The language of denial: text analysis reveals differences in language use between climate change proponents and skeptics
- 2.1k Downloads
- 7 Citations
Abstract
We used text analyzers to compare the language used in two recently published reports on the physical science of climate change: one authored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the other by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC; a group of prominent skeptics, typically with prior scientific training, organized by the Heartland Institute). Although both reports represent summaries of empirical research within the same scientific discipline, our language analyses revealed consistent and substantial differences between them. Most notably, the IPCC authors used more cautious (as opposed to certain) language than the NIPCC authors. This finding (among others) indicates that, contrary to that which is commonly claimed by skeptics, IPCC authors were actually more conservative in terms of language style than their NIPCC counterparts. The political controversy over climate change may cause proponents’ language to be conservative (for fear of being attacked) and opponents’ language to be aggressive (to more effectively attack). This has clear implications for the science communication of climate research.
Keywords
Hedging Anthropogenic Climate Change Science Text Language Style Concordance LineNotes
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Nathaniel Barr, Evan Risko, and Andrew Olney for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. This project was unfunded.
Supplementary material
References
- Adams Smith DE (1984) Medical discourse: aspects of author’s comment. ESP J 3:25–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Anderegg WRL (2010) Moving beyond scientific agreement. Clim Chang 101:331–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Anderegg WRL, Prall JW, Harold J, Schneider SHS (2010) Expert credibility in climate change. Proc Natl Acad Sci 107:12107–12109CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Anderegg WR, Callaway ES, Boykoff MT, Yohe G, Root TYL (2014) Awareness of both type 1 and 2 errors in climate science and assessment. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 95:1445–1451CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Anthony L (2012) AntConc (Version 3.3.5) [Computer Software]. Available from http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/
- Baayen H, Piepenbrock R,van Rijn H (1993) The CELEX database on CD-ROM. (Linguistic Data Consortium)Google Scholar
- Biber D, Conrad S (2009) Register, genre, and style. Cambridge Univ Press, New YorkCrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Biber D, Gray B (2010) Challenging stereotypes about academic writing: complexity, elaboration, explicitness. J Eng Acad Purp 9:2–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Biber D, Gray B (2013) Nominalizing the verb phrase in academic science writing. In: Aarts B, Close J, Leech G, Wallis S (eds) The verb phrase in english: investigating recent language change with corpora. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, pp 99–132CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Boykoff MT, Boykoff JM (2004) Balance as bias: global warming and the U.S. prestige press. Glob Environ Chang 15:125–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Boykoff MT, Boykoff JM (2007) Climate change and journalistic norms: a case-study of US mass-media coverage. Geoforum 38:1190–1204CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Bray D (2010) The scientific consensus of climate change revisited. Environ Sci Pol 13:340–350CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Brysse K, Oreskes N, O’Reilly J, Oppenheimer M (2013) Climate change prediction: erring on the side of least drama? Glob Environ Chang 23:327–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Coltheart M (1981) The MRC psycholinguistic database. Q J Exp Psych 33:497–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Cook J, Nuccitelli D, Green SA, Richardson M, Winkler B, Painting R, Way R, Jacobs P, Skuce A (2013) Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environ Res Lett 8:1–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Crossley SA, McNamara DS (2011) Understanding expert ratings of essay quality: coh-metrix analyses of first and second language writing. Int J Continuing Eng Educ Life Long Learn 21:170–191CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Ding D, Maibach EW, Zhao X, Roser-Renouf C, Leiserowitz A (2011) Support for climate policy and societal action are linked to perceptions about scientific agreement. Nat Clim Chang 1:462–466CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Doran PT, Zimmerman MK (2009) Examining the scientific consensus on climate change. Eos Trans AGU 90:22–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Dunlap RE, Jacques PJ (2013) Climate change denial books and conservative think tanks: exploring the connection. Am Behav Sci 57:699–731CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Dunlap RE, McCright AM (2011) Organized climate change denial. In: Dryzek JS, Norgaard RB, Schlosberg D (eds) The Oxford handbook of climate change. Oxford Univ Press, Oxford, pp 144–160Google Scholar
