Chanting to the choir: The dialogical failure of antithetical climate change blogs

April 20, 2020, by Brigitte Nerlich

Chanting to the choir: The dialogical failure of antithetical climate change blogs

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My paper, Chanting to the choir: the dialogical failure of antithetical climate change blogs, was recently published in the Journal of Science Communication. This paper emerged from one of the chapters in my PhD thesis, Rethinking science communication models in practice, which was accepted at the Australian National University last year.

My motivation for studying two antithetical blogs on climate change science was to look at whether laypeople—those without a scientific background—were engaging in deliberative discussions about the science on blogs. I chose antithetical blogs because I was interested to see if the quality of dialogue was different between those who engaged with the consensus science of climate change (https: //www. skepticalscience. com/) versus those who engaged with a blog that denied such science (http: //joannenova. com. au/).

To be frank, I did not expect such reactions to this paper but it’s great that it’s stimulated such discussions and I want to explore each of these concerns.

This brings me to the last point about calling someone who denies consensus climate science a ‘science communicator’. Jo Nova is a pseudonym for Joanne Codling who is a graduate from and was a lecturer in the Australian National University’s (ANU) science communication program. Her blog’s About page says: “Before blogging she hosted a children’s TV series on Channel Nine, was a regular keynote speaker, and managed the Shell Questacon Science Circus. She was an associate lecturer in Science Communication at ANU. At one time she helped fundraise for The Australian Greens. Then she grew up. ” I certainly don’t regard Jo Nova as a ‘science communicator’, and perhaps I should have made it clearer in my paper that this was her claim rather than mine. However, it’s an interesting point to consider: what do we call lawyers, teachers or doctors who’ve gone bad?

Image: Thomas Webster: The village choir, Wikimedia Commons