Conference Program

Manipulations and distortions in scientific divulgation and communication on the internet have become top issues in STSs and among the sociologists of cultural and communicative processes. Climate change, among other topics, has fallen under the lens. For instance, Dunlap and McCright (2010) have explored the heterogeneity of the so-called “climate denial blogosphere”; others have analysed the “rhetorical constellations” posted by bloggers on the public Facebook page of a denialist digital platform (Bloomfield and Tillery, 2019; Tillery and Bloomfield 2022).

The present study, moving from the theory of “Co-Production” of science and social order (Jasanoff, 2004; Jasanoff and Kim, 2005), further explores the phenomenon of online climate change denial focusing on the website “Wattsup with that” (https://wattsupwiththat.com), founded in 2006 and run by William Anthony Wattsup, former television meteorologist, chatted climate change skeptic, among the protagonists of the American “Climategate” (Scott, 2021). The platform, self-proclaiming “the world’s most viewed website on global warming and climate change”, is one of the several adversaries of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), established since 1987 by the United Nations, the main advocate of the anthropogenic theory of global warming (ATGW), currently shared by 99% of scientists (Lynas et al. 2021; Myers et al. 2021).

In particular, the analysis concentrates on the archive of “failed predictions”, containing more than sixty climate forecasts, delivered since 1966 until nowadays, by representatives of mainstream climate science and proved, based on observational data, ex post wrong.

Together with some surprising outcomes (to anticipate one, until 1988 every prediction hinted at the coming of a new Ice Age, and not towards a warming trend), the empirical case study provides interesting insights to develop an interdisciplinary reflection upon a constellation of related topics that span from the epistemic status of contemporary climate change science to the future of our climate modelling (Bordoni, 2025); from a critical discourse analysis unveiling fallacious reasonings and flaw explanatory logics, rhetorical tricks and unsound conclusions, to a deeper understanding of the role of epistemic coherence in climate change science (Corradi, 2025); from the intrinsic and multidimensional complexity of climate change predictions, to their instrumental, economic and political usages to erode public trust in mainstream scientific accounts (Blöbaum, 2016; Fischer, 2017).

One important implication is that against climate change denial, it is urgent to safeguard the specific epistemic status of climate predictions, and disclose the actual limits of their reliability, showing the (ever shifting, but nonetheless knowledgeable) boundaries between what we know, what we don’t know, and what we cannot know (Krauss, 2021; Stainforth, 2024). More generally, the positive democratization of access to scientific knowledge through the internet, hiding distorted communicative means and aims, more urgently needs a careful and timing critical sociology of scientific communication, ready to reveal the pitfalls of misleading interpretations and instrumental usages of scientific tenets and findings: before they turn, online, quickly viral.