IELTS Global Warming Essay: Answer the Question, Do Not Explain the Science

Global warming is one of the most common themes in IELTS Writing Task 2, and it produces one of the most common failures. Candidates who know the subject write an accurate explanation of the greenhouse effect and score lower than candidates who know less and answer the question.

This post shows the three question shapes this theme uses, why the science lecture answer loses marks, and a full answer to one of them with the reasoning behind each paragraph.

The three question shapes

Task 2 does not ask you about global warming. It asks you to do something with global warming. The verb in the instruction line tells you which.

Read the instruction line twice before you plan. The same theme, with a different instruction, needs a different essay.

What is actually being marked

Task 2 is marked on four criteria of equal weight: Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. How the paper works sets out all four.

Here is the public wording for Task Response at the bands most candidates are aiming at.

• Band 6: "addresses all parts of the task although some parts may be more fully covered than others"; "presents a relevant position although the conclusions may become unclear or repetitive"; "presents relevant main ideas but some may be inadequately developed/unclear".
• Band 7: "addresses all parts of the task"; "presents a clear position throughout the response"; "presents, extends and supports main ideas, but there may be a tendency to over-generalise".
• Band 8: "sufficiently addresses all parts of the task"; "presents a well-developed response to the question with relevant, extended and supported ideas".

Read those three again and notice what is absent. There is no mention of scientific accuracy, no mention of data, no mention of specialist knowledge. "Supported" means your idea is carried further by explanation or example, not that it carries a citation.

This is the single most useful thing to know about this theme. You are not being tested on climate science. You are being tested on whether you took a position and developed it.

The answer that explains the science

This is the paragraph that appears in thousands of global warming essays. The question was: Some people believe that global warming is caused by human activity, while others think it is a natural process. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.

Global warming happens because of the greenhouse effect. The sun's rays enter the atmosphere, and carbon dioxide, methane and other gases trap the heat so that it cannot escape back into space. Carbon dioxide comes mainly from burning fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum and natural gas. Methane comes from agriculture and from livestock. These gases have increased steadily since the Industrial Revolution.

Everything in it is true. It is also worth very little, for three reasons.

1. It takes no position. The question asked which view the writer finds convincing. This paragraph does not say.
2. It does not belong to either view. It is not an argument for human causes. It is a description of a mechanism that both sides accept.
3. It is detail, not an idea. The band 5 descriptor names this directly: "presents some main ideas but these are limited and not sufficiently developed; there may be irrelevant detail". A list of gases is detail.

Here is the same knowledge doing work.

Human activity is the more convincing explanation because the gases that trap heat, above all the carbon dioxide released by burning coal and oil, have risen alongside industrial production for two centuries. The mechanism itself is not disputed by either side. What matters is the timing, because the sharpest temperature increases follow the periods of heaviest industrial growth rather than any natural cycle.

Same subject, same vocabulary, roughly the same length. The difference is that every sentence now serves a position. That is the move from "relevant detail" to "extended and supported idea", and it costs nothing in knowledge.

A full answer, with the reasoning

Question: Some people believe that global warming is caused by human activity, while others think it is a natural process. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.

The rise in global temperatures now appears in weather records across the world, and there is real disagreement about what is driving it. In my view, although natural cycles have always altered the climate, the speed of the present change points clearly to human activity. Those who see the warming as natural point to the long history of the planet. Ice ages have arrived and retreated with no human involvement at all, and single volcanic eruptions release carbon dioxide on an enormous scale. From this position, the current warming is simply the latest turn of a cycle that has repeated for millions of years, and the alarm surrounding it is out of proportion to the evidence. The opposing argument rests on the rate of change rather than the fact of it. Industry has burned coal, oil and gas in very large quantities for roughly two centuries, and temperatures over that period have risen far faster than in the shifts recorded in earlier cycles. The timing is also difficult to dismiss, because the steepest increases follow the decades of heaviest industrial growth. If the cause were purely natural, the pattern would not track human production so closely. I find the second position more convincing, and its practical consequence matters more than the debate itself. If the warming is natural, nothing can be done about it. If it follows from how we produce energy, then changing how we produce energy can slow it, which makes action worth taking even for a reader who is not yet certain. In conclusion, natural cycles cannot be ignored, but the pace and the timing of the present warming indicate human causes, and that is the only conclusion that leaves room for a response.

What each paragraph is doing, criterion by criterion.

• The introduction states the position in its second sentence. Band 7 Task Response asks for "a clear position throughout the response", and "throughout" starts here, not in the conclusion.
• Each body paragraph holds one view and nothing else. Band 7 Coherence and Cohesion asks for "a clear central topic within each paragraph". Mixing both views in one paragraph is the fastest way to lose that bullet.
• The fourth paragraph gives a reason for the choice, not a repetition of it. This is the difference between a position that is stated and one that is developed.
• No figures appear anywhere. Nothing in the descriptors asks for them, and an invented statistic is a risk with no reward.

The answer is about 290 words. What the Task 2 word count is for explains why 250 is a floor rather than a target. For more worked answers on other themes, the discussion essay samples in the library show the same structure on different questions.

Vocabulary for this theme, and the trap inside it

The useful vocabulary here is small and ordinary. These are the pairings that come up, and they are worth learning as pairs rather than as single words.

• fossil fuels, carbon emissions, renewable energy
• rising sea levels, extreme weather, crop yields
• carbon footprint, energy consumption, public transport

Now the trap. Lexical Resource rewards precision, not rarity, so a long word in the wrong pairing costs you on the exact criterion you were trying to satisfy. Three errors that appear constantly in essays on this theme:

• "make pollution" instead of cause pollution
• "global warming is increasing day by day", a phrase so common that it reads as memorised
• "mitigate" and "exacerbate" dropped into sentences where "reduce" and "worsen" are both correct and clearer

What Lexical Resource measures, band by band has real sentences at each level, and environment essay topics covers the wider theme that global warming sits inside.

The four mistakes that cost the most

1. Writing about the theme instead of the question. Plan from the instruction line, not from the topic.
2. Losing the position in the middle. Each body paragraph should still be traceable to the view you stated in the introduction.
3. Inventing evidence. A made up percentage adds nothing, and a reader who doubts one sentence doubts the next.
4. Proposing solutions in a discussion essay. If the instruction did not ask for measures, measures are off task.

What to do today

Take the question above and write your own answer in 40 minutes. Then read only your introduction and your conclusion, one after the other, with the body hidden. If they do not state the same position, that is the first thing to fix, and it will show up under Task Response before any vocabulary problem does.

When you want a second reading, Bandly estimates each of the four criteria separately on your own answer and shows the sentences behind each estimate, which is the part a model essay on a website cannot tell you about your writing.