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Politicization of science: how climate change skeptics use experts and scientific evidence in their online communication

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Abstract

This study, using the discussion about climate change in the USA as an example, analyzes the research question of how climate change skeptics use experts and scientific evidence in their online communication. Two different strategies are distinguished: legitimation and criticism. The study conducts a quantitative content analysis of online documents to answer the research question. The results show that the deduced strategies are an important part of the communication of climate change skeptics, who more commonly use the criticism strategy than the legitimation strategy. Results are further differentiated for different actor types and various types of experts.

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Notes

  1. Extensive pre-tests showed that a higher number of “source seeds” (i.e., starting points for the crawler software) resulted in networks that contained a great amount of noise and were too large to be processed further.

  2. „climate change“or „global warming“or „Klimawandel*“or „globale* Erwärmung“, thus resulting in English and German websites.

  3. The criticism of an actor with an opposing view often does not occur as a direct offense or insult but is mentioned more implicitly for example by making an actor appear ridiculous or by using a very ironic language style.

  4. The codebook used is available at url (anonymized)

  5. During the sample period of one year, for one actor (the blog “Watts Up With That?”), several different pages that dealt with climate change were coded. For the analysis, these single pages were aggregated at the actor level.

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Funding

This publication was created in the context of the Research Unit “Political Communication in the Online World” (1381), subproject 7, which is funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation. The subproject is also funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF, 100017E-135915).

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  1. University of Passau, Innstraße 33a, 94030, Passau, Germany

    Hannah Schmid-Petri

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  1. Hannah Schmid-Petri
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Correspondence to Hannah Schmid-Petri.

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Schmid-Petri, H. Politicization of science: how climate change skeptics use experts and scientific evidence in their online communication. Climatic Change 145, 523–537 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2112-z

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