Doubt,Delay,and Discourse

Introduction

Evidence of human-induced changes in the atmosphere was established in the 1970s, and the impact of these changes on the planet’s climate have been measured and modeled with increasing certitude since that time (Hansen, 2009). However, there is currently a sharp disconnect between the near consensus among climate scientists about the complex yet clear connections between human activity and climate change, and what seems to be a stable or increasing number of people across the world who believe either that there is no clear consensus among scientists on the subject or that claims about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are suspect. ¹ For instance, despite an increasing and overwhelming consensus apparent in the scientific literature (Cook et al., 2013), a survey by the Pew Charitable Trust (Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 2012) found that more Americans (77%) in 2006 believed that there is a scientific consensus about AGW than did at the time of the survey (67%), although the number had increased from a low of 57% in 2009. Other studies report similar trends in many other countries (Nerlich, 2010; Ratter, Philipp, & von Storch, 2012; Scruggs & Benegal, 2012).

While there may also be other influences at play, such as economic recession, these numbers support assertions that considerable effort has been exerted, to great effect, by think tanks, policy bodies, and corporations, notably in the United States and the United Kingdom but also in countries such as Australia and New Zealand, to influence public opinion about climate change. Academic research has been attentive to these persuasive efforts. McCright and Dunlap (2003), for example, built on Schnaiberg’s (1994) claim that corporate actors engage in consciousness-lowering activities to counter environmental activism, to argue that powerful interests at the turn of the millennium strategically attempted to introduce doubt into the scientific consensus that AGW is a major environmental problem, in order to take climate change off the policy agenda and delay much-needed environmental regulation.

Our broad concern in this article is to explain the means by which such persuasive efforts continue to gain communicative traction with various publics in the face of overwhelming evidence in support of the AGW thesis. Over the past decade, scholars have observed that climate change issues in general have been increasingly politicized along liberal and conservative lines (McCright & Dunlap, 2011; Nisbet, 2009; Nisbet & Myers, 2007), with liberals and progressive audiences much more likely to accept evidence about AGW and conservative audiences much more likely to endorse arguments that reject such evidence. Climate skeptics have evidently been using the same discursive tactics repeatedly, over a long period of time, and the statistics on public opinion cited above, along with the reported divisions along ideological lines, suggest that the tactics have long had powerful, and dangerous, effect. As we elaborate further in this article, rhetorical scholars have long noted the significance of tactics of disrupting commonsense arguments to accomplish ideological work, across a range of important political issues. Our ultimate aim here is to deconstruct these discursive tactics in the hope that such exposure may weaken their effect. Of course, as pointed out by Fairclough (1992), the potential danger of this type of critical understanding is that the tactics become available for others to employ.

While several studies have identified broad strategies that skeptics use to influence audiences (e.g., McCright & Dunlap 2010), they have focused on strategies that skeptics use to question scientific evidence about climate change. However, scholars have not paid close attention to the crucial question of what communicative strategies skeptics have developed specifically to politicize climate change issues themselves, a task that is increasingly important given the extent to which climate change issues have become a political lightning rod in several countries worldwide.

We seek to fill this gap, and address our broader aim, by providing an empirically supported, comprehensive theoretical explanation of discursive strategies that skeptics use to politicize the AGW thesis. We begin by providing a broad background of ways in which particular interests have attempted to exert influence on public understandings of AGW, before reviewing a series of studies that have identified communicative strategies that skeptics have used to contest evidence that supports AGW. We then present our theoretical framework, which draws from and synthesizes the notion of political fields (Bourdieu, 1991), together with practices of discursive articulation (Hall, 1986; Slack, 1996). When combined, these concepts serve to explain and expose the discursive strategies of politicization and delay that have for so long, and so effectively, been employed by climate skeptics against the evidence of a broad consensus of climate scientists. Next, by way of illustration, we turn to the New Zealand website of an internationally influential organization of climate skeptics. From our analysis of material published on or linked to via the website over a 7-year period we identify a range of political interests with which skeptics attempt to align climate science, using three closely aligned discursive strategies. Finally, we unpack the implications of such strategies, which have been powerfully effective over a long period of time.

