(Illustration by Michael Morgenstern)
When politicians and corporate leaders commit to becoming “carbon neutral by 2030,” or climate scientists warn that the Arctic could be ice-free by 2035, they are doing more than making predictions or setting targets. They are also constructing a shared vision of the future that shapes how the public understands the urgency, timeline, and stakes of climate change. A new paper analyzes the temporality that sits at the heart of discourses about climate change and how it shapes visions of the future distributed across society. Who projects what, how far out, and have those projections shifted over time?
Oscar Stuhler, an assistant professor of sociology at Northwestern University; Iddo Tavory, a professor of sociology at New York University; and Robin Wagner-Pacifici, a professor emerita at The New School for Social Research and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, examine “the structure of anticipation” in US public discourses on climate change and how it has shifted over the last two decades. To map how the future of climate change is imagined in American society, the researchers assembled a comprehensive dataset comprising nearly a quarter million news articles drawn from major national newspapers, print magazines, and digital outlets containing mentions of climate change between 2000 and 2021. Rather than sampling selectively, the researchers sought to capture the full range of voices and venues through which climate futures enter public discourse through journalism. They applied methods from computational linguistics to this archive to build a system that could categorize forward-looking statements, such as plans, commitments, warnings, and predictions, scattered across decades of coverage. The result was what the researchers call a “temporal landscape” of climate change: a systematic picture of how far into the future public discourse looks, which timelines dominate the conversation, and how the horizon of anticipation has shifted in 20 years of intensifying crisis.
This is “a compelling, rigorous example of how textual analysis can provide concrete insights into one of the defining sociological conditions of our time: climate change,” says Benjamin Bradlow, an assistant professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University. “This study helps us to understand the patterns that news journalism has constructed about climate change, making it neither an event nor a non-event, but what the authors call a ‘quasi-event.’ Precisely because the temporality of climate change is so unstable, it becomes difficult to use its temporality as a way of structuring action to mitigate and/or otherwise respond to it.”
The authors’ study yielded three findings. The first concerns how far into the future climate discourse looks when it comes to anticipated effects. Temporal horizons for climate-change impacts have diminished since 2000, but at a linear rate around a fixed reference point. Contrary to expectations that mounting scientific alarm would push projections closer to the present, the average reference point for climate change—the time at which climate change would transform the planet—remained stubbornly at roughly 2060. More striking still, vast stretches of the future—the decades between 2050 and 2100—barely registered in public conversation at all.
The second finding complicates this picture. When it comes to climate action rather than climate effects, the temporal horizon appears shorter, typically around 16 years out, and remains stable over the same period. Plans, commitments, and targets are framed using a similar timespan, regardless of how the broader conversation about climate consequences has changed.
In the third finding, the researchers document an expanding discourse of urgency, including demands to act now, warnings of imminent catastrophe, and language stripped of the measured future tense of prediction. Between 2000 and 2022, such expressions increased nearly twentyfold. But the surge did not unfold gradually. It followed the pattern that media researchers call “media storms” to refer to dramatic spikes triggered by events such as the 2020 California wildfires, followed by rapid declines. The alarm rises and then recedes, leaving the underlying temporal structure of the discourse largely unchanged.
“Perhaps the most striking thing about these
findings is the contrast between a drastic rise in expressions of urgency
(people demanding we act ‘now’) and the stability in explicit horizons,”
Stuhler says. “This might suggest that there are certain deep-seated
institutional rhythms that have been hard to change. It may also be the case
that certain actors try to ‘domesticate’ climate change into temporalities and
forms of action they already take for granted. Of course, even if temporal
horizons remain fixed, climate action can set more ambitious targets.”
Find the full study: Oscar Stuhler, Iddo Tavory, and Robin
Wagner-Pacifici, “Time and
Climate Change: U.S. Media Representations of Climate Actions, Horizons, and
Events (2000 to 2021),” American Sociological Review,
vol. 91, no. 1, 2026.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.