ABSTRACT
The facticity patterns are clusters of linguistic devices which come together to represent descriptions as certain or true, or to undermine descriptions as uncertain or false. The facticity has been explored in useful ways by a range of disciplines, including discursive psychology; the sociology of science; political discourse analysis; and more general discourse analysis. This chapter analyses two texts from what Brulle calls the climate change counter-movement, to illustrate different ways that this movement uses facticity patterns to undermine environmentalist positions on climate change. The ecolinguistics investigates not just the specific facticity patterns used by scientific institutions and counter movements, but also investigates and questions the more general meta facticity patterns used by both sides to build up the facticity of their descriptions. Within ecolinguistics, facticity patterns have been examined primarily in the area of climate change, which is clearly a key area both in terms of the scale and strength of the debate and in its social and ecological importance.
