Visual education and climate change: The invention of global warming

Abstract Using the covers of the reports available on the website of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, working with the Foucauldian discourse analysis, we conducted our study by verifying the emergence of three statements: the globalization of the warming process; the dramatization of climate change and its effects; and the risks of warming to different types of populations. Our objective was to suspend the judgment on the object global warming and, from the surface of its statements, to evidence it as a social construct, fraught with relations of knowledge and power. The description of these statements can evidence them as a social production, in which the discursive control occurs by the emotionality and the reconstruction of scientific conceptions. This process points to the pedagogical potential of these statements, since readers can grasp concepts, position themselves and act socially in response to the problems and solutions conveyed in these documents.