Disasters and Discourse: How Newspaper Framing Shapes the Political Salience of Climate Change

How do newspapers frame extreme weather events (EWEs), and does framing differ systematically by event type? Extreme weather attribution is a rapidly growing field of climate science, yet media coverage often diverges from scientific understanding, shaping public perceptions of whether EWEs are human-induced crises or naturally occurring phenomena. This paper presents a corpus-based computational text analysis of approximately 18,000 articles published in The Guardian between 1997 and 2022, covering hurricanes (n ≈ 10,000) and droughts (n ≈ 8,000). We test the null hypothesis that there is no difference in narrative framing of different extreme weather events in relation to climate change. Using a six-category theory-driven keyword occurrence matrix covering climate change attribution, severity and damage, social inequality, policy response, emotional and psychological responses, and knowledge discourse derived from IPCC attribution research, we compare framing patterns across the two corpora. We find strong grounds to reject the null hypothesis: drought articles are more frequently framed in terms of climate change attribution and human causation, while hurricane coverage is more strongly associated with economic damage framing. These asymmetries have significant implications for the political economy of climate information, public risk perception, and the governance of climate adaptation.