Scams, Hoaxes, and Liberal Fraud As Climate Change Denier Commonplaces: Conspiracy Topoi and Far-Right Ideologies in the Digital Rhetoric of Watts up with That

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Scams, hoaxes, and liberal fraud as climate change denier commonplaces: Conspiracy topoi and far-right ideologies in the digital rhetoric of Watts Up With That

Denise Tillery University of Nevada, Las Vegas ~ [email protected]

Emma Frances Bloomfield University of Nevada, Las Vegas ~ [email protected]

Abstract

Climate change deniers are increasingly turning to online spaces in order to connect with others who share their beliefs and to critique scientific information about climate change. Recent studies have examined the role of digital communication and affordances in tracing the activities and rhetorics of climate change deniers. This study continues this important research into how climate change denial is disseminated, shared, and performed online through a multi-methodological analysis. Examining comments on the Facebook page of Watts Up With That (WUWT), we analyze the rhetorical deployment of conspiracy theories and far-right ideologies as inventional resources for spreading climate change denial. We also ran concordance and collocate analysis to analyze the most frequent words used by commenters and what words modified important scientific terms such as “data.” Our findings show that in response to the science of environmentalism, WUWT members employ ideological arguments rooted in economics, national autonomy, opposition to immigration, and gun rights as extensions of anti-government and anti-science conspiracy. For WUWT members, conservative values and ideologies seem inextricably connected to their denial of climate change and their association of climate change with liberal fraud and government hoaxes. Both our quantitative and rhetorical analyses located appeals to “hyperrationality” as inventional resources to discredit mainstream climate science and claim the rational higher ground for skeptics. By locating common features and terms within climate change denial discourse, we can better understand the most frequent practices of these groups and also the variety of resources they use to make sense of the environment, environmentalists, and climate scientists. In addition, we can draw conclusions about the specific characteristics of far-right U.S. discourses on climate change as constellations of conservative ideologies.

In order to find solutions and avenues to refute science denial discourse, we must first understand the roots of denialism and how denialist communities form and are validated, particularly in online platforms. One of the most pressing and dangerous forms of anti-science discourse is climate change denial, which threatens the long-term wellbeing of both the planet and humanity. While climate change denial is largely absent in technical and scientific communities (Ceccarelli, 2011) and attitudes seem to be shifting optimistically in public discourse (Funk & Hefferon, 2018; Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, Feinberg, & Rosenberg, 2015), it continues to flourish in political rhetoric (e.g., Antonio & Brulle, 2011; Hardin & Moser, 2019: Matthews, 2017) and digital spaces (e.g., Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019; Dunlap & McCright, 2010; Matthews, 2015; Sharman, 2014). The turn from technical communities to public ones is not only a feature of climate change deniers. Science deniers such as creationists and anti-vaccine advocates have also turned to public outlets and online spaces for recognition and validation. Because of the lasting impression that science denial rhetoric can have, it is important for scholars to critique its emergence in its various forms (Bloomfield, 2017; Hoerl & Kelly, 2012) in order to defend the “current scientific orthodoxy” (Ceccarelli, 2011, p. 199). In this inquiry, we focus on digital communities of climate change deniers as a “new rhetorical landscape” that provides “visibility and proliferation” to climate denial beliefs (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2018, pp. 23-24). As Dunlap (2013) argued, in order to combat climate skeptics, “more research is needed, especially on . . . the impact of skeptical and denial blogs” and their role in climate communication (p. 695).

In addition to considering the medium of the Internet as promoting climate denial rhetoric, we also attend to the ideologies, political, economic, religious, and otherwise, that intertwine with climate denial to promote conspiracy ideations. To do so, we analyzed information collected by BirdSong Analytics from the public Facebook page of Watts Up With That (WUWT), a prominent player in “climate denial blogosphere” (Dunlap & McCright, 2010, p. 253; see also Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019). The Watts Up With That (WUWT) Facebook page transfers information from the WUWT blog operated by Anthony Watts and has, at the time of this writing, 12,583 likes and 12,326 followers. In what follows, we turn to previous literature that examines the intersection of conservative ideologies, conspiracy, and climate change, explain our methodology in examining WUWT’s Facebook group content, and analyze prominent argument themes and rhetorical strategies. We hope that a multi-methodological dive into the rhetoric of WUWT members will help environmental and communication scholars understand more deeply from where these associations occur in order to respond more effectively to those arguments when they emerge. Of particular importance to the present study is how the prominence of these reactionary groups and their discourse provides the voices of primarily white, male an outsized impact on policy and media circulation.

