About the Author:

Patrick Maher is a senior at the University of Texas at Austin studying Sustainability, Geography, and Geosciences. Since graduating in 2023, he has judged over 300 rounds across every debate event between both national and local circuit tournaments, and coached students in all 3 major debate events.

Speech and debate is unique in extra-curricular activities because it asks students to take an active role in their own learning while examining their biases. After four years, a well-traveled graduate of a debate program will have a substantial working understanding of geopolitics, critical theory, philosophy, and the world. Debate also teaches students to think critically about the world and systems around them during the competitive research process. Students are typically randomly assigned sides in a round, so they must adequately prepare for multiple angles of any given issue. This enables debaters to identify flaws in their own arguments and beliefs, providing the opportunity for character growth and is why debate is used as a pedagogical method in the classroom: the way topics are discussed in-round spills out into the way we think about them in the real world (Tomperi et al. 2022). 

The Problem with Status Quo Debate

The simplest defensive arguments are usually made in response to impacts. Impact debates are most easily resolved in three ways:

• "Your impact is less important than another impact" (Outweighing)

• "Your solution doesn't resolve your impact" (Solvency Deficits)

• "Your impact won't happen as a result of X action" (Link Defense)

However, debate’s tendencies towards treating climate change as just an impact rather than the central threat in the next century desensitizes us towards the impending dangers of rising sea levels, warmer temperatures, and agricultural damage. And in a more recent trend, debaters will strategically claim that climate change is not taking place or that humans are not a primary contributor to increasing global temperatures. Instead of contesting links and solvency, this approach vaguely attacks the impact itself, forcing an opponent to debate the existence of climate change instead of legal strategies to combat it. 

Debate is a great, research intensive activity, driven by competitive incentives. However, this leads to an environment where an Affirmative that argues about climate change must defend that it is real rather than contesting whether a proposal can or can’t solve it. While this seems inevitable, the question then becomes: how is debate training us to respond to the concept of climate change, what are the social implications of this argumentation, and should we advocate for change to fight back against the greatest humanitarian and ecological crisis in history?

The Devil

It is an unequivocal fact that the planet is warming, that this warming is caused by human activity, and that this warming is contributing to global change which will impact humans (IPCC 2023; Lynas et al. 2021). While the scientific community is united about the existence of this universal and existential threat, energy, agricultural, and manufacturing corporations are facing their own individual existential threat: falling profits, the green transition, and the end of the fossil fuel era of abundance. But beyond the fact that climate change is simply happening, we are experiencing a crisis in communication about it.

Modeled after the tobacco industry’s media and lobbying efforts which delayed anti-smoking legislation for decades, industry groups have coordinated massive campaigns to delay regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Manufactured doubt and lobbying of governmental officials has delegitimized climate science into a political arena rather than a scientific discipline (Reed et al. 2021). Undermining the scientific process is useful for these corporations which see science as a threat to their bottom lines. The impact of their actions is obscured and they can continue emitting, business as usual. 

Debate is an activity that teaches us to think critically about large problems. And the necessity of fact-forward thinking becomes apparent when we realize how corporate manufactured disinformation has penetrated public perception of climate change. 40% of Americans believe either that the earth is not warming or that any warming can be attributed to natural climate variability, while up to 33% of the global population doubts that climate change is caused by humans (Pasquini et al. 2023; Leiserowitz et al. 2023). These beliefs are counterfactual, but they persist because bad faith actors have proliferated misleading information online, taking advantage of familiarity bias and partisanship bias to limit political pressure for change (Spampatti et al. 2025). 

The Details

So these arguments are false, but if they’re competitively viable and possibly strategic, what's the harm if debaters surely understand how serious the issue is outside of the debate round? A key purpose of debate is to train an ethical, knowledgeable, and capable generation of young people to challenge the unjust society we’ve been born into. When debaters train using disinformation, the potential for debate to motivate students to take action diminishes. And while to some debate is just a game, it has real implications, both educationally and socially. 

The way competitive debate treats climate change ends up creating polarizations in research, where debaters often search for resources that harshly critique climate change as a threat, or its power to devastate humanity, which desensitizes us to climate change disinformation. Thus, debaters may find themselves more drawn to misinformed arguments outside of the round, are less likely to critically interrogate these claims, and forget the true impact that climate change can bring to humanity. Frequent positive contact with the argument that climate change doesn’t exist and/or has no impact may, through exposure bias, affect how debaters and judges think about climate change outside of the round. In this way, the debate space effectively operates as a smokescreen by which climate disinformation can be packaged and distributed unknowingly. 