Climate Science: Consensus and Skepticism

On the surface, evidence for AGW should be unassailable. First, the five reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the Nobel Prize–winning organization established by the United Nations—have each expressed greater certainty than the last on the AGW thesis, with the 2007 report concluding that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal” (Solomon, 2007, p. 30) and “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (p. 39). The 2013 report notes that improved climate models give “very high confidence” in the observations of increasing surface warming of the Earth, and states, “Human influence on the climate system is clear” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2013). Second, the national science academies of every developed nation have examined the evidence and issued statements supporting the AGW thesis. Third, two surveys found that over 97% of scientists actively researching and publishing in climate science support the AGW thesis (Anderegg, Prall, Harold, & Schneider, 2010; Doran & Zimmerman, 2009).

In the face of this broad consensus, however, powerful interests have strategically attempted to introduce doubt into the scientific consensus that AGW is a major environmental problem, in order to take effective policy action on climate change off the political agenda and avoid or delay environmental regulation (e.g., McCright & Dunlap, 2003). Importantly, this is a pattern seen in relation to other health and environmental hazards. As scientific findings identify a health risk from industrial activity, industry groups whose economic interests are threatened by the potential for regulation mobilize to contest the science. Previous instances include the findings linking tobacco with cancer, ozone depletion with chlorofluorocarbons, and sulfur dioxide emissions with acid rain (Oreskes & Conway, 2010; Ungar, 2000).

Early corporate intervention in the AGW issue, especially in the United States where overt political lobbying is the norm (Levy & Kolk, 2005), took the form of both direct and indirect advocacy. For example, in 1993 Mobil bought op-ed spaces in the New York Times suggesting that if climate change were in fact happening, it could be beneficial (Gelbspan, 1998; see also www.ejnet.org/rachel/rehw467.htm). However, today such influence is almost invariably exercised indirectly and by proxy, through professional social movement organizations such as think tanks or through funding for selected climate skeptics.

Conservative think tanks in particular have been a major mechanism for corporate actors to exert influence by manufacturing doubt on climate change issues in the past decade (Oreskes & Conway, 2010), but their influence goes back to the early 1990s. McCright and Dunlap (2000), for example, argued that think tanks in the United States such as the Hoover Institute or Cato Institute played a major role in introducing skepticism about AGW into congressional hearings on the subject between 1990 and 1997. Likewise, Jacques, Dunlap, and Freeman (2008), found that of 141 books that were skeptical about global warming published between 1972 and 2005, 92% were associated with 50 conservative think tanks, all but 6 of which were in the United States. They included the Heritage Foundation, the American Council on Science and Health, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Acton Institute.

The largest economic interest that has funded conservative think tanks, especially those that sponsor climate change deniers, has been the petrochemical industry, in particular ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute (Mayer, 2010). In recent years, funding by Koch Industries, the fourth wealthiest corporation in the United States and whose holdings are dominated by petroleum and chemical interests, has increased dramatically. Greenpeace data reveals that since 1997 Koch Industries has directly contributed more than 88 million USD to 80 groups denying climate change (Greenpeace, 2014).

In New Zealand, several groups and commentators have actively argued against the global warming thesis. For instance, Roger Kerr, director of the influential neoliberal think tank, the New Zealand Business Roundtable, regularly published a blog on the subject, as well as opinion pieces in a number of influential newspapers. The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC), the subject of our inquiry, was founded in 2006, and has been funded by the U.S. think tank, the Heartland Institute, which has played a key role in organized climate denial in the United States and internationally (Renowden, 2012).

Skeptics’ Communication

As skepticism about AGW was promoted and grew in the 1990s, so did scholarly attention to such attempts. Several studies attempted to characterize and categorize skeptics’ communication. For example, McCright and Dunlap (2000) found three broad counterclaims in documents produced by conservative think tanks in response to AGW: (1) the evidence for global warming is weak or wrong; (2) global warming will be beneficial if it occurs; and (3) policies to address global warming would be more harmful than helpful. Each of these claims included subthemes. For example, they identified five subthemes addressing the evidence counterclaim (e.g., “The scientific evidence . . . is highly uncertain,” “Mainstream climate research is ‘junk’ science”; p. 510). The authors linked these counterclaims to Hirschman’s (1991) rhetoric of reaction and Ibarra and Kitsuse’s (1993) notion of counterrhetorical strategies. In doing so, they made useful connections of skeptics’ communicative strategies to broader rhetorical techniques but did not offer an underlying theoretical explanation for their persuasive effect.

