In this article we explore, from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the resources of the system of MODALITY that realize the gradation of stances expressed by the authorial voices inserted in news articles, regarding the urgency of facing the drought affecting the central-northern area of Chile. From a corpus of five news articles published on digital platforms in the period 2019-2021, we approach the analysis form a trinocular perspective (Halliday, 1994). The focus lies on the interpersonal patterns of meanings, mapped by the ENGAGEMENT subsystem of the APPRAISAL system in interaction with resources from the GRADUATION subsystem. The analysis of the corpus allows us to visualize that the graduation of dialogic perspectives in the voices of experts contributes to modeling their judgments and attitudes regarding climate change on scales of obligation carried out through the prominence of evaluative micro-maneuvers of [contract: deny] + [contract: demand] and [expand: consider] + [contract: demand].