Where is the urgency in the climate change discourse?

Beginning in 2018, Greta Thunberg, the youthful climate change activist, has become a symbolic leader of a new movement that repeatedly has called on global leaders to ‘face the climate emergency’.The following considers the question of the reverberations of their recent actions and those of others (including Extinction Rebellion and the flight shame or flygskam movement) by inquiring into the extent to which the climate change discourse over the past few years on Twitter has become generally suffused with urgency. We employ network analysis techniques that detect distinctive spheres or communities of users in the discourse, and subsequently linguistic analyses that detect expressions of urgency within them. We also consider the question of urgency talk as alarmism or eco-doom. In all, we found in the leading discourses the language of ‘action’ and even ‘crisis’ have appeared among the more pronounced, whilst alarmism only appears in the deniers' community. That is, we report a recent uptick in urgency talk without associated alarmism.