Divergence in Climate Change Communication: LLM-Based Evidence from the IPCC and the Press

Sebastian Galiani, Franco Mettola La Giglia and Raul A. Sosa

No 35216, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Public summaries of IPCC climate assessments lean toward the more severe end of the technical evidence. The pattern appears at two stages: the IPCC’s lead authors and member governments produce the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) from the Technical Summary (TS), and newspapers then cover the SPM. We use LLMs to score about 114,000 matched claim pairs from all six Assessment Reports (1990 to 2023) and ten major US and UK outlets. Both stages systematically shift toward the more severe end of the source while staying inside the IPCC’s accepted scientific ranges. The shift comes mainly from emphasizing higher-impact magnitudes within reported ranges, less from uncertainty compression, and almost none from selecting worst-case emissions scenarios. Left- and right-leaning outlets show similar patterns.

JEL-codes: D83 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05
Note: DEV
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35216.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35216

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35216
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().