From Creationist Rhetoric to Climate Change Denial Rhetoric: My Journey with Studying Evidence Denial

I know I already have an “About” page, but I’m an academic and writing professor. I have much more to say about my work and academic journey. To be clear: as I am a newer scholar in the field, a good portion of this blog constitutes an origin story. As those origins happened during my doctoral study at Ohio University, I will be recounting those. As I move into my climate change work, I will start moving to the work I’ve done in the last three to four years, including my dissertation and excerpts from my latest work.

Though this is my first official website, I’ve launched others in the past. In my second year of my PhD at Ohio University in Fall 2018, I took a New Media Composition in English Studies with Dr. Ryan Shepherd before he became a WPA at Northern Illinois University. This class let me shift my work from researching and analyzing creationist (evolution denial) rhetoric to researching and analyzing climate change denial rhetoric.

On my old website from 2018, I discuss my analytical work on creationist rhetoric and the visual rhetoric of climate change data. Studying creationism and climate change data and denialism comes from my initial teaching and studying logical fallacies. As I explain and outline, I felt empowered to understand how creationists made logically dubious claims and arguments. In learning about these concepts, I expanded into studying Toulmin’s concept of the warrant in my PhD application essay, “Rhetorical Wedges and Warranting Bridges in Anne Gauger’s “Something Borrowed, Something New.” Though I never mention a particular fallacy or fallacies in this paper, I saw Toulmin’s concept of the warrant as “elucidating a potentially useful method for looking at Gauger’s assumptions informing her rhetorical connections” (p. 3). In other words, I wanted to go beyond labeling Gauger’s work as fallacious, attempting instead to from where her lack of logic springs. However, without understanding what fallacies are, I would have missed that Gauger was making illogical arguments to begin with.

I also ended up applying my understanding to my Midwest Popular Cultural Association presentation in 2016, I titled “Rhetorician of the “Word”: A Hubbed Meditation.” In this paper, I used the metaphor of hub and spoke metaphor. This metaphor organizes into four different spokes. The first three spokes deal with how Pastor Ham uses and defines the word “science” throughout his speech at Ham/Nye debate. The fourth spoke then critiqued Ham’s strategies using the work of Culler, Ong, and Weaver’s scholarship to break the strategies down. Though I took this paper into a different paper later in my career, I think this work established my interest in looking at science denial from the most charitable yet objective angle possible.

Though the Gauger paper got me into Ohio University and I did some presentations on creationism, my professors didn’t seem as excited by the work as I was. Truth be told, the most current studies of science denial rarely focus on creationists trying to put their agendas into public science classroom or into the public square. Though the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California still does some research and intervention dealing with creationism, they have mainly switched to focusing on climate change education (as their most recent banner on the home page reveals). Along with this public shift, I had a personal shift into looking at climate change rhetoric after I took a special topics class on rhetoric, which I outlined on my old website. If you’ve made it to this blog, you’ve no doubt encountered the data visual below:

Though the class wasn’t about data visualization, the professor’s curriculum included looking at a webpage by Timothy Morton that features this visual, which he cites from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. As the NCSE is a scientific and science educator organization, I felt left out of the science literacy battle. Seeing Dr. Timothy Morton, an English professor, using a scientific visual on climate change for his work showed me that I too could analyze and use scientific visuals in my rhetoric of science denial work. I go into much more detail about how three different online contexts use Figure 1A (pictured above) in very different ways as evidence for their respective arguments, which you can read here.

Simply put, my dissertation project looked at how three different websites used Figure 1A (pictured above) for very different ends. I decided to see if I could find an origin for the data visual Morton used beside the link he provides for the GISS, as the graph looked different. I found that the figure above originated at Hansen et al. (2006) online paper, “Global Temperature Change.” Need more…

As mentioned above, Morton used the above visual to talk about global warming as a hyperobject. In short, a hyperobject represents a physical phenomenon that outlives a singular life span, such as radioactive half lives and global warming. As such, global warming defies the common sense humans have where weather and climate are the same. Morton uses Figure 1A because the X axis shows a timespan of 1880-2005. Such a timespan goes well beyond a single person’s or generation’s lifespan. In so much that people will deny climate change because their own experiences of cold waves, cold winters, or even particularly cool summers confuse the sense that just because it’s cold or hot where someone lives doesn’t reflect the fact that the entire planet is getting hotter year-by-year according to the data. In essence, the data challenges our immediate sense experiences.

In another academic context, Dr. Sara Via of the University of Maryland school uses a second graph that seeks to explain how readers should see the differences between long term and short term trends in temperature variations in Figure 1A. Since the page I analyzed has been partially archived on the Wayback Machine without the visual Via used, I will post it here:

For both Figure 1A and the above figure, Via cites USGCRP’s 2013 report. Citing USGCRP’s Third Climate Assessment from Supplemental Message 3 , Via used this graph (which includes my markups) to show how short term trends (with the red circles around the orange jagged lines) can show flattening and downward trend while the main trend (represented by the black line) shows a steady increase over a larger time period. (Go here to see the same data visual in more detail).

By contrast, recalling Figure 1A, it may be harder for a person to see the individual yearly trends in such a long period of time:

Though the general, long term trend is clearly moving up, with all the different lines, dots, and long span of years, a reader may find this difficult to understand. So, the simplified chart she provides in the archived page visually clarifies the way long-term pand short-term trends can differ.

As none of these contexts (or any other analysis in my dissertation) dealt with climate denial, I shifted to climate denial analysis in 2022 while I was doing final revisions on my dissertation. Particularly, my most recent work deals more with looking at the rhetoric of climate change denial and how it engages (or disengages) with evidence in online spaces. Here’s a link to the visual essay I presented for an on-demand session at the CCCC’s 2022 conference, which was a hybrid in person/online conference. Aside from the activism context for the visual presentation, the visual essay applies the mark up method I used in my dissertation to show how the two different Quora posters misinterpret the same figure (from the same Hansen et al., 2006) paper as before.

At this point, I’m planning on moving some of this work into a larger project. Please stay tuned!