In a later study, McCright and Dunlap (2010) identified four strategies the American conservative movement used to block decision-making on AGW.

McCright and Dunlap (2010) argued that these strategies reflected the exercise of Lukes’s (1974) second dimension of power—that is, preventing a decision that threatens their interests through setting an agenda or creating a nondecision. Thus, they explained the effects of the strategies but not the underlying mechanisms that enabled their efficacy.

Two other studies of skeptics’ communication have focused on the use of religious metaphors. Nerlich (2010) demonstrated that in response to the “Climategate” controversy, skeptics used religious metaphors to construct climate science as a “belief” that is unfounded and fraudulent. Similarly, Woods, Fernandez, and Coen (2010) found that conservative newspapers used religious metaphors to denigrate AGW proponents in three ways: representing climate science as religion and faith, and therefore irrational; using terms such as fundamentalists and zealots to paint environmentalists as extremists; and suggesting that proponents were intolerant of criticism through metaphors such as blasphemy and heresy. Nerlich (2010) explained how metaphors worked to undermine the science of AGW:

By framing or conceptualising science as religion or myth, opponents to the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and its political consequences created their own myth or story of science as fraud or untruth. This then made the conclusions they drew from their stories and arguments (e.g., no political action needs to be taken with regards to climate change) feel natural and like common sense. (p. 424)

Thus, these two studies (Nerlich, 2010; Woods et al., 2010) go some way toward explaining the underlying mechanisms of one aspect of skeptics’ communication—the use of religious metaphors and frames. Framing, including the use of metaphors and other such rhetorical devices, is a concept often used in studies of media representation and of issues where public opinion is important, such as agenda setting (Lakoff, 2010). We agree, however, with Fischhendler, Boymel, and Boykoff (2016, p. 149) that while framing as an analytical concept is useful in such instances, the concept of discourse, including that of articulation described below, allows deeper understanding of the complexities of communication processes. For example, from a discourse analysis perspective, framing can be considered a discursive tactic, the mechanics of which can be exposed by close analysis of linguistic devices, including articulation.

Theoretical Framework

To explain how climate skeptics lay the groundwork for influence, we build on Roper (2005) in bringing together Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of social and political fields and the concept of articulation as explained by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Hall (1986). As we illustrate further below, the combination of these concepts provides a framework for analysis and understanding of how climate skeptics construct new discourses, the tactics behind such constructions, and why they can be so effective. Specifically, as skeptics go against the norm in employing articulation to disrupt rather than construct commonsense discourses (e.g., Kinsella, 2015), analysis in the context of Bourdieu’s theory helps explain that deviation. It is important to note that the framework is useful to explain tactics available to and employed by those who wish to popularize and politicize minority views that would not otherwise be widely accepted. Pro–climate action individuals and groups, on the other hand, have the weight of scientific opinion on their side and so would not need to disrupt what should already be commonsense arguments.

For Bourdieu (1991), the social field is a multidimensional construct. It has a diverse range of inhabitants who are more or less grouped according to shared interests, and whose potential for organization is directly correlated with proximity and strength of interests. In a dialectic, constitutive process, shared interests produce shared discourses, and vice versa, which is a facet of social fields that is directly pertinent to our analysis here. Social fields, like political fields, are specific to a given time and place.

The political field in large, complex societies is the arena in which politicians, political agents, and political interests attempt to represent citizens of the social field by competing to produce political ideas from which citizens then choose, in much the same way that they would consume products. The struggle between different political interests means that political fields are organized around discursive poles, typically defined by differences between Left and Right ideologies, as political agents attempt to create contrasts between themselves and other competing agents or interests. The closer to the discursive poles, the more contentious is the discourse. By contrast, the “center” of a field is occupied by those discourses that, through lack of contest or controversy, are deemed “neutral” or common sense. Thus it describes a center not as a halfway point but as a depoliticized conceptual space characterized by common agreement.

