Media and Climate Change Observatory Special Issue 2020: A Review of Media Coverage of Climate Change and Global Warming in 2020

2020 has been another critical year in which climate change and global warming fought for media attention amid competing interests in other stories, events and issues around the globe. Yet, climate change and global warming garnered coverage through stories manifesting through primary and often intersecting, political, economic, scientific, cultural as well as ecological and meteorological themes. As the year 2020 has drawn to a close, new vocabularies have pervaded the centers of our consciousness: ‘flattening the curve’, systemic racism, ‘pods’, hydroxycholoroquine, ‘social distancing’, quarantines, ‘remote learning’, essential and front-line workers, ‘superspreaders’, P.P.E., ‘doomscrolling’, and Zoom. This past year has been one like no other, where members of the Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) team – like many others around the world – have lost family to COVID-19.