THE WEB,THE PUBLIC,AND THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE

The World Wide Web is a popular source of information on the environment. The global warming controversy, an important environmental problem, has very extensive Web coverage, yet no detailed analysis has been made of its treatment on the Web. Our paper attempts to remedy this lack of analysis. It first analyzes the scientific controversy about global warming, then examines its current treatment on the Web, contrasting it with the treatment in elite science journals. The paper further discusses the direction the controversy on the Web will most likely take in the future. We conclude that although the debate on global warming science has been very widely treated on the Web, the future is likely to see the controversy shift to questions of the appropriate response to climate change. We argue that this new phase of the controversy is likely to become even more prevalent on the Web as the controversy moves from the scientific arena to the political.