As Bourdieu (1991) argues,

The power of a discourse [in a political field] depends less on its intrinsic properties than on the mobilizing power it exercises—that is, at least to some extent on the degree to which it is recognized by a numerous and powerful group that can recognize itself in it. (p. 188)

Thus, when a discourse resonates with already established beliefs, identification occurs. The greater the scope of recognition, the more powerful (and persuasive) is the discourse. If identification with a particular discourse occurs for a broad majority of people, it may well become common sense, and neutralized in the center. While there may well be more than one “commonsense” version of an issue or debate in social fields, once they are set up in competition with each other they tend to be politicized rather than neutralized. In this way, they enter the political field. The more divided public opinion is on a particular issue, the greater the polarization of that issue in the political field.

Because the discourses and policies of a political field require identification with the issues and discourses of groups of the social field whom it seeks to represent, a political field cannot operate autonomously as a sphere of influence. Thus, discourse that permeates the political field is influenced by a range of interests outside that field that enter by becoming the subject of public policy discussions. Those seeking to influence such discussions require the support of those from social fields (voters) on whom politicians depend. In order to heighten identification with issues and attract that support, specific interests are often discursively aligned with popularly held views through a process of articulation (Hall, 1986; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Slack, 1996).

Articulation is a discursive practice by which actors produce cultural meanings of phenomena by connecting them to other, established discourses (Fairclough, 1992). An articulation, according to Hall (1986), is “the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time” (p. 141). The product of articulation is the creation of a new, apparently unified, discourse made of distinct components that can make sense only under particular circumstances and yet can be put forward in an attempt to establish an authoritative explanation of a phenomenon. Thus the primary objective of discursive articulations can be understood as the construction of new areas of “common sense” over other competing discourses. As a form of connection, then, one articulates one idea, argument, interest, or discourse with another. Discursive articulation is never complete; rather, it requires ongoing effort and varying degrees of discursive struggle as the logic of the connections can be challenged (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Slack, 1996).

We argue that the high degree of consensus among climate scientists regarding the AGW thesis should have resulted in public acceptance, with the issue removed from political debate. Furthermore, given, as stated, that the aim of discursive articulation is widely seen as the construction of an issue or its associated discourse as common sense (Hall, 1986; see also Kinsella, 2015), its use by climate skeptics to disrupt common sense is particularly interesting, especially when examined in relation to political and social fields. In this framework, even the introduction of an alternative “common sense” commonly serves to politicize an issue as it is set in opposition to the existing accepted discourse.

Politicization of an issue requires a degree of polarization to remove consensus and thereby remove the issue from a neutral, commonsense position at the center of the political field where although it is the subject of policy decisions, the direction of such policy would not be contested. Our argument in this article is that a key communication strategy of climate skeptics is to use the process of articulation to not only garner support from the social field but also disrupt consensus by discursively constructing the AGW thesis as contentious and thereby generate debate within the political field and delay decision making.

In order to be effective in terms of skeptics’ disruptive strategy, a particular articulation must serve the purpose of first achieving identification of an argument with the interests of sufficient numbers of people in order to, second, ensure effective polarization and debate. We reiterate that such articulations are not natural but are strategically constructed. Given the degree of scientific consensus, factual questions such as whether the earth’s temperature is warming and what the primary causes of that warming are should arguably occupy a place in the center of the political field—a neutral, scientific, noncontroversial discourse. Thus, in order to politicize the science on factual questions—whether on climate change, biotechnologies, or the qualities of fetal tissue—new articulations must also serve to challenge the scientific basis of its political neutrality.

Any critical analysis of discourse requires close attention to the context in which that discourse is constructed, disseminated, received, and interpreted (Fairclough, 1992, 2003; van Dijk, 1999, 2003). By analyzing discursive articulations in the context of political fields, and the political debates surrounding policy initiatives that occur in such fields, the strategic nature of skeptics’ discourse can be more closely revealed.

We illustrate the theoretical insights afforded by bringing together the concepts of political fields and articulation below by analyzing a collection of skeptics’ publications regarding climate change. We are, in line with the theoretical framework described above, specifically interested in exploring the means by which climate skeptics’ discourse is effective in building public support. To guide our data selection and analysis, we ask the following two research questions: How do skeptics attempt to discursively polarize AGW? What are the social interests with which skeptics attempt to articulate AGW?

