Prolepsis and Rendering Futures in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports

TL;DR

This paper explores how future climate scenarios are rhetorically framed in IPCC reports to influence policy decisions.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel approach combining figural studies and Rhetorical Genre Studies to analyze anticipatory arguments in IPCC reports.

Findings

Prolepsis is used in IPCC reports to render future climate impacts in the present for persuasive effect.

The analysis reveals how anticipatory arguments are constructed through rhetorical and genre-specific patterns.

This approach offers new insights into how scientific findings are rhetorically shaped for policy audiences.

Abstract

Rhetorical figures of speech provide important analytical frames to chart how arguments operate within genres and within genre ecologies. Varieties of the figure prolepsis allow for the rendering of future time or fact in the present, which can be a powerful rhetorical inducement toward social and political action. In this article, we examine how anticipatory arguments drawn from complex data shape a key genre for public and policy-facing work on the climate crisis—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Synthesis Report’s (SYR) Statement for Policy Makers (SPM). We examine how the rhetorical figure of prolepsis operates within this genre to understand the anticipatory arguments and logics emerging from the synthesis of scientific findings and their reporting. Pairing figural studies and Rhetorical Genre Studies, we further offer an approach to investigate how these patterned operations of language might intersect in their rhetorical workings.

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