Other scholars have explored the connection between ideology and climate denial in offline spaces. For example, Gauchat (2012) used polling data to conclude that both conservative affiliations and religious attendance increased people’s skepticism of science as an authority, including over matters of the environment. Hmielowski and colleagues (2014) noted that politically-slanted media have an agenda setting function, whereby “the more Americans use conservative media, the less certain they are that global warming is happening” (p. 878). The change in beliefs is attributed to the lack of trust in climate scientists perpetuated by conservative media (Hmielowski, Feldman, Myers, Leiserowitz, & Maibach, 2014). Collomb (2014) noted that the reasons often given to support climate denial are related to conservative and libertarian policies including an “opposition to regulation” and appeals to the “American way of life” that is largely capitalistic (p. 20).

Linking ideologies to conspiracy, van der Linden (2015) summarized previous research that conservatives are more likely to hold “conspiratorial views about global warming” (p. 173). There are

Presented at Waterlines: Confluence and Hope through Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Vancouver, Canada, June 17-21, 2019 https://theieca.org/coce2019 Page 3 of 17 many examples of conservative politicians echoing conspiracy rhetoric. From the infamous cover of Senator James Inhofe’s book The Great Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, which equates climate science with the accuracy of crystal ball readings (Bloomfield & Lake, 2015), to Donald Trump’s tweet that climate change was “created by and for the Chinese” (Ohlheiser, 2016), conspiracy rhetoric and conservatism frequently reinforce one another. The links between conservatism and conspiracy have also been established by scholars such as Bricker (2013), who argued that the Climategate conspiracy was particularly resonate with “conservative ideologies” because it tapped into “existing anti-elitism” held by conservative audiences (pp. 226, 224). The lasting importance of Climategate was also measured by Leiserowitz and colleagues (2013) who noted that the conspiracy gravely affected “trust in scientists,” especially among those who had “a strongly individualistic worldview or political conservative ideology” (p. 818).

Some might dismiss conspiracies as fringe beliefs with few real consequences, but studies show otherwise. van der Linden (2015) argued that exposure to climate change conspiracies both negatively affected pro-environmental behavior and belief in a scientific consensus about climate change (p. 173). In van der Linden’s (2015) study, exposure to just a 2 minute video discussing climate change as a conspiracy led to these effects, prompting his conclusion that contact with conspiracy theories, even if “brief expos[ures]” (p. 173) can have incredibly harmful societal impacts. We propose continuing this important work by exploring how conservative ideologies and conspiracies are deployed as argumentative resources in the discourse of everyday climate deniers. Instead of examining the discourse of established climate change denial groups, we examine the discourse of individuals through the WUWT community. Such an approach can help scholars avoid the rhetorical trap of treating climate deniers as “monolithic and homogenous” (Cagle & Herndl, 2015, p. 4) and instead acknowledge “the multifaceted, complex, and nuanced opposition” still waged against climate science (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019, p. 32). Furthermore, our approach adds to scholarly knowledge on climate change denial rhetoric by providing a look into how conservatism and conspiracy ideations are intertwined in the performance of a climate denial identity.

Method

Public discourse is increasingly occurring in online spaces, and any study of digital media must account for a variety of activities and relationships enabled by the online platform, in addition to the sheer volume of discourse available for analysis. Koteyko (2015) argues that an understanding of audiences’ cultural, political, and socioeconomic conditions, along with their ability to use technological resources “is increasingly necessary for public engagement with science research in our age of digital communication technologies” (p. 184). Koteyko (2013; 2015) uses a method called corpus-assisted discourse analysis, based on Partington (2010), which is characterized by “attention to context -- both the situational parameters and the broader sociocultural and political context in which texts making up corpora are embedded” (Koteyko 2015, p. 188). According to Koteyko (2015), corpus-assisted discourse analysis and webometrics (data from websites regarding use and interactions) allow us to attend to textual levels (including concordances, or measures of word frequency, and collocates, or measures of the frequency at which words occur together), human-computer interaction, and broad situational and social parameters (p. 188). In our study, we study the two elements of textual levels (concordances and collocates) of WUWT discourse through the textual analysis program AntConc and the engagement data (likes, reactions, and number of comments) through BirdSong Analytics. In

Presented at Waterlines: Confluence and Hope through Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Vancouver, Canada, June 17-21, 2019 https://theieca.org/coce2019 Page 4 of 17 addition, we use the data retrieved from BirdSong Analytics to find rhetorical patterns and argument themes.

The rhetorical analysis of the WUWT comments and content is based on viewing WUWT’s discourse as part of a larger constellation of anti-environmental, skeptical, and conservative discourse present online. Instead of viewing these argumentative features independently of one another, a constellation approach emphasizes “the recurring patterns of argument interactions” that “heighten [each topoi’s] argumentative force” when acting together (Palczewski, 2019, p. 87). In her analysis of arguments against women’s suffrage, Cate Palczewski (2019) argued that “recurring arguments are not merely different topoi or lines of argument but, instead, seem to supercharge each other while providing a silhouette of the motive behind the arguments” (p. 87). In other words, argument patterns are not coincidental; they occur because they are linked to underlying ideologies and motivations. In tracing the constellation of arguments that WUWT members use, we attend not only to the variety of resources that are used contra climate science, but also how these concepts “intersect” (Palczewski, 2019, p. 91). At this intersection, we can locate identity performances that constrain WUWT members to adopt or even entertain traditional climate science messages and understand in more detail the ideological obstacles in place to climate change communication. In other words, when attempting to change the minds of climate skeptics, much more is actually under discussion, such as politics, economics, national security, social issues, and identity. Taking these arguments into consideration provides a more productive look at the maintenance and proliferation of climate denial online and how it operates to create inclusive communities resistant to argumentative engagement.

