Researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder found increased use of hedging language in climate change-related reports, as more reporters try to be careful with their wording.

"Hedging" or "vague" language is an important feature of academic writing in which writers use cautious words on sensitive subjects.

Adriana Bailey, lead author of the study and a doctoral student of CU's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, and her colleagues compared climate change reporting of two U.S. newspapers and two Spanish newspapers.

The researchers analyzed articles related to climate change published by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, El Mundo and El Pais. These articles were published between 2001 and 2007 during the time that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) panel released its third and fourth reports.

The analysts focused their search for words that may promote vagueness such as "almost" or "speculative."The researchers considered the context of the words to gain internal validity. They also counted the hedging language that directly spoke of the physical science evidence of climate change or the process used by the IPCC in collecting data for their reports.

The team found out that in 2001, the U.S. newspapers recorded a total of 189 hedging words for every 10,000 words printed paper. The Spanish newspapers, on the other hand, recorded 107 words per 10,000 words. In addition, in 2007, the US newspapers recorded 267 hedging words and phrases per 10,000 words and 136 words for the Spanish papers.

Results of the study excluded the latest report published by the IPCC which talked about the negative effects of climate change on cities. Bailey expressed her interest to conduct the same analysis for the fifth and latest assessment.

"Unfortunately, that's part of the slowness of academic publishing," Bailey said to CU News. "We actually completed the study a year ago, ahead of the most recent IPCC report. "We were hoping it would come out before. So it goes."

Further details of the study were published in the June 9 issue of the Environmental Communication.