Speaking of the weather

Climate change raises the stakes of human communication to the existential level of the species and the planet. This article presents an empirical study of how users make sense of climate change as they traverse the contemporary digital media environment. Departing from a baseline survey and drawing on the tradition of reception analysis, focus groups of different ages and with various political and religious affiliations identified distinctive themes, narratives, and arguments regarding the natural environment as represented and received across different media. Climate change appears out of scale – incommensurable not only with established media formats and genres but also with common frames of human cognition and communication. In conclusion, the article addresses climate change from the perspective of human rights and social justice, under the recent heading of climate justice.