Concordances and Collocates

Given the enormous quantity of data gathered by Birdsong Analytics, amounting to some 489,200 words, with an average of 25 total reactions per post, some “distant reading” method is useful for providing a cross-check against our readers’ identification of key themes. The program AntConc was used to generate a concordance sorted by frequency. Once frequently used words were removed (based on a commonly used “stoplist”) and terms generated by Facebook metadata were also removed (including months, days of the week, and proper names of members), a list of the top 100 most frequently occurring words was used to generate colocated terms.

Within the ten most frequently occurring words, “climate” and “change” were the top two, along with “warming” and “global.” Science-themed words figured prominently, including “science” (#6), co-- CO2-- (#7) and “data” (#9). This finding corresponds with the rhetorical themes identified in the following sections, especially the theme of “hyperrationality.” Each of the top 20 most frequent words has some relation to scientific evidence, until entry 20, “money” (see Table 1). This list demonstrates the strong emphasis among these Facebook commenters on appearing to engage with the scientific arguments about climate change, although the collocates, key words in context, and topical analysis suggest a lack of meaningful engagement with scientific data.

Table 1: Twenty most frequent terms in dataset

Rank Frequency Word 11 4247 climate 30 1808 change 34 1671 warming 35 1634 global 38 1606 science 43 1079 co 44 1066 data 45 1050 people 46 945 ice 49 866 energy 53 782 temperature 54 747 world 56 740 time 57 619 models 60 584 scientists 61 583 ocean 62 572 earth 63 534 sea 64 517 money 65 499 power

When the collocates are sorted by statistical likelihood (i.e., other words that occur primarily in association with the first term), collocates with the term “data” include terms “untampered/tampered,” “selectivity,” “interpreted,” and “omitted.” These modifiers suggest a trend of skepticism towards scientific findings and linguistically modifying their traditional interpretation, or more problematically, a concerted effort to discourage trust in scientific findings as well as scientific institutions such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This association in the dataset seems to confirm Goertzel’s (2010) analysis of how conspiracy theories undermine science and demonstrates that what looks like engagement with scientific evidence may likely be a spurious attempt to undermine faith in science. In other words, what may appear to be engagement in scientific debate on the surface is in actuality refutation and modification of scientific information. When collocates of the term “data” are sorted by frequency, the fourth most frequent term (after “temperature,” “climate,” and “satellite”) is

“experimental.” The “key words in context” list for “data” and “experimental” also suggests a frequent line of argument climate change deniers use: the challenge for scientists to show experimental data over or instead of computer models (see Figure 1). This collocate demonstrates an unwillingness to accept climate science predictive modeling and thus an unwillingness to accept mainstream climate science conclusions.

As the list in Table 1 demonstrates, the most frequent terms not associated specifically with science include “people,” “money,” and “power.” The occurrence of these last two terms supports our identification of ways that WUWT members connect environmental topics with ideological arguments. The “key words in context” for “money” include phrases such as “it’s all about the money,” and consistent themes of wasting taxpayer money or references to profit by politicians, bureaucrats, and otherwise undefined “special interests.” The term “power” yields more ambiguous results, as it occurs in both the sense of electrical power (comments on nuclear power, solar power, and so forth) and the sense of political power. “Money and power” occurs several times, linking WUWT members’ views of climate science as a way for people to achieve money and power. One occurrence of “power” refers to the atmosphere of the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, which the commenter described as “a nightmarish situation which most people can somehow relate to, although strongly surreal. With an ethereal, ‘evil’, omnipotent power floating just beyond the senses.” As the topical analysis section describes, “power” in the second sense is poorly defined in these contexts, but WUWT members seem to ascribe power to their political opponents, which would be any scientist, politician, or public figure who discusses anthropogenic global warming as a problem.

The lists of words by frequency and the preliminary collocate data offer validation for our topical analysis. The data also demonstrates the sheer number of occurrences of science-related words, which also further confirms our previous finding that WUWT and similar Facebook groups provide a source for scientific-seeming arguments to deny global warming (Bloomfield and Tillery, 2019).The quantitative tool verifies patterns that emerge in the rhetorical analysis and offers additional insight in terms of the most frequent topics discussed on WUWT. When we are coding the data ourselves, we tend to notice themes that are more shocking, including aggressive and sometimes violent insults to public figures including Hillary Clinton, Bill Nye, and Michael Mann, or racist and anti-immigrant sentiments associated with climate denial. But the data overwhelmingly show that most members are posting most frequently about scientific arguments. While it is important to acknowledge and critique the aggressive discourse used in the WUWT community (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019), it is also important to acknowledge that the bulk of WUWT discourse appears, at least on the surface, as topical, rational, and scientific. Paired with the qualitative analysis, these findings reveal typical strategies that climate change deniers engage in as well as the topics that resonate with them, in addition to how scientific arguments can evolve into addressing other ideological issues.

