ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the discourses of climate change denialism in a corpus of texts mentioning climate change and global warming from 186 websites and blogs known to promote pseudoscience and conspiracy. After comparing this corpus to the English Web 2020 corpus (enTenTen20) for keywords, keyword co-occurrence analytical approach was used. The analysis revealed that all the tactics and arguments known to have been developed and promulgated by conservative think tanks (funded by the fossil fuel industry) have permeated online blogs and websites promoting pseudoscience and conspiracy. Additionally, the analysis shows that while outright denial of climate change is common on these websites, texts are more likely to focus on downplaying the seriousness of climate change. It is argued that downplaying the seriousness of climate change is a subtler and more believable strategy in comparison to outright denial, which is harder to believe in the face of growing scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change.