Method

To address these questions, we examine AGW skeptics’ efforts in Aotearoa New Zealand, specifically focusing on the website of the NZCSC, from which we collected our data. The NZCSC website hosts original content but more often reproduces material from international blog posts, newspaper articles, and other commentaries. Our analysis was based on the 1,215 news releases, reports, blogs, and commentaries posted on the website and dated from 2009, when the website was started, to July 2016.

After an initial reading of all the texts to obtain an overview of the discourse, the texts were jointly sorted by two authors, with three core categories identified and agreed: discrediting sources, discrediting evidence, and emphasizing ideological linkages. From this point, our selection of items for close analysis was driven by our theoretical framework and our research questions that led us to identify and illustrate the discursive mechanisms by which the framework is enacted in practice. Thus our selection required the identification of the interests and discourses with which AGW is being articulated and the discursive polarizing strategies used to politicize perceptions of those interests. Our analysis followed principles of critical discourse analysis as put forward by Fairclough (1992) and others, whereby text is analyzed in context, as addressed below. It is the political, historical, cultural context that shapes, and is shaped by, the assumptions and ideologies that are evident in texts. Close textual analysis entailed particular attention to linguistic construction, which includes the process of articulation, as described in detail above.

Through a close reading of the skeptics’ discourse, we began to identify a range of interests with which AGW was being articulated, finding three major categories. Once we established these interests, we examined the specific ways in which the issue of AGW was polarized. We found that three discursive polarizing strategies were evident to varying degrees across the three interests, which are detailed in our Findings section.

In line with the principles of critical discourse analysis, in the next section we outline the political, social, and historical context of the texts analyzed. We then present our findings and discuss the polarizing strategies, followed by an analysis of how they are enabled by the articulation of AGW with specific social interests.

Context

New Zealand had initially been active in endorsing and creating policies designed to mitigate some effects relating to climate change: it ratified the Kyoto Protocol in late 2002 and a carbon emissions–trading scheme was passed into law in 2008. A successive, conservative government, however, effectively undermined the emissions trading scheme and refused to sign up to post-Kyoto commitments. A 2009 survey showed that while about 64% of the public did not doubt that climate change was happening and 87% believed that the country should do something about climate change, the results were split along political lines (ShapeNZ, 2009). By 2012, however, in line with many other nations, including the United States and United Kingdom, New Zealand experienced double-digit falls in the proportion of people who consider climate change to be a “very serious” issue (Mountford, 2013). In other words, even in a country where there had appeared to be a robust public consensus that policies to ameliorate AGW were necessary, it is likely that skeptical and denialist arguments have continued to be a factor in shaping public understanding of the subject.

There are good reasons to focus on the discursive strategies of the NZCSC, including the fact that they not only are a nationally prominent group but also have international connections, including funding from the Heartland Institute mentioned earlier, and have exerted international influence. The founding chairman of NZCSC is Terry Dunleavy, a winemaker and former director of the New Zealand Wine Institute, who continues to chair a large winemaking company in the country. After founding the NZCSC in 2006, Dunleavy set up the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) in 2008 and announced the appointment of Tom Harris as its executive director in 2008. Harris was formerly a public relations lobbyist for a Canadian energy industry lobby group called the High Park Group, and he also founded pro-petrochemical “astroturf” groups called the Friends of Science and the National Resources Stewardship Project. Shortly after Harris’s appointment, the ICSC announced what it called the “Manhattan Declaration,” which was signed by more than 40 climate change skeptics from around the world, amid much media coverage. The ICSC started initiatives in Australia, Canada, India, the United States, and the United Kingdom, with plans to expand into many more countries. According to Sourcewatch.org, a website published by the Center for Media and Democracy in the United States, the websites for the NZCSC, the ICSC, and their Australian counterpart are all hosted by the same Internet server in Arizona (Sourcewatch.org, 2011). In 2008, Exxon-Mobil publicly announced that it had been funding the ICSC. That the ICSC began in Aotearoa New Zealand is perhaps not surprising given that the oil and coal lobbies have long recognized allies here as well as in Canada and Australia (Gelbspan, 1998).

