Analytic Reflection and Work Cited

Throughout the composition of my blog piece “Are We Finally Going to do Something About Climate Change?” I drew upon several concepts from course readings throughout the semester. The most relevant and helpful critical texts that I used was definitely Miller and Shepherd’s Blogging as Social Action as well as Jeanne Fahnestock’s Accommodating Science.

In Accommodating Science, Fahnestock discusses and evaluates the methods used by writers to accommodate scientific studies into more accessible and appealing documents for the general public. My science tech blog was essentially doing just this. I took inspiration from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2002 document “Climate Change and Biodiversity,” but focused my blog post on climate change. This piece, although still relevant today, is 12 y ears old, therefore it yields itself to some credibility issues when one attempts to place it in a modern argument. Because of this, I utilized sources such as NASA’s current climate change statistics to formulate my argument.

The kairos of my blog is very strong, as the United Nations just held a summit in New York City on Tuesday to discuss and promise to negotiate the international issue of climate change within the next year. In Blogging as Social Action, kairos is defined as “both the sense in which discourse is understood as fitting and timely--the way it observes propriety or decorum--and the way in which it can seize on the unique opportunity of a fleeting moment to create new rhetorical possibility.” My exigency in composing my blog post was to take the issue of climate change, one that I have always heard about but never researched in depth until now, and transition it into a relevant discussion aimed at a vast audience. The stasis of my blog post was that of a person who is informed and excited about the potential to finally see something done about climate change, yet I remained somewhat skeptical not of the science itself, but of the world’s ability to apply it into action. 

In Accommodating Science, Fahnestock relays that the intention of science accommodation is to “"bridge the enormous gap between the public's right to know and the public's ability to understand." Climate change is without a doubt a very complex issue, but is also very relevant therefore people have a desire to understand it. Fahnestock argues that in order for a science subject to be properly embraced by the general public, it must first appear to be groundbreaking or crisis-worthy. Climate change is not a new topic, but it is one that is growing more and more prevalent everyday and window of action is rapidly closing as the issue continues to be politicized, rather than taken seriously scientifically. It is my hope that science will continue to be accommodated affectively, and as a result policies will be made and treaties will be reached to actually do something about it.

Work Cited:

1972. NASA. LIFE. Web. 25 Sept. 2014.

Anderson, Michael. "Voicemails from the Future Explore the Impact of Climate Change | WIRED." Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 05 Feb. 0014. Web. 25 Sept. 2014.

"Climate Change." NASA. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.

Gitay, Habiba. Climate Change and Biodiversity. Rep. N.p.: n.p., n.d.Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Apr. 2002. Web. 24 Sept. 2014.

"Global Climate Change." Global Climate Change. NASA, n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

Fahnestock, J. "Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts." Written Communication 3.3 (1986): 275-96. Web.

Keim, Brandon. "The Psychology of Climate Change Denial | WIRED."Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 09 Dec. 2009. Web. 24 Sept. 2014.

Landler, Mark, and Coral Davenport. "Obama Presses Chinese on Global Warming." The New York Times. The New York Times, 23 Sept. 2014. Web. 25 Sept. 2014.

Miller, Carolyn R., and Dawn Shepherd. "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs." (2004): n. pag. Web.

Monsivais, Pablo Martinez. 2014. USA Today. Web.

Stampler, Lauren. "Watch Leonardo DiCaprio Demand the UN Take Climate Change Seriously." Time. Time, 23 Sept. 2014. Web. 25 Sept. 2014.

Vaughan, Adam. "UN Climate Change Summit in New York- As It Happened." The Guardian. N.p., 23 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Sept. 2014.

Vidal, John, Allegra Stratton, and Suzanne Goldenberg. "Low Targets, Goals Dropped: Copenhagen Ends in Failure." The Guardian. N.p., 18 Dec. 2009. Web. 24 Sept. 2014.