The Devil Doesn't Need an Advocate
Disinformation in Debate

The Devil Doesn't Need an Advocate: Climate Disinformation in Debate

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 Debate

In a debate round, all arguments are comprised of a claim, a warrant, and an impact. Unanswered arguments are automatically assumed to be true, as it would be unfair for a judge to 'intervene' by applying outside information not presented by the debaters to influence the outcome of the round. 

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" (Link Defense)

It is under this framework that debate is failing. While we face the reality of climate change in our daily lives, debaters will strategically claim that climate change is not taking place or that humans are not a primary contributor to increasing global temperatures. Permissive coaches, competitive incentives, and fairness-focused judging have allowed climate disinformation to begin to take the place of legitimate, worthwhile link defense. The unfortunate contradiction is that the freedom which makes debate a meaningful activity has allowed it to become corrupted by its competitive incentives, reducing its educational capacity. We must stop using the academic space of speech and debate to reproduce and defend the institutions that are permitting and prolonging the greatest humanitarian and ecological crisis in history and instead begin contributing to the solution.

The Devil

We are experiencing a crisis in communication about climate change. 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. 

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. 

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). As established above, 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

These coordinated efforts to discredit science have worked, but what's the harm in the context of debate, especially if debaters understand these arguments are being repeated solely for the purpose of winning a round? The purpose of debate, ostensibly, 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, that training becomes useless. And while to some debate is just a game, it has real implications, both educationally and socially. 

Because disinformation works through continuous exposure via the familiarity bias, debaters may find themselves more drawn to these arguments outside of the round. Conceding to climate denial in round, even strategically, can influence a judge's perception of the argument, especially community judges without substantial experience in debate. Debaters and judges in frequent contact with uncontested disinformation may repeat these arguments out of round. In this way, the debate space effectively operates as a smokescreen by which climate disinformation can be packaged and distributed unknowingly, masked as a study on uncertainty. 

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. 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.

Addressing the Elephant

The natural defense to this concern is that “in the real world, people buy this fake science, we have to train debaters to debunk them.” But this mindset ignores the purpose of disinformation. Combatting climate denial through debate is bound to be ineffective if the goal is preventing climate impacts because climate denial isn’t meant to stand up to scrutiny. The claims are false, outdated, or cherry-picked, but there are more false claims than one person will ever be able to identify and accurately debunk. Disinformation is intentionally vague, so arguments can be repeated without skill, and mistaken beliefs can persist without the argument that spawned them through confirmation bias (Piksa et al. 2024). The point of disinformation is principally to fatigue and confuse, leading people to disengage with an issue (Robertson 2025). Once someone stops paying attention, they're more likely to believe it's not a big deal and that other issues should take precedence in national politics. So while yes, debaters should learn to respond to these arguments, their inclusion in-round trades off with other, more worthwhile discussions of policy.

Debaters may also 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 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 are entirely outside the scope of a debate round because they require rigorous testing and repetition that cannot be resolved within 90 minutes.

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 the implications of the arguments they make and more seriously consider contesting disinformation with procedural theory. Judges should more carefully examine author qualifications of questionable arguments and enforce evidence quality rules, and coaches should more directly guide argument choice. But above all else, debaters must stop improving the reach of climate denialists. There are better arguments to make, and ultimately, the devil doesn’t need an advocate.