MID-TERM Short Answer

Article - "Dark Green Doomsayers" by George F. Will

From my first reading of the article by George F. Will, I was immediately distracted by the amount of quotes that he included in his article. It is always a good idea to include work by others and relevant quotes by experts on topic one is writing about, but when one page of a one and a half page article is composed of quotes, its a bit of an overload. But the one aspect of Will's writing that makes the amount of quotations almost expectable is that when he does actually write, the humor that he writes with makes the topic readable. Those two aspects are the first things I noticed about the article " Dark Green Doomsayers."
But what is Will even writing about, and more importantly, what is his stance on the topic. The article is about the on-going issue of global warming and about all the theories these scientists have come up with. From the title of the article alone, I could tell that this wasn't just a news article; it wasn't a reporting of new developments in the field. The author, Will's has an opinion on the topic and freely and openly lets everyone who reads the writing see it. He isn't trying to hide his stance and opinion on the issue of global warming and those predicting such disasters as the beginning of a new ice age.
When began reading the article, i did think that it was just a report on the issue of global warming; but after reading the entire article, i realized that it was an article almost making fun at the people who are obsessed with the topic. Will ends the piece with; "Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one third of the span since the global cooling scare." Will spent the entire article discussing the different beliefs and theories of those scientists who believe that global warming is an immediate threat, than in his last two sentences, made them seem like idiots. I also believe that the author's argument is that the country and its people should be more worried about pressing and real problems such as the economy, rather than be enthralled in the "theory" of global warming.
The article comes from the Washington Post, which is the first sign that the article can be somewhat trusted since the Post is the newspaper with the largest circulation and the oldest paper in the country's capital. Researching the author, my immediate belief that this article was more an editorial piece seems to be correct since George F. Will is a Op-Ed columnist. Will is not a reporter, he doesn't get paid to report the news, he gets paid to write his opinion; but not only to write his opinion, but to make it interesting, entertaining and maybe even controversial. A columnist is a journalists who writes editorials; an editorial is "relating to an article stating opinions or giving perspectives." (wordnet.com) Because the writer of this piece is a columnist, his writing cannot be taken as fact or true because he is without a doubt writing with opinion and an objective or 'spin'. Although he filled his article with lots of quotes from scientists about global warming, he specifically chose those quotes because they made his point stronger by the way that he presented them. Even just Googling the article, I found it reposted in numerous websites, sites that share Will's point of view, such as; Climate Change Fraud.