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Christian Ledesma
Mr. Hackney
English 101
8 October 2014
The Changing Climate
For years, global warming has been in news articles and all over TV, but many people do
not see the effects of this. Recently, however, global warming has become a larger issue which
has grabbed the attention of many different researchers. The increase in human emissions has led
to many scientists wonder about which extreme weather events. In Scientist Trace Extreme
Heat in Australia to Climate Change, Justin Gillis uses logos and ethos to explain how scientist
claim that climate change is affecting some specific weather occurrences.
Right from the beginning of the article, Gillis includes logos to show that some such
weather events have been affected by climate change. One such event was the heat waves that hit
Australia last year. Gillis said that researchers concluded that this event was almost certainly a
direct consequence of greenhouse gases released by human activity. Even though Australia is
known to be a hot, arid place, the research groups believed that the heat waves could not have
been as severe without the long-term climatic warming from human emissions. This caused
problems with sporting events such as the Australian Open in January because temperatures
reached a high of 111 degrees which caused the tournament to be delayed. These research groups
were able to come to this conclusion by utilizing computer analysis of what the climate would
have been like without human emissions. These results prove that not only is the earth warming,
but the climate in places around the world may be changing as well. Even though, one such
weather event was linked to human emissions, not all extreme weather events are because of

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that. For example, there was extreme rainfall in places in 2013 such as Colorado that scientist say
are becoming less likely, not more likely, in the warming climate. This shows that we should
not conclude that human influence is affecting every weather pattern.
Gillis then incorporates ethos into his article to show that climate change is happening.
Gillis said that David Karoly was a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne that helped
lead research on the extreme heat waves in Australia. Then, Gillis mentions about how other
research groups have written papers on their findings and includes a quote by Martin B.
Hoerling. Hoerling is an American scientist who is skeptical of links between global warming
and weather events. Hoerling said in response to these papers that [t]he evidence in those papers
is very strong. This shows that even someone who does not think these weather events are
caused by global warming believes that some extreme weather events could be caused by global
warming.
Throughout his article, Gillis successfully uses ethos and logos to explain how some
weather events can be because of global warming. The extremity of these events will gradually
worsen over the next few decades if nothing is done about it. By including these devices in his
article, it provide a more credible and reliable source about the issue with climate change and
with informing the readers that a change has to be done.