ABSTRACT
Examining in detail how the trauma represented by climate change is disarticulated across a range of ways we construct and know what global warming is and what it means, this chapter focuses first on how the dominant discourses of climate change help construct a pervasive and normalized denialism. It begins by locating a crucial mechanism of this denialism in framings of the question of “denial” itself, acknowledging that while overt denialism (or “skepticism”) has of course helped render global warming as a “debate” rather than an emergency, it has also functioned as a diversion from how a more normalized cultural denial has been produced across a range of centrist discourses. The chapter then argues that calling attention to overt denialism is a chief way the “responsible” center, the sober “thought leaders” represented here especially by the New York Times and the Obama administration, purports to align itself with the rationality of science, even as, in its identification with the growth paradigm, it fuels the ecocidal status quo—enacting not a partisan conflict but a fundamental political consensus. Beyond such political and media arenas, the chapter details how normalized denialism is constructed across a range of other dominant cultural discourses, focusing on such works as Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree about Climate Change , Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication’s “Global Warming’s Six Americas.”
