The purpose of this article is to show how the battle for the citizens’ opinions and actions regarding climate change has been played out via language, i.e. via written documents or oral statements, in the media in the U.S. and in Sweden. The results show the importance of language and discourse in our understanding of science and of the relations of power between consensus scientist and contrarians. They also show how these groups have a different resonance in the media as a result of the media logic, the journalistic narrative form and the journalists’ professional ideologies as well as of the journalists’ and ordinary peoples’ lack of knowledge when it comes to the conditions and restrictions of science.