Anyone who knows anything about green movements, legislation, and popularization knows that the concept of framing is perhaps one of the most highly used tactics used by green activists and politicians to garner support for environmentalist causes. Basically, framing is the act of taking an issue and highlighting a more specific aspect of that issue to strike the interest and sympathy of supporters who might otherwise not have cared. Two of the most popular environmental frames are public health- based claims and economic claims.

A majority of the world's climate scientists have convinced themselves, and also a lot of laymen, some of whom have political power, that the Earth's climate is changing; that the change, from humanity's point of view, is for the worse; and that the cause is human activity, in the form of excessive emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. A minority, though, are skeptical. Some think that recent, well-grounded data suggesting the Earth's average temperature is rising are explained by natural variations in solar radiation, and that this trend may be coming to an end. Others argue that longer-term evidence that modern temperatures are higher than they have been for hundreds or thousands of years is actually too flaky to be meaningful.