The NZCSC has also been active domestically, not only in the form of periodic news releases, columns in major newspapers, and addresses by its members at various public and industry events but also in the form of legal action. In 2010, the NZCSC filed what amounted to a nuisance lawsuit against the National Institute for Water and Air, the government’s largest and most credible research and consultancy group on atmospheric research, accusing the group of manipulating its temperature records. While it is unclear how a court could determine issues of scientific accuracy, the NZCSC lawsuit appeared to be part of a larger set of strategies advocated by the ICSC to introduce uncertainty into climate change debates. As such, the function of the lawsuit was not so much to stop or change procedures in temperature measurements but to reap the publicity that the lawsuits engender and, arguably, to delay implementation of greenhouse mitigation policies by generating doubt over the science by which such policies are deemed necessary. In this particular example, a judicial review eventually, over 2 years later, dismissed the case in favor of the National Institute for Water and Air (Underhill, 2012). Even though the case was dismissed, the lawsuit effectively set up and extended the debate well beyond the timeframe of the initial charge.

The featured posts and links on the NZCSC website make its goals clear. For example, on September 2, 2014, the site featured six stories that include phrases such as “entrenched climate establishment,” “unsubstantiated hypothesis that CO2 fossil emissions cause ‘global warming,’” and “global warming zealots.” As such then, it provides a synthesis not only of skeptics’ discursive work in Aotearoa New Zealand but also of more global discourse on skepticism about AGW.

Findings

The first of the three discursive polarizing strategies that skeptics employ is what we call power-resistance. This frames AGW as working in the interests of the powerful or those seeking power and control, with skeptics in turn offering brave and courageous resistance, often suffering violence and victimization for their efforts. The second strategy, corruption-purity, casts AGW as a deeply corrupt and unethical game, with proponents distorting evidence and processes to achieve their aims. Skeptics, on the other hand, are constructed as voices of truth. The third, hysteria-reason, defines AGW and its proponents as irrational, alarmist, and nonsensical, with skeptics, in turn, being cast as the voice of sanity and reason. Each of these polarizing strategies is carried out through the use of a strategic articulation, one component of which serves to identify AGM with interests of targeted societal groups and the other to politicize the issue.

Through these discursive strategies, climate skeptics are able to construct three major social concerns with which they attempt to articulate AGW, which we label as Establishment interests, Corporate interests, and Radical interests. Very often the constructions are contradictory, but the articulation with already emotive concepts enables the arguments to be made. When skeptics refer to Establishment interests, they refer to an entrenched status quo that has a vested interest in preventing changes in current practices surrounding climate science. This “Establishment” can consist of scientists and universities, politicians, regimes, and international institutions. When skeptics talk about Radical interests, they attempt to articulate climate science with the interests of influential left-wing groups, radical environmentalists, and even communists. Finally, when skeptics refer to Corporate interests, they attempt to articulate climate science with a “global warming industry” that is poised to make significant financial gain because of AGW. In the sections that follow, we take up each interest in turn, examining ways in which skeptics use multiple strategies in their attempts to articulate AGW with that interest. Skeptics encourage identification by articulating their positions with prominent discourses of purity, resistance, and reason. Polarization is effected by the articulation of the positions of proponents with the polar opposites of these popular discourses (corruption, power, and hysteria).

Limitations

In illustrating our theoretical framework, we have confined our analysis to texts sourced from one group of climate skeptics’ website, although these texts are largely reposts of texts from other, similar groups and websites around the world. We have not attempted an analysis of all skeptics’ tactics, discursive or otherwise, but have focused on the discursive process of articulation used as a strategy for generating political debate and delaying policy action on climate change, in accordance with our research questions.

Discussion

In sum, it is clear that skeptics’ articulation of AGW with a wide range of contentious political interests—establishment, radical and corporate—serves to politicize AGW in the political field. In fact, it appears that several skeptics are well aware of the value of politicization in general. David Evans, a climate skeptic who claims to be a climate scientist despite not having authored any peer-reviewed papers on the subject, says the following:

To win the political aspect of the climate debate, we have to lower the western climate establishment’s credibility with the lay person. And this paper shows how you do it. It simply assembles the most easily understood points that show they are not to be entirely trusted, with lots of pictures and a minimum of text and details. It omits lots of relevant facts and is excruciatingly economical with words simply because the lay person has a very short attention span for climate arguments. (NZCSC, 2010)

This illustrates the keen awareness, on the part of climate skeptics, of the need to keep politicizing AGW in order to maintain a debate rather than have climate science accepted as fact. Furthermore, it also illustrates recognition of the need to both attract the attention of “the layperson” and have those people identify with the skeptics’ discourse.