Figure 2: Experimental and Data: Key Words in Context

Rhetorical Themes

The themes uncovered in the rhetorical analysis of WUWT’s Facebook page point to an overarching conservative ideology that doubles down on perceived standards of scientific inquiry and links climate change activism to other political issues. The first theme functions to support the identity of skeptics as “hyperrational,” thereby undermining the perceived rationality of climate scientists, environmentalists, and climate advocates. The second theme shows how climate skeptics link their climate change beliefs to their political ideology, which, in turn, leads to the integration of other political and social issues in their environmental arguments. While we separate these two themes here to analyze them, these argument constellations work together to support a meta-narrative that liberal ideologies are irrational while climate skeptics and their values are rational. Therefore, both themes will be present across many comments that we analyze.

Hyperrationality Arguments

A prominent theme that emerged in the data was frequent appealing to the rationality of deniers as more scientific than scientists. We call this rhetorical strategy the establishment of hyperrationality, or the idea that the rational standards normally attributed to science are viewed as corrupt or lacking, necessitating a rational resource that is more and differently rational than mainstream scientific argument. Goertzel (2010) explored a similar idea in an examination of how conspiracy theories undermine all aspects of science by “demand[ing] immediate, comprehensive and definitive answers to all questions” (p. 493). Without those answers, science can be framed as dismissing its commitment to rationality and thus as an irrational decision-making resource. In their study of competing digital climate change discourses, Knight and Greenberg (2011) argued that deniers framed climate scientists as being “dangerous” in their abandonment of “fundamental normative expectations of science” (p. 336). This inversion enables climate deniers to claim the rational upper-hand and condemn science as irrational, faulty, manipulative, and conspiratorial. Questioning the rationality of climate scientists is an established strategy of climate deniers (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019; Ceccarelli, 2011) and we build on this research by tracing how these arguments unfold in digital spaces as a reframing of rationality that weighs skeptical versions of scientific performances as more rational than mainstream climate science.

In proposing that climate skeptics are more rational than scientists, WUWT members directly commented on what they viewed as rational behaviors. One commenter characterized “true skeptics” as “critical thinkers” who could not be duped by climate scientists and would not “submi[t] to their delusions.” Another WUWT member embraced the label of "Science doubting" offered in a posted article to describe climate skeptics. The commenter wrote that doubt “is essential within true science. It can be taken as a compliment.” This commenter appealed to scientific standards of skepticism and questioning as identity labels that heightened their scientific credibility. While few WUWT members claimed to have advanced degrees, they were quick to question the credentials of others. For example, in response to a post about Dr. Sabrina Helm, an Associate Professor Family and Consumer Science, one commenter wrote, “Is that a real discipline? Does science recognise that? Sounds like a lot of bull science to me.” These comments function to reframe acceptable standards of rationality and question traditional credibility markers such as advanced degrees.

While the active WUWT commenters largely expressed climate skepticism, there were instances of climate change advocates joining the comments and posting their opinions. One commenter responded to a series of replies between a WUWT member and a climate advocate and called the climate change advocate irrational and not open to seeing evidence. The commenter wrote, “No point providing [the climate change advocate] with exhibits, links to papers, or indeed any rational argument. A number of us have tried. He doesn't read them or answer them--just skips to the next post and repeats his assertions. A sad case.” This commenter simultaneously supports the rationality of the WUWT community as relying on arguments and evidence while reducing the climate change advocate to a series of talking points and lacking real, rational engagement. Because the advocate’s comments had been removed (by the poster or the moderator), it was impossible to evaluate the relative rationality of the advocate’s arguments. What remained, however, was the WUWT members’ characterization of the advocates’ behaviors.

Climate skeptics refuted climate change alarmism and appealed to their own rationality by providing their own evidence. An oft-repeated claim was that carbon dioxide benefits plants, a common climate skeptic argument that McCright and Dunlap (2003) call, “the social construction of non- problematicity” (p. 351). In addition to denying that climate change is a problem, this rhetorical strategy

Presented at Waterlines: Confluence and Hope through Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Vancouver, Canada, June 17-21, 2019 https://theieca.org/coce2019 Page 9 of 17 position increased carbon dioxide as beneficial to plants. The WUWT moderator posted articles about carbon dioxide benefitting plants: “New research from a Florida State University scientist has revealed a surprising relationship between surging atmospheric carbon dioxide and flower blooms in a remote tropical forest.” It also appeared frequently in comments, such as one WUWT member arguing, “CO2 is not a green house gas and is not a pollutant. It is the basic building block of life for all living things on Earth.” Similar to previous findings about the WUWT community (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019), these arguments were often missing context, such as the upper limit on when too much carbon dioxide becomes harmful and other factors that contribute to plant growth that will be adversely affected by increased carbon dioxide (Brook, 2016).