- Fløttum K, Dahl T (2012) Different contexts, different “stories”? A linguistic comparison of two development reports on climate change. Lang Comm 32:14–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Freudenberg WR, Muselli V (2010) Global warming estimates, media expectations, and the asymmetry of scientific challenge. Glob Environ Chang 20:483–491CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Freudenburg WR, Muselli V (2013) Reexamining climate change debates scientific disagreement or Scientific Certainty Argumentation Methods (SCAMs)? Am Behav Sci 57:777–795CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Gosden H (1993) Discourse functions of subject in scientific research articles. Appl Ling 14:56–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Graesser AC, McNamara DS, Kulikowich JM (2011) Coh-metrix providing multilevel analyses of text characteristics. Educ Res 40:223–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Graesser AC, McNamara DS, Cai Z, Conley M, Li H, Pennebaker J (2014) Coh-metrix measures text characteristics at multiple levels of language and discourse. Elem Sch J 115:210–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Halliday MAK (1979) Differences between spoken and written language: some implications for language teaching. In G. Page et al. (eds) Communication through reading: Proceedings of the 4th Australian reading conference (pp. 37–52). Adelaide: Australian Reading AssociationGoogle Scholar
- Halliday MAK, Martin JR (1993) Writing science: literacy and discursive power. Falmer PressGoogle Scholar
- Hyland K (1998) Hedging in scientific research articles. John Benjamins Publishers, AmsterdamCrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Hyland K (2005) Prudence, precision, and politeness: hedges in academic writing. In M.A. Olivares Pardo & F. Suau Jiménez (Eds.). Las lenguas de especialidad: Nuevas perspectivas de investigación (Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Linguistics 10, pp. 99–112). Valencia: Universitat de ValènciaGoogle Scholar
- Idso CD, Singer SF (2009) Climate change reconsidered: 2009 report of the nongovernmental panel on climate change (NIPCC). The Heartland Institute, ChicagoGoogle Scholar
- Idso CD, Carter RM, Singer SF (eds) (2011) Climate change reconsidered: 2011 interim report of the nongovernmental panel on climate change (NIPCC). The Heartland Institute, ChicagoGoogle Scholar
- Idso CD, Carter RM, Singer SF (eds) (2013) Climate change reconsidered II: physical science. The Heartland Institute, ChicagoGoogle Scholar
- IPCC, 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (2007) In: Solomon S, Qin D, Manning M, Chen Z, Marquis M, Averyt KB, Tignor M, Miller HL (eds) Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NYGoogle Scholar
- IPCC, 2013. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group 1 to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2013) Stocker TF, D Qin G-K Plattner M, Tignor SK, Allen J, Boschung A, Nauels Y, Xia V Bex and P.M. Midgley (Eds.). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 1535 pp. (2013)Google Scholar
- Jacques P, Dunlap RE, Freeman M (2008) The organization of denial: conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism. Environ Poli 17:349–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Jankó F, Móricz N, Vancsó JP (2014) Reviewing the climate change reviewers: exploring controversy through report references and citations. Geoforum 56:17–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Lambert C, Robinson P (2014) Learning to perform narrative tasks: a semester-long classroom study of L2 task sequencing effects. Task sequencing and instructed second language learning. In Baralt M, Gilabert R, Robinson P (eds) Task sequencing and instructed second language learning. 207–230. Bloomsbury AcademicGoogle Scholar
- Landauer TK, Foltz PW, Laham D (1998) Introduction to latent semantic analysis. Discourse Proc 25:259–284CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Lewandowsky S, Oreskes N, Risbey JS, Newell BR, Smithson M (2015). Seepage: climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community. Glob Environ ChangGoogle Scholar
- McCarthy PM, Jarvis S (2010) MTLD, vocd-D, and HD-D: a validation study of sophisticated approaches to lexical diversity assessment. Behav Res Methods 42:381–392CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- McCright AM, Dunlap RE (2003) Defeating Kyoto: the conservative movement’s impact on U.S. climate change policy. Soc Probl 50:348–373CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- McCright AM, Dunlap RE, Xiao C (2013) Perceived scientific agreement and support for government action on climate change in the USA. Clim Chang 119:511–518CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- McNamara DS, Graesser AC, McCarthy PM, Cai Z (2014) Automated evaluation of text and discourse with Coh-Metrix. Cambridge Univ Press, CambridgeCrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Oreskes N (2004) The scientific consensus on climate change. Science 306:1686–1687CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Oreskes N, Conway EM (2010) Defeating the merchants of doubt. Nature 465:686–687CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Parkinson J, Musgrave J (2014) Development of noun phrase complexity in the writing of English for Academic Purposes students. J Engl Acad Purp 14:48–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Robinson M, Stoller F, Costanza-Robinson M, Jones J (2008) Write like a chemist: a guide and resource. Oxford University Press, New YorkGoogle Scholar
- Rosenberg S, Vedlitz A, Cowman D, Zahran S (2010) Climate change: a profile of U.S. climate scientists’ perspectives. Clim Chang 101:3–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Singer SF (ed) (2008) Nature, not human activity, rules the climate: summary for policymakers of the report of the nongovernmental international panel on climate change. The Heartland Institute, ChicagoGoogle Scholar
- Tausczik YR, Pennebaker JW (2010) The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. J Lang Soc Psychol 29:24–54Google Scholar
- van der Linden S, Leiserowitz A, Feinberg G, Maibach E (2015) The scientific consensus on climate change as a gateway belief: experimental evidence. PLoS ONE. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0118489
- Zehr SC (2000) Public representations of scientific uncertainty about global climate change. Public Underst Sci 9:85–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Zeiger X (1999) Essentials of writing biomedical research papers. McGraw-Hill, New YorkGoogle Scholar