While nothing changes politically, global temperatures will continue to rise. However, neither the international nor domestic conversations about climate change are over. Debates about solutions to rapid anthropogenic climate change must take place. By discussing political topics in the context of global warming, students can learn about the necessity and possibility of productive change. Conversations around carbon capture, water protection, pollution taxes, energy subsidies, and nature-based solutions to environmental degradation are productive uses of the debate space that spread awareness of how the problem ought to be solved. Debates about policies like these help develop the legal and communication skills that can be oriented towards climate advocacy. Critical examinations of environmental policy and perspectives can highlight failing cultural norms which contribute to environmental degradation. But converting the debate space into a training ground for live fact-checking by amplifying climate denial both creates harm and is unproductive when the opportunity cost is research into solutions. 

Common Concerns

Debaters may interject that they regularly argue in favor of beliefs they do not hold. However, debaters are only asked to debate multiple sides of policy propositions and philosophical statements, while questions of fact are typically deferred to literature. Typical clash in climate-centered debates concerns urgency of a climate response when compared to competing issues, the influence of individual polluting acts on the global climate, and the capacity of any specific plan to solve climate change. It is possible for two people to hold equally valid opinions on these subjects because they are rooted in questions of resource allocation and policy implementation, not scientific validity. Established scientific truths (such as “the planet is getting warmer,” “anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the largest contributor to climate change” and “climate change will have impacts on human society”) are entirely outside the scope of a debate round because they require rigorous testing and repetition that cannot be resolved within 90 minutes.

Others still may argue that there is no difference in educational loss between a round where someone wins via dropped tricks and a round where someone wins by repeating propaganda. However, anti-education content is worse than minimal content. It would be better for the debate space if everyone quoting climate denialists switched to reading tricks because tricks do not writ-large co-opt the language of science nor diminish the importance of fighting climate change. There is a real possibility of subjectivity shift due to reading climate denialist arguments which can’t be reproduced by reading indexicals or frivolous theory. Industries spending massive amounts of money to discredit science and protect their own interests are no better than people who spend massive amounts of money to spread bigotry and collect political favor by appealing to fears of ‘the other.’ In this way, platforming climate denial in debate is equivalent to quoting J.K. Rowling in an impact turn to transphobic oppression. Spreading these ideas in any manner or to any audience is unacceptable.

The Role of Speech and Debate

Improved communication abilities, research skills, and capacity for critical thinking are all part of the pitch when we recruit students into debate. So when a concerning trend in strategy begins to compromise the educational capacity of the debate space, it is important to reverse that trend. Debaters should more carefully consider offering alternative solutions or advocacies to climate change and debating over the potential for these advocacies to fight back against climate change. Debaters should invest time into solvency, link, and critical debates, not spreading overt propaganda. Evidence quality should become a much bigger deal in debates over climate change, and debaters should pay attention to both theirs and their opponent’s sources. 

Outside the debate space, debaters should read reports on climate change and learn more about the policies and systems being used to address it (and why they’re failing). Debaters should learn about the processes of environmental feedback loops and how they work. I encourage anyone interested in climate research to study it in college, it’s how I ended up where I am. Epistemic collapse as a result of misinformation is a serious problem which prevents action, and debaters need to be part of the solution. There are better arguments to make, and ultimately, the devil doesn’t need an advocate.

References

• International Public Opinion on Climate Change, 2023. (n.d.). Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Retrieved April 19, 2026, from https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/international-public-opinion-on-climate-change-2023/

• IPCC, 2023: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, H. Lee and J. Romero (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland, pp. 1-34, doi: 10.59327/IPCC/AR6-9789291691647.001

• Lynas, M., Houlton, B. Z., & Perry, S. (2021). Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, 16(11), 114005. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966

• Pasquini, G., Spencer, A., Tyson, A., & Funk, C. (2023, August 9). Why Some Americans Do Not See Urgency on Climate Change. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/08/09/why-some-americans-do-not-see-urgency-on-climate-change/

• Piksa, M., Noworyta, K., Gundersen, A., Kunst, J., Morzy, M., Piasecki, J., & Rygula, R. (2024). The impact of confirmation bias awareness on mitigating susceptibility to misinformation. Frontiers in Public Health, 12, 1414864. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1414864

• Reed, G., Hendlin, Y., Desikan, A., MacKinney, T., Berman, E., & Goldman, G. T. (2021). The disinformation playbook: How industry manipulates the science-policy process—and how to restore scientific integrity. Journal of Public Health Policy, 42(4), 622–634. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41271-021-00318-6

• Robertson, C. (2025, February 21). People are turning away from the news. Here’s why it may be happening | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/people-are-turning-away-news-heres-why-it-may-be-happening

• Spampatti, T., Brosch, T., Mumenthaler, C., & Hahnel, U. J. J. (2025). Blueprint of a smokescreen: Introducing the validated climate disinformation corpus for behavioural research on combating climate disinformation. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.70012

• Tomperi, T., Korhonen, O., & Mielityinen, S. (2022). Debate as a Pedagogical Practice: A Case Study from Finland on Teaching International Law. Journal of Legal Education, 72(1/2), 156–175.