For example, one commenter focused on the benefits of warming on grapes, arguing that “Past warmings have been great for Grapes. Roman Warming saw grape growing far north of England,.. maybe Greenland will be the Napa of the future.” Not only does this commenter not take into account what the rest of the world might look like if Greenland has become hot and dry enough to grow grapes, but the commenter also seems to elevate the importance of grape production over the immense damage to other plant and animal life that would occur with that much warming (Brook, 2016). Using both an offensive portmanteau (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019) and an appeal to non-problematicity, one commenter wrote, “Do LIBTARDS HAVE ANY IDEA THAT CO2 BENEFITS PLANTS ???” (all caps in original). This comment frames this knowledge as obvious and those who deny it or claim that carbon dioxide is harmful as irrational and without a clue.

For climate skeptics, the truth about climate change was obvious, meaning that anyone who contradicted it were clearly motivated by malicious intentions or was truly irrational. One commenter called climate advocates, “insane.” Another commenter emphasized emotions as counter to rationality: “people seem to get weirdly emotional about climate science and lose the capacity for critical thinking and rational debate.” These assertions echo the common refrain that environmentalists are “hysterical” (Killingsworth & Palmer, 1995, p. 1). To account for what they view as the blindness of climate science to the truth, WUWT members described climate science as irrational, faith-based, hysterical, and primarily influenced by politics and money than true scientific inquiry. One commenter wrote, “Finally we're making a dent in this climate catastrophe religious fanaticism. All of the data is against them and they still cling to their religion.” Comparing climate change science to faith served to undermine the perceived authority of scientists and the evidence they had to support their beliefs. Conflating climate science and religion works to “reduce[s] science to faith rather than fact” and “deconstructs the authority of scientists, their scholarly rigor, and their observational and logical character” (Bloomfield & Lake, 2015, pp. 386, 387). One commenter wrote, “Blending science and religion failed in the Middle Ages. You couldn't contradict ‘science’ back then either.” Another commenter noted that climate scientists, “Have to pay proper obeisance to the AGW religion” when publishing their research, implying that the peer review process has been tainted, another frequent climate skeptical argument (Bloomfield, 2019).

The theme of “follow the money” (Tillery, 2018) appeared frequently in the WUWT comments, where climate scientists are positioned as colluding with governments and agencies to control people’s pocketbooks. One commenter surmised that climate scientists scramble to make themselves appear credible because if society no longer trusts climate scientists then “Governments then lose their excuse to impose green taxes.” Former Vice President Al Gore was a frequent target of monetary conspiracy accusations. One commenter wrote, Al Gore “has become a bilionare [sic] off his gullible minions. It's all about the money.” Using another portmanteau (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019), one commenter called global warming “Gorebal” warming, arguing, “Gorebal Warming had always been about using the fear

Presented at Waterlines: Confluence and Hope through Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Vancouver, Canada, June 17-21, 2019 https://theieca.org/coce2019 Page 10 of 17 of the boogeyman to seize money from the producers to give to the parasites with the limited amount of effort.” This portmanteau emphasizes the influence and control that this commenter ascribes to Gore’s environmental activism. Explicitly referring to the topoi, one commenter wrote, “Follow the money. Nothing changes. Gore has become a billionaire using climate as his very own money printing machine at the expense of every hard working family. I don't believe he really believes the nonsense he's spewing but it makes him rich and that's his real agenda!”

The idea that people are somehow getting rich off of promoting environmental protection was quite frequently, but the mechanism by which the money flows was never fully explicated. For example, one commenter wrote,

Where ever they try to sell people on "green" energy they push this green jobs BS. The jobs are temporary, kill real jobs, drive energy costs into the stratosphere, destabilize the power grid & cause energy poverty before finally having to be abandoned. The government & their cronies get rich though.

This commenter painted a picture of the economic catastrophe and “industrial apocalyptic” (Peeples, Bsumek, Schwarze, & Schneider, 2014, p. 229) that would follow from pro-environmental policies, but failed to characterize exactly how “the government” and its “cronies” would get rich through producing energy poverty. One WUWT member similarly targeted the government as the source of financial conspiracy. This commenter noted, “Here's a tip for you. When studying so called scientific data, search a little deeper to find out who paid for the research. If the study was funded by government mark it with a G. If it's privatly [sic] funded mark it with a P. Government funding has an agenda. Always follow the money.” While scholars are often skeptical of privately-funded research as potentially biased based on the interest of the funder, this skeptic flips that bias by arguing that only privately funded research was free from the bias of institutions that had been invaded by environmentalists.

