Australia, New Zealand, India, United Kingdom, and United States newspapers from 2000-2015 were analyzed for global climate change (GCC) news framing. The combination of the time range, cross-national approach, and detail on framing is rare in research on GCC communication. This article reports on diversity across news frames, attends to some cross-national differences, and resituates the question of journalistic balancing in GCC reporting. Political framing along with environmental effects and science frames were dominant both cross-nationally and over time. Less prevalent were frames that more directly linked GCC to the economy, causal factors, and the lifeworld. Habermas’ legitimation crisis theory is used to bring attention to the significance of observable imbalance in reporting. Newspaper accounts situated GCC more as a crisis of the political sphere while deemphasizing economic or lifestyle causes and their significance for the private or public lifeworld. The findings are intended to inform social science studies of GCC as well as, potentially, informing journalistic practice in GCC and other environmental reporting.