The troubled rhetoric and communication of climate change: the argumentative situation.

• Author: Danuser, Deborah J.
• Position: Book review

The troubled rhetoric and communication of climate change: the argumentative situation, by Philip Eubanks, New York, Routledge, 2015, pp. 156, $148.00 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-138-84118-5

In The Troubled Rhetoric and Communication of Climate Change: The Argumentative Situation, English professor Philip Eubanks (2015) delves into the passionate, bitter debate about whether or not the Earth's atmosphere is warming and if so, are humans the cause. While the book focuses on the American perspective, the argument about climate change (or global warming) is occurring in local, national, and international political arenas around the world. What makes Eubanks' analysis of the climate change debate interesting is his focus on understanding the underlying beliefs and values that shape both sides of the debate, as well as modern attitudes towards argumentation.

In his introduction, Eubanks lists five problems that make the climate change issue seem intractable: (1) both sides "espouse nearly identical attitudes towards science and objectivity" (p. xi) without recognizing their predispositions towards the evidence; (2) public attitudes towards authority and facts have shifted in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish between "reasonable" and "unreasonable" doubt; (3) as psychologists and argumentative scholars have discovered, motivated reasoning and confirmation bias reflect a natural human tendency to argue to 'preserve our intuitions' rather than to correct error (p. xii); (4) the rift between the two sides runs deeper than competing economic and political interests; the rifts are rooted in deeply held moral foundations; and (5) in today's technological era, attention is a more valued commodity than truth.

In the first chapter, Eubanks starts by asking, "What's wrong with argument?" and then proceeds to examine common complaints about argument in general. Although he does not cite Deborah Tannen in this chapter, the criticisms he lists are similar to those raised by Tannen in The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words (1998). He presents three grievances: (1) "public arguments are about winning and little else" (p. 4); (2) "public arguments are presented as two-sided even when they do not need to be" (p. 6); and (3) "two-sided, winner-take-all argumentation has poisoned the public square" (p. 7).

Chapter two delves into the "trouble" interlocutors who believe in climate change encounter when engaging climate "skeptics" or "doubters."...