Climate Change - The FactsCommunicationThe writer uses a variety of techniques to make this article easier to understand for younger readers. To themore childish readers, the use of personification is effective as it gives the article a more fictional and storybook appeal- “If the ocean warms sufficiently they could melt, burping vast quantities…” The diction employed is immature- “farting cows… become a politicalhot potato…” This gives people the sense that the issue of this article is not major and there are more important issues that need to be dealt with first. The writer also uses the statement “…fringe subject”. This means it is not the center of attention which it should be. The writer uses references to other scientists however these are not precise or helpful as names are not used and there are no statistics to go with them- “Majority of scientists…” and the writer refers to ‘people’ – “Most people now agree…” This is very imprecise as it leaves the readers with no clue of who these people are, if they even have any professions which make their thoughts important and something we should listen to. There are not many solutions provided for the problems or possible quotations from other scientists which could have beenuseful and made the article more reliable.

Purpose – audience text type and form

The purpose of this article was to inform young aged people about the issue of global warming, which was once a fringe subject, and how it occurred. The texts are written in short paragraphs under subheadings,which makes the passage more informative and clearly explained to the reader. This is further supported by statistics mention throughout the article, when “Warming in the past 100 years has caused about a 0.8°C increase in global temperature.” In one sentence, the reader learnt about many facts that were not known.

Tone and ContentKate Ravilious employs various methods throughout the article to demonstrate her points on global warming and its effects on both humans and the earth. By the use ofstatistics and graphs it gives the reader a different perspective on the article; instead of losing interest by reading continuous paragraphs, she chose to adopt visual representations such as brightly coloured images, diagrams and graphs. This might lead the reader to believe that the article is aimed towards the younger generation, as it is further illustrated in the extract by her choice of words such as ‘farting cows' and ‘rotting vegetation’- the tone of her voice is verychildish and furthermore there have been better articles where the global warming issue has been touched upon; throughout ‘Climate Change’ she writes about previous points that have already been mentioned, her piece does not blow away the audience with the facts and figures, the data stated goes back to 2003, therefore there is no recent information on the current issues of global warming. The text gives the reader a sense that this is just another article based on global warming- it is not very effective.

All through the article, the author aims to display the text using the format of a question and answer. It would be an effective method as each topic is explored in depth; however this is not evident in the passage. The main question of ‘Is mankind really to blame?’ is not even explored; it is faintly mentioned in some parts and by the time the reader has reached the end of the article they are left clueless- they do not know if mankind really is to be blamed.