Climate change and ‘climategate’ in online reader comments: a mixed methods study

Climate change has rarely been out of the public spotlight in the first decade of this century. The high-profile international meetings and controversies such as ‘climategate’ have highlighted the factthat it is as much a political issue as it is a scientific one, while also drawing our attention to the roleof social media in reflecting, promoting or resisting such politicisation. In this article, we proposea framework for analysing one type of social media venue that so far has received little attentionfrom social scientists – online reader comments. Like media reporting on climate change, readercomments on this reporting contribute to the diverse, complex and contested discourses on climatechange, and can reveal the meanings and discursive resources brought to the ongoing debate bylaypeople rather than political elites. The proposed framework draws on research in computer-mediated communication, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis and takes into account both thecontent of such ‘lay talk’ and its linguistic characteristics within the specific parameters of theweb-based context. Using word frequencies, qualitative study of co-text and user ratings, we analysea large volume of comments published on the UK tabloid newspaper website at two different pointsin time – before and after the East Anglia controversy. The results reveal how stereotypes of scienceand politics are appropriated in this type of discourse, how readers’ constructions of climate sciencehave changed after ‘climategate’, and how climate-sceptic arguments are adopted and contested incomputer-mediated peer-to-peer interaction