Changing concepts of greenhouse gas expressions: Discursive specialization in parliamentary discourses on climate change

Abstract

Global environmental change has provoked changes in how humans experience and perceive their relationship to nature. Such conceptual changes can be observed through language use, and specifically lexical change. This paper investigates how such changes manifest through an analysis of how the terms ‘greenhouse gas’, ‘climate gas’, ‘carbon’, and ‘CO2’ are used in the Norwegian parliament in the time period 1999–2019. We observe a discursive specialization where different discursive dimensions are linked to the different expressions, corresponding to different framings of climate change, including technological, economic, and moral perspectives. Importantly, there is a shift over time where the discursive division of labor between the expressions is consolidated and new framings emerge. We show that a more refined language of GHG expressions is a discursive resource that contributes to making sense of the multiple ways that climate change impacts society.