Explicit and implicit ethical issues in the reports of the intergovernmental panel on climate change: The example of the "tipping points" metaphor

Abstract

Climate change is a both a cause of concern (in the English-speaking world and beyond) and a wide-ranging field of research, situated at the crossroads between science and technology, economics and politics. It is linked to major socio-scientific controversies, in which issues linked with ethics play a major role, from a deontic as well as an epistemic perspective. The main objective in this article is to explore the ethical points of view expressed in the Assessment Reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) both explicitly, through the occurrences of the words "ethics", "morals" and their derivatives, and implicitly, through the use of the metaphorical terms contained in the IPCC reports. Terms based on metaphors constitutive of climate change theories are focused on, in order to examine in which ways they can express ethical values implicitly. This perspective is developed with the example of "tipping points".