In the WUWT community, scientific institutions were seen as untrustworthy and as fixing the data to support their perspectives. One WUWT member asked, “Anyone ever notice that *every* error in modeling is in the direction that supports AGW alarmism?” Another comment chastised David Attenborough’s narration in Blue Planet as a “great deception,” full of “sweeping and unsupported statements,” and “obvious BS.” This commenter was “concerned” that “uninformed viewers” will begin to believe in climate change because of the documentary, despite their assertion that it was not scientifically accurate. One commenter put their position on the rationality of scientists quite plainly: “No rational person believes NASA or NOAA.” In addition to scientific and government institutions not being trusted, environmentalists and climate change believers also have their credibility undermined. One commenter discussed their version of a conversation with a climate change advocate thusly:

I recently was in an argument with a climate change true believer that continually called me a terrorist for not agreeing with his extreme ideology on the topic and he even went so far as to say that all big oil exec should be killed. That isn't even my first or only encounter with people on that side of the debate that seem to be willing to kill anyone that doesn't agree with them. All for the "greater good" in their mind I'm sure.

This commenter associates climate change advocates with “true believers,” and the “greater good,” which are additional instances of religious/cult terminology. This description also characterizes climate change advocates as advocating violence, a frequent argument in climate skeptical discourse (Bloomfield, 2019).

Ceccarelli (2011) argued that climate skeptics turn the values of scientific inquiry, namely “open- mindedness, freedom of inquiry, and fairness” (p. 198), against climate science by claiming that they have been shut out of conversations. One commenter argued that it fits the agenda of climate scientists to repress discussion because, “If debate is allowed, why people might follow the scientific facts, rather than the political agenda.” This commenter One WUWT member critiqued what they saw as apparent hypocrisy in the behaviors of climate climate advocates: “People like these are tolerant and open minded and promote diversity and seek to be inclusive till you ask the first question then you wind up in a dungeon someplace with chain-link fences and razor wire and there are spotlights and men with guns. In the end there are showers and crematoriums. Every time.” Connecting the promotion of environmental policies to a slippery slope that ends in the Holocaust, this commenter also proposes that environmentalists can be violent, controlling, and motivated by malicious intentions.

WUWT members saw the increased need for their presence and activism against the powerful forces of environmentalism that they saw seeping into politics. Overall, however, they portrayed optimism that their version of rationality would win out. Because climate skeptics believe that they have the truth of the matter, they believe that their beliefs will eventually overthrow mainstream climate science and become accepted as the norm (Bloomfield, 2019; Ceccarelli, 2011). One commenter wrote, “It's apparent now the the [sic] consensus is turning toward rational science rather than politically motivated fear” and another echoed this idea noting, “It's almost as though rational inquiry is starting to have its effect on political dogma. Yay!” In bifurcating rationalism from politics and associating climate skepticism with rationalism and politics with environmentalism, WUWT members drew climate skepticism closer to “real” science and relegated environmentalism to irrational politics. This connections is taken up further in the next section that highlights the conservative ideology that underlies climate skepticism and works contra the perceived liberal environmental agenda.

Ideological Arguments

In addition to launching attacks against climate scientists’ reputation and claiming the rational higher ground for themselves, WUWT members connected environmental topics to other political and social issues. While the quantitative data show that WUWT members tend to stay on topic, as it were, and discuss the scientific merits of climate change, it was not uncommon to see conspiracy ideations that linked climate change to other social issues. WUWT members ascribe to the belief that the climate conspiracy is rife with ulterior motives and conspiracies, so they reason that there are other areas besides the environment that this irrationality proliferates. For climate skeptics, bringing up other topics was a way to amplify the dangers of environmentalism as existing beyond just environmental issues and threatening other ways of life. While they do not consider their own loyalty to conservative ideologies political baggage, WUWT members link environmentalism to other anti-conservative policies as further reason to oppose mainstream climate science. In other words, climate skeptics do not see the controversy over climate change as a one-issue discussion. Instead, refutations of environmentalism are also constructed as protections of conservativism, neoliberalism, and individual freedom, among other ideologies and values. In exploring how ideologies emerge in WUWT discourse, we will first examine the dichotomy established between conservative and liberal values and then how the climate conversations moves into different topical arenas.

