Creativity, complexity and ‘carbon compounds’: Tracing the meaning of climate change in the English media  Brigitte Nerlich (Institute for Science and Society, University of Nottingham) Climate scientists and social scientists are grappling with complex and dynamic feedback mechanisms that operate between economy, society and the ecosystem. Language is part of this dynamic system and has developed a dynamics of its own with relation to climate change. Whereas the 20th century was the century of ‘the gene’ whose meaning has been studied by many social scientists, linguists and metaphor analysts, the 21st century will be the century of ‘carbon’ whose meaning still needs to be studied, preferably before we enter the era of ‘a post-carbon society’. There is what one may call an explosion of information around climate change. In the English speaking world, advice on how to reduce one’s ‘carbon footprint’ is provided almost daily in newspapers, adverts, books, and on websites. This explosion of information is mirrored by the explosion of lexical creativity around ‘carbon’, as much of this advice is framed by using ‘carbon compounds’ - lexical combinations of at least two roots - such as ‘carbon finance’, ‘carbon sinner’, or ‘low carbon diet’. These are only some of the numerous lexical, discursive and figurative clusters that have emerged recently around 'carbon' as the hub, especially in the media. A whole new language is evolving that needs to be monitored and investigated from a linguistic point of view, especially a cognitive linguistic point of view, as many of these compounds provide new ways of seeing, perceiving or evaluating climate change, introduce new ontologies and new ways of categorisation. This lecture will report on a project that tracks the emergence and proliferation of carbon compounds in traditional media and in blogs. Whereas those who studied the meaning of the gene examined a small number of potent metaphors and study their use and spread in the media and public discourse, the challenge we face in our research is to study the use and spread of an immense and ever expanding cohort of compounds. In this lecture I can only provide a brief overview of the emergence and spread of some carbon compounds in English, before homing in on one carbon compound that has structured one major controversy in debates about climate change mitigation, namely, carbon offsetting. The compound I will use to trace some parts of this complex debate is ‘carbon indulgence’, a multifaceted compound which has meanings that are both metaphorically and metonymically grounded and has become embedded in a variety of semantic fields, discourses, arguments and debates in both the older and the newer media. The lecture is based on a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. My co-worker on the project is Dr. Nelya Koteyko.