Media and the Politics of Arctic Climate Change: When the Ice Breaks

The Arctic sea-ice reached record lows in 2007, and again in 2012. In the international news media, these moments were reflected via striking images of polar bears, crumbling ice chunks and the use of more alarmist metaphors about global climate change. Through these narratives, and despite the periodic disappearance of climate change from media reports due to issue fatigue, a sharper narrative of climate change has entered public discourse: a new global reality where the future is no longer a given.

Going beyond media studies as well as descriptive or highly scientific accounts of the impacts of climate change in the Arctic, this book explores how both historical and contemporary mediations, scientific narratives and satellite technology simultaneously capture and reconstruct this new reality of the Anthropocene, where human activities shape the planet. By highlighting the linkages between science, media, environmental change and geopolitics, the informed contributors to the volume invite the reader to reflect on what is local and what is global in today’s connected mediatized world.

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1. Contents:
   Globalization, Climate Change and the Media: An Introduction – Miyase Christensen, Annika E. Nilsson and Nina Wormbs
2. Arctic Climate Change and the Media: The News Story That Was – Miyase Christensen
3. Eyes on the Ice: Satellite Remote Sensing and the Narratives of Visualized Data – Nina Wormbs
4. An Ice-Free Arctic Sea? The Science of Sea Ice and Its Interests – Sverker Sörlin and Julia Lajus
5. Signals from a Noisy Region – Annika E. Nilsson and Ralf Döscher
6. A Question of Scale: Local versus Pan-Arctic Impacts from Sea-Ice Change – Henry P. Huntington
7. Under the Ice: Exploring the Arctic’s Energy Resources, 1898–1985 – Dag Avango and Per Högselius
8. Changing Arctic – Changing World – Miyase Christensen, Annika E. Nilsson and Nina Wormbs