For WUWT members and other climate skeptics, environmentalism may appear to threaten “sustained economic growth, the free market, nationality sovereignty, and the continued abolition of

Presented at Waterlines: Confluence and Hope through Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Vancouver, Canada, June 17-21, 2019 https://theieca.org/coce2019 Page 12 of 17 government regulations - key goals promoted by the conservative movement” (McCright & Dunlap, 2003, p. 353). It makes sense, therefore, that in challenging what they perceive to be a politicized issue, other political concerns seem relevant to include as part of the conversation. Bringing in these other issues may also help to build the community’s sense of identity in locating multiple points of commonality and agreement beyond their shared skepticism of climate change. Thus, the ideological constellation works in tandem with the hyperrationality constellation to increase the perceived rationality of WUWT members by shifting the conversation to topics where there is more legitimate discussion and debate over correct policies. Commenters frequently expressed the connections they saw between liberal policies and environmental protection. In addition to characterizing environmentalism as a product of the “liberal agenda” and thus overly influenced by politics, as seen above, WUWT members also linked environmentalism to the left’s support of (undocumented) immigration, LGBTQ rights, intersectionality, and gun control. This constellation positions climate change as just one policy in the “the empty fantasies of confused leftists” (Killingsworth & Palmer, 1995, p. 8) that should be attacked as a coherent whole.

Watts, the WUWT moderator, posted an article about people tweeting #Irma who linked Hurricane Irma to climate change. Watts described the tweets as “hatred on display,” noting, “I blame it on Trump Derangement Syndrome, oh wait, some were deranged before he got elected.” Watts directly links environmentalism to liberal ideologies and a specific brand of liberal ideology that circulates on pro-Trump discussion forums called “TDS” or Trump Derangement Syndrome. TDS describes a particular brand of hysteria that conservative ascribe to liberals as deranged, hysterical, and irrational due to their response to Trump. Echoing Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton is a “nasty woman” during the final 2016 Presidential Debate, one WUWT commenter described Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May as “This woman is quite the nasty. . . . Horrible woman.” Although no longer in prominent positions of political power, WUWT members were still concerned about the influence of Barack Obama and Clinton as seeking to “rule the world.” One commenter wrote that “Hillary is a traitor” and attributed full responsibility for Benghazi and “lost billions from the State Dept” to Clinton. Liberal political leaders were thus seen as part and parcel of the larger liberal, environmental agenda and were oftentimes brought up along with Al Gore, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and other “Hollywood celebrity scientists” as evidence of the pervasive connection between liberalism and environmentalism.

In addition to opposing environmentalism, WUWT members shared skepticism of government intervention and regulation, except when it comes to border control, and believed that conservative values, such as neoliberalism and national autonomy, were at stake in environmental deliberation. For example, one commenter wrote that environmentalism is linked to “socialist views [of] using the military to educate and restrain the undesirables” who do not kowtow to government control. Control emerged from another commenter who wrote, “The only people who view fossil fuels as a dead end are people who dream of controlling the energy, food, healthcare,housing, location, free speech, life span we could go on, of other people.” Using a guilt by association fallacy, one commenter linked eugenics and population control to environmental non-profits: “In addition to funding McKibbens 350.org climate nuts, the Rockefeller (old oil money) foundation also funded the Eugenics movement last century that sterilized many supposed idiots and subhumans.” Without sources or links, it is hard to follow the exact comparison being made in this comment, but it does clearly echo a frequent link to eugenics and genocide that was quite common in WUWT comments. For example, one commenter wrote, “energy poverty is all part of [environmentalists’] genocidal political agenda.”

The topoi of control was connected to government overreach and the perceived liberal proposal to have the government run all aspects of people’s lies. A frequent reason attributed to the promotion

Presented at Waterlines: Confluence and Hope through Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Vancouver, Canada, June 17-21, 2019 https://theieca.org/coce2019 Page 13 of 17 environmentalism was to control populations. Connecting environmentalism to support of LGBTQ issues, one commenter proposed that both liberal values share the ulterior motive of promoting population control: ““The control freaks are constantly at it. Maybe we should all become homosexual-- that would really reduce the birthrate.” Other commenters echoed both their disdain for immigrants and their belief that these policies were motivated by power grabs: ““Does [anyone] think migrants are going to give a crap about the environment? Judging by the trash they leave all over the border when they illegally cross, the answer is a resounding no. If progressives truly cared about the environment, they'd stop immigration tomorrow. But they want an electoral super-majority that can only come by displacing native born Americans.” This commenter linked environmentalism to control, specifically political control through vote manipulation and implied that environmentalists are hypocritical in their dual support of environmentalism and immigration. While WUWT members viewed their positions as coherent, environmental arguments were portrayed as contradictory and misguided.

Linking environmentalism to immigration policies also reveals a racist streak within WUWT’s discourse. While not overt nor frequent, themes of purity and protecting Western/white culture were present. One commenter proposed that the reason environmentalists support population control is to increase immigration: “when low birthrates happen, we need to import masses of immigrants. It's not about the climate, but about destroying Western civilisation. They're just using climate to try and enact the change when other methods failed.” For this commenter, climate change advocacy are not solely nor even primarily about the environment. This commenter links environmentalism with the destruction of Western values, which they see at risk with increased immigration. On an article about a California bill that would allow limiting the publication of climate skeptical beliefs, one commenter wrote, “Up next, a bill banning Republicans. Then whites.” This WUWT member’s slippery slope includes political and racial persecution against climate skeptics, implying both that climate skeptics are largely white and that whiteness itself is something to be protected that is currently under attack. Another commenter echoed the persecution of climate skeptics in noting, “If you replaced ‘Climate Change Denier’ with ‘Jew’, ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Gay’ or the ‘N’ word it would be no worse than this.” The WUWT community creates a sense of identity and community by positioning themselves as under attack from an environmental threat. This framework of war simultaneously justifies the group’s presence and also legitimizes them responding in kind with aggression and threats (Bloomfield, 2019).

