ABSTRACT
The author feels that the debates over climate change as they have been framed in mainstream American media at best do nothing to address the impacts of climate change, and at worst relegate to obscurity a host of other environmental problems that also require immediate attention. The conservative media's sanction of climate change denial likely accounts for some of the increased political and demographic polarization, but there also exists the possibility that pre-existing forms of socio-political polarization have simply taken up climate change as another front in the culture wars. In order to explore the relationship between conservative media's climate change and gender inequality denial strategies, the author chose to focus on the 2012 Rush Limbaugh Show transcripts. Rush Limbaugh has offered more explanations of climate models than any other mass-consumed news source regardless of political inclination, and has simultaneously generated the least sentences suggesting that such models may be accurate.
