, we examine national news media representations of climate protests with an eye towards wider, political-economic contexts and conditions. This approach allows us to glean insights into a period of profound change while identifying discursive mechanisms of power within and across borders. Through a historically contextualized and cross-national analysis of news reports and opinion commentaries on recent climate protest events, we ultimately reveal how prominent national news outlets in Australia, Canada, and the United States are positioning protesters, and particularly historically marginalized groups who are a part of climate movements, as deviant, criminal, and threatening to the stability and security of the nation-state. We argue that this is significant because these derogatory representations are circulating across borders at the same time as states are specifically targeting and outlawing political, anti-fossil fuel, and infrastructure-oriented forms of climate protest.

ABSTRACT Focusing on popular climate change images obtained from major Chinese search engines, this study used a combination of computer vision and human coding to analyze the degree of individualization, localization, visual context, and their relationships in the images. Results show that the degree of individualization in Chinese climate change images is relatively low, with less than 10 percent of the images containing humans and only 2.66 percent containing recognizable faces, and foreigners appear more often among human images. This suggests that climate change is not yet seen by the Chinese as a sufficiently local threat. According to the analysis of the character context, visually, most Chinese people are arranged indoors, focusing on showing them attending meetings or giving speeches, while foreigners are relatively more present in outdoor natural and outdoor man-made environments. This shows that the localization and individualization of people in China's climate change images have not been achieved.