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Rhetorical Strategies In Climate Change

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The Uncertainty of Science: Rhetorical Strategies in the Climate Change Debate
In 2015, world leaders gathered together for the United Nations climate conference in Paris, in hopes of reaching an emissions agreement to reduce climate change. The outcome was a global pact between 195 countries, including the United States. The politicians and policy makers of the conference were heavily influenced by a study done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The “Pausebuster” study, published in 2015, refuted a 2013 study by United Nations scientists, which claimed that global warming had slowed down from 1998 to 2013. The NOAA study, in fact, reported that the increase of global warming per decade had increased, instead of …show more content…

Prior to the Paris conference, in 2013 after NOAA published the paper, Republicans, who have a pattern of rejecting climate change, headed by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, launched an inquiry into the validity of the report (Rose 9). Rose omitted the date of this inquiry, and strategically placed the information about the inquiry after talking about John Bates releasing the information discrediting NOAA, falsely suggesting the inquiry was a result of Bates’ whistleblowing. In 2013, NOAA failed to comply with subpoenas for their information, but the Daily Mail failed to mention NOAA made its scientists available on multiple occasions (Gallucci 3). Also, critically the Daily Mail failed to report, the result of the inquiry was that NOAA was found of no wrong doing (4). The Mashable article omitted, that NOAA’s data sets were flawed due to software bugs and that NOAA has taken steps to retake sea measurements after releasing the report (Rose 5). The information the authors did not omit, they labeled with a bias towards the article’s ultimate …show more content…

Gallucci accurately labels Rose’s article as the “widely refuted Daily Mail article” (Gallucci 1). She even labels David Rose as a false journalist by highlighting a false climate science coverage and Iraqi weaponry claims (1). Gallucci backs up her labels by using twitter post from Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at U.C Berkeley and Gavin A. Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (2). She also uses a blog post from Victor Vienna, a German scientist with the World Meteorological Organization (5). Lastly, she uses a penned rebuttal in a newspaper article by Peter Thorne, an Irish climate scientist, who worked on the NOAA study (5). Rose also uses bias by labeling by presenting Dr. John Bate’s evidence as “irrefutable”, instead of as unverified, as correctly mentioned in Gallucci’s article (Rose 1). He also quickly links the 2015 NOAA study to the infamous 2009 “Climategate” scandal, in which scientists manipulated data before the UN summit (2). In fact, Rose renames the NOAA climate change study to “Climategate 2.0” (3). Rose’s limited sources include an interview John Bates, a study conducted by John Bates by himself, and quotes from Professor Curry from Georgia Institute of Technology (1). Gallucci’s sources are a diverse set of scientists, who can accurately speak to the issue of climate

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