>>507565151eggheads, lol
Firstly, we found the majority of climate related discussions on /pol/ to fall under the science theme, with seven topics out of 16 belonging to this category, forming 41 percent of our dataset. This finding points to the fact that while discussions in online environments of the likes of /pol/ are clearly characterised by a unique style of communication with a significant quantity of profanity and hate speech, the debate on climate change is still largely played in the scientific field, where scientific evidence and its validity continues to be debated. In this sense, climate change communication on /pol/ is no different from the broader online and off-line discussion on this issue, where the debate remains essentially a scientific one. The presence of two topics on the process of scientific knowledge creation, ‘academic publishing’ and ‘scientific consensus’ is particularly interesting, as it sheds light on how the processes linked to academic research are discussed on this platform in relation to climate change.
However, results also show that this ‘scientificity’ of a part of climate change conversations on /pol/ appears to be on a reversing trend, with the scientific theme falling in relevance, accompanied by a steady growth of hate speech and conspiracies. In particular, this study finds that climate nationalism, defined as the use of nationalistic arguments to blame climate change on developing countries, is sharply on the rise on /pol/, growing by 50 percent in the period under analysis. Climate nationalism is not an entirely new concept in right-wing environments — for example, in 2019, the far-right French Front National leader Marine LePen suggested that borders are the environment’s greatest allies, claiming that nomadic populations do not care about the environment (France 24, 2019). Further, both the El Paso shooter and the Christchurch shooters, who killed a total 75 people in Texas and New Zealand