Our analysis shows that there are manifest contradictions in the articulation of AGW with the interests of political establishments, corporations, and radical groups, which in turn could potentially form the basis of a counterdiscourse to challenge key arguments offered by climate skeptics. It is, for instance, very difficult to rationally align the political ideologies of “radical” fringe groups, including communists, with the economic interests of global corporations. Moreover, the categorization of left-wing groups as being simultaneously “fringe” and “establishment” lacks consistency. However, all three sets of opposing positions are carefully constructed, through articulation, to fundamentally align with emotively held opinions that tend to characterize conservative, right-wing views: individualism, pro–free market economy, and antisocialist/communist. The messages are thus consistent with research findings of politicization of climate change issues along conservative and neoliberal lines, referred to earlier. In addition, carbon trading in practice results in a cost—through taxation and/or purchase of carbon credits—for high-emitting industries such as petroleum.

Politicization is effected by disrupting common sense/consensus—that is, by moving AGW away from the uncontroversial center of the political field and by generating popular concern through identification of social issues with the debate. The strategy for identification is the use of three sets of opposing discourses: power versus resistance, corruption versus purity, and hysteria versus reason, each of which is known to resonate in the social field. Scholars concerned with the construction of rhetorical contrasts have long recognized such types of oppositions as a major discursive means by which political actors accomplish ideological work (Raum & Measell, 1974). For instance, Ivie (1980) identifies how the Johnson administration in the United States obtained public support for war in Vietnam by means of three rhetorical contrasts that construct enemies as savages: force versus freedom, irrationality versus rationality, and aggression versus defense. Not surprisingly, efforts to maintain such contrasts can be seen as recently as the U.S.-led war on Iraq. It is interesting that at least one of Ivie’s contrasts (irrationality/rationality) resonates with our analysis, as it points toward the fact that actors who attempt to articulate discourses in the political field may not have an unlimited choice of contrasts at hand. Indeed, similar discursive dichotomies can be seen to shape discourse between competing actors in a range of public controversies, ranging from management union disputes, activist protests, or even public discussions about biotechnology. It does not matter that in the case of AGW politicization the articulations are, on the surface, contradictory. The objective is to break consensus and to have members of the social field identify with the arguments. Furthermore, the articulations must foster polarization in the political field, and they do this by implicitly utilizing conventional poles of Left and Right. The articulations are effective—and persuasive—because they utilize discourses that potentially resonate with public concerns from across the spectrum: political corruption, corporate greed, and radicalism. In sum, we believe that our analysis makes it evident that a key motive of NZCSC skeptics is to create doubt regarding the credibility of the AGW thesis, thereby legitimizing the need for delay in exercising action (e.g., Oreskes & Conway, 2010).

It is both interesting and important to understand how skeptics construct new discourses in attempts to shift public opinion on AGW. By identifying specific tactics we may be in a better position to counter the seeming facticity of such discourses. We may not know fully what the skeptics’ long-term purpose is, but it is clear that their discourse agitates against any legislated approach to the mitigation of greenhouse gases. In practice, their arguments also act against voluntary mitigation. One might also speculate that their efforts are directed against what they perceive as disruption to the free market by carbon taxes and, more fundamentally, disruption through changes to a carbon-fuelled economy. In the light of what is increasingly becoming not only a matter of scientific consensus but also a visible issue with an increase in extreme weather events, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels, skeptics’ strategies are to delay rather than prevent legislation, to enable business to proceed as usual for a few more years. This has serious consequences for our ability to preserve the world’s commons. Not only does mainstream science express grave concerns over delay in action for greenhouse gas mitigation but with the publication of the UK Stern (2006) report, followed by others such as that by Garnaut (2008) in Australia, economists are also warning that the costs of delay will far outweigh costs of mitigation. Thus the material effects of skeptics’ discourse continue to have dire consequences for everyone.

There is clearly scope for future research that examines more closely the discursive and material effects of skeptics’ strategies, particularly among citizen groups, which is beyond the scope of this article. A further important area for research, often ignored, is that of government responses to skeptics’ strategies, particularly the intended response of delaying mitigation through regulation. What are the connections, if any, between governments and climate skeptics and/or what is the range of interests served by delayed mitigation?