Treacherous Words : How Climate Change Conspiracy Sceptics use Conceptual Metaphors to Extinguish our Future

Abstract: This study examined the metaphors used in contemporary American conservative discourse between October 2018 and March 2019, focusing on material published by conservative think tanks (CTTs) and tweets made by Republican senators in relation to climate change. For the CTTs, a domain-specific corpus (36,388 words) was compiled and a smaller corpus (3967 words) was assembled based on 135 tweets. These datasets showed that conspiracy scepticism was the most common type of scepticism used to discredit climate change data, scientists and environmental policies. In addition, the datasets indicate that conservative agents frequently used metaphors of WAR, RELIGION, HEALTH, BUILDING, JOURNEY, WATER and PRODUCT to convey negative frames. These domains linked to the conceptual key LIFE IS A STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL and were presented in a moral context. In response to these findings it is suggested that the scientific community incorporate emotional language, metaphors and moral values when communicating environmental issues.