Similar to the “flaming” (Zappen, 2005) common to climate skeptical communities (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019), we located themes of violence and threats toward liberals, feminists, and environmentalists in WUWT discourse. In response to an article about CBC News contributor Kristen Pyszczyk, one WUWT member wrote, “Oh. Another bitter feminist who hates children and has arrogantly set herself up as the arbiter of morality. . . . She should euthanize herself immediately.” A similar violent comment was directed toward Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, in the context of his population predictions. The commenter wrote, “That guy has been wrong on everything, why does anybody listen to him. Can somebody just shoot him.” Directing a threat at climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, one commenter wrote, “Hopefully with enough rope for Mann & Co, the hangings will start soon?” These examples of threats and others (see Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019) are quite noticeable on the WUWT webpage among the sea of seemingly reasonable scientific arguments. Despite their presence, it seems that members wish to downplay this type of discourse to maintain their claims to the rational high ground. One member denied the WUWT community’s use of threats, noting “I read virtually ever article posted on WUWT and have NEVER read one threat of bodily harm.” While denying the presence of threats, this commenter did acknowledge that the community will use “insults, ridicule, and name calling . . . against a very small crowd of fervent believers.” In addition to narrowing the scope of where such aggressive discourse is tolerated on the Facebook page, this commenter also

Presented at Waterlines: Confluence and Hope through Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Vancouver, Canada, June 17-21, 2019 https://theieca.org/coce2019 Page 14 of 17 argued that the people who are subject to attack are the ones at fault. This commenter continued that insults are only launched at environmentalists who make such utterly ridiculous claims that they bring the ire apon [sic] themselves.” Another commenter agreed and noted, “Ridiculing the ridiculous is always a good thing” to justify the ad hominem attacks and insults present in the community.

This type of discourse might not be the most frequently posted in the WUWT community, but its presence, in whatever quantity, poses ideological obstacles to environmentalism that undeniably support commenters’ persistent refutations of climate science. Taken together, hyperrationality arguments and ideological arguments form a compelling constellation that motivates members of the WUWT community to maintain their identity and reject environmentalism. Furthermore, the linking of environmentalism to other issues creates an expansive constellation that covers a variety of political and social topics. In this way, the WUWT Facebook community, and perhaps other similar groups online, are not merely climate denial groups, but ideologically-driven political actors that have mobilized against what they perceive to be threats to their identity and well-being. Appeals to their own hyperrationality and the questioning of the rationality of environmentalists and climate scientists lends legitimacy to their opinions on all issues up for debate. Spanning the environment, immigration, LGBTQ issues, taxation, and political campaigns, the rhetoric of WUWT members launches a powerful attack on the values and beliefs that underlie not only environmentalism, but many other liberal issues. The constellation gets its power from being simultaneously a unified collection and also from the individual issues each deserving of their own attention. If we push the constellation metaphor even further, we might say that the environment is the Polaris or North Star that shines the brightest and is the most noticeable, but is in fact only part of the Little Dipper constellation. To address one star in the constellation is to invoke the entire assemblage of arguments, albeit in varying degrees and frequencies.

Implications for Digital Climate Discourse

As our analysis demonstrates, the “hyperrationality” stance helps to create a self-closing loop, by arming group members with technical-sounding arguments that they can then recirculate in other spoken and written contexts. This also functions to reaffirm group membership, particularly in this overwhelmingly male group (about 87.6% male, as reported by the BirdSong Analytics data) where rationality is assumed to be masculine and hysterical emotionalism is assumed to characterize femininized liberals and irrational scientists (Killingsworth & Palmer, 1995). “Reason” is style, an inventional resource when paired with technical terms, and an argumentative stance.

Our research is not intended to over-emphasize skeptical attitudes towards climate change (the most recent Yale Program on Climate Change survey found that 6 in 10 Americans agree with the scientific consensus); rather, we focus on the circulation of misinformation and recurrent lines of argument in social media as both its own problem and as a symptom of a larger pattern of discourse where online platforms including reddit (Cagle & Herndl, 2015), Twitter, and Facebook not only provide a platform but actually shape the discourses and views of participants, in ways that are problematic and detrimental to deliberative ends. By learning more about how these communities spread misinformation (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019) and what information is being spread, we can support future research into refutational strategies and advise effective strategies for environmental communicators, especially in digital spaces.

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Presented at Waterlines: Confluence and Hope through Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Vancouver, Canada, June 17-21, 2019 https://theieca.org/coce2019