| Through content analysis of comments on internet news articles, I examine the arguments of climate change supporters, those labeled climate change "deniers", and an unexamined identity of individuals that are climate change abstainers. By analyzing the discourse of the climate change debate at one of its sources on a public forum, I find that climate change support is a spectrum that varies from non-support of dominant climate change assumptions to complete support. I also find that identities that are represented on this spectrum are strongly entangled with education level, while the dominant climate change support assumption portrays non-supporters as ignorant, uneducated, and scientifically illiterate. Non-supporters and abstainers use 5 primary strategies of negotiating intelligence and the stigma of ignorance associated with dominant climate change support: abstaining from climate change support and non-support; critically questioning political and corporate power; critical analysis of the academy and peer review process; claiming identities related to science, education, and politics; and negotiations of the stigmas attached to non-support identities through online public scientific debate. |
