When Climate Change Hits Home: Natural Disasters and Climate Rhetoric in the European Parliament

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Abstract

Climate change is often cast as a psychologically distant threat, diffuse in cause, remote in its worst consequences, and weak in its everyday experiential signal. This paper asks whether nearby extreme weather changes how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) frame climate change: not whether they discuss it more, but whether they present its impacts as proximate, near in space and time, attached to identifiable European communities, rather than as distant problems for faraway people and future generations. || The central argument distinguishes the meteorological signal of extreme weather from the social-impact narrative that disaster recording produces. Heatwaves that were meteorologically real but never crystallised into a recorded disaster are followed by a gradual shift toward more proximate and more specific climate framing among nearby MEPs, surfacing with a lag of two to three years. Heatwaves that did produce a recorded disaster, the kind of recorded-disaster set a conventional disaster-politics design would analyse, produce no comparable response. What activates legislators’ climate framing is the regional footprint of a hot summer travelling through weather coverage and lived experience, not the discrete-event impact narrative that dominates standard disaster registers, and it works on how climate is narrated, not how much. The political signal of climate change, on this evidence, reaches elite rhetoric through the slow metabolism of climate-coded weather rather than through the acute focusing events the literature has emphasised.