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Whitewashing alert

This article has severe issues. I will highlight just one:
The article for anthropogenic global warming redirects to here.
...yet it gives no indication that the page has this redirect.

It is clear that major things are broken here. This article could use a large dose of transparency.
It does state that "Climate change" redirects here. The proper action to take is to make the same statement about AGW.
I will leave it to others to fix this, as this only scratches the surface on what is broken here. --Concord19 (talk) 13:43, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

This comment contains two parts.
  • A - tangibly, you have a complaint about the AGW redirect. In reply.... there's no policy that says articles must list all the redirects that target a given article. The reason "climate change" is mentioned is two-fold, first that among readers (and even editors) there is a lot of confusion over the terms "climate change" and "global warming". In contrast, a microscopically small number of wonky readers arrive here thinking of the phrase "anthropogenic global warming". Second, the former "climate change" article stood for a long time with a different scope but was recently moved to a different title (Climate variability and change) so we try to provide some basic info about all that in a "you are here" sort of way for returning readers. See WP:HATNOTE for background info on the goals and purposes of providing a statement like climate change redirects here.
  • B - the rest of this comment is what's known as a WP:VAGUEWAVE, so there's nothing to reply to.
NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:23, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
There's no policy? The reason this one example was called out is because this IS the article on AGW. The title has been whitewashed so that the "A" is now assumed. Quote (early statements in the lede):
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that "human influence on climate has been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century". These findings have been recognized by the national science academies of major nations and are not disputed by any scientific body of national or international standing.
Yet it gives no indication that there are plenty of scientists who dispute it. Randall Carlson is one person who gives sound reasons as to why the jury is still out on this issue. So this article has FAILED in presenting an NPOV. One obvious way to lower the global temperature is to INCREASE pollutants. This is what the whole nuclear winter thing was all about.
Now look at the statement from the first paragraph:
Collectively, global warming and its effects are known as climate change.
That is a garbage statement. "Climate change" is a term which is inclusive of global cooling. "Change" is not a synonym for "warming".
Then there are the policies you cite to change the very title of this issue I have highlighted. You, and other editors, have been called out on this general problem that this article has. There is no Manual Of Style policy which instructs me to be neutral with a section title I use here in the TALK space. You'be grossly misinterpreted this policy which is used for helping us with how to write Articles.
And there is irony in you citing Vaguewave while not giving specific example.
Anyone who is not clear on the general criticism, there have been multiple articles which have been conflated here:
- Global warming is a distinct issue from...
- Anthropogenic global warming, and both are a separate issue from...
- Climate change.
And it was the lumping of these all together which is what has raised this flag of whitewashing. The article is so broken that it no longer gives the courtesy appearance that you've been redirected. As this article stands today, it tells the public that it is a forgone conclusion that human beings are the reason for climate change. And dissenting views have been silenced. NPOV fail. --Concord19 (talk) 10:34, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Concord19, it is certain that humans are causing climate change now. We've shown this in the article by citing many high-quality reliable sources (NASA, NOAA, many peer-reviewed scientific articles, IPCC, World meteorological organisation and more). The opinion of one non-expert as Randall Carlson isn't relevant. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:54, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

"Global warming has become a new religion ...because you can't discuss it." ~ Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever

I've already explained that humans have the potential to create global cooling by way of polluting the atmosphere. It was expected that you would readily dismiss Randall Carlson. Now to persist with this whitewashing, you will be required to dismiss this position by a Nobel laureate. And I expect that you and others have already justified doing this. Because these dissenting views are not hard to find.

I intend to LEAVE this article now as being broken beyond repair. I had raised the concern that whitewashing was happening in the article. The immediate response was then someone whitewashing my section title. And attempted to legitimize this by bogusly applying WP. Your reply has made it perfectly clear why this problem here has been persisting. Because a critical mass of editors have stopped looking to present any semblance of NPOV. This fits perfectly with Giaever's assessment, that this has become a religion. --Concord19 (talk) 11:36, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Concord19, per WP:SECTIONHEADINGOWN, it's perfectly valid to make a heading more to-the-point and neutral. Nobel prize winners talking about fields they have no expertise in are about as valuable as you and me in establishing facts. We're discussing it now, but you have not provided any high-quality reliable source (f.i recent review papers in good scientific journals). You might find that contrary to some (US and Australian) media, a disagreement about the cause of climate change isn't present in actual scientific literature. If you're afraid some of us formed a clique, you can always get completely uninvolved editors to weigh in using the Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/Noticeboard, but I don't think you'll get far. Femke Nijsse (talk) 11:46, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
A guy with a Nobel prize in physics isn't smart enough for you? Here is a different guy who worked in the Australian Greenhouse Office as their "main modeler of carbon":
"The climate models ...don't really have a clue about how much warming, or what's causing warming. They're saying it's due to CO2. Obviously it's not." ~ David Evans, PhD
I expect you will have a standard way of dismissing Evans too, as readily as you dismissed Carlson & Giaever.
By the way, some of us remember this big scare from the 70s:
"Climate experts believe the next Ice Age is on its way. ...temperatures have been dropping for 30 years. ...According to some climatologists, within a lifetime, we might be living in the next Ice Age." ~ documentary narrator Leonard Nimoy
Ok, I have said about all that I came to this article to say. --Concord19 (talk) 12:23, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

I think Concord19 raises half of a valid point illustrative of the multi-year confusion over naming and scope of topic articles "climate change" and "global warming". I say "half valid" because we're arguing about equally valid meanings of the phrase when both are accurate. What the article now says is half true... global warming and its effectives are indeed known as "climate change". But its only half true because that's not the exclusive meaning of "climate change". As Concord19 points out it has a broader technical meaning that encompasses any-and-all climate change, including global cooling. I would not object to adding a footnote making the meaning used here more clear, and in contrast with the general meaning. The footnote could point to the main article on this broader meaning, Climate variability and change. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:22, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

The position you have taken here strikes me as quite odd. Say that you go look at the Wikipedia article on Natural Numbers, and there you find the lede stating this:
"Natural numbers are known as Integers."
Or you look at the article on Bisexuality, and in the lede there, you find this:
"Bisexuals are people who are attracted only to men."
These are NOT "half valid" statements. These are examples of blatantly erroneous statements. Because they were written by people who clearly have failed to grasp the concept of what they are writing about.
This article on Global warming is laced with blatant errors. And until these bogus statements get fixed, then this will remain a broken article. --Concord19 (talk) 22:02, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 3 August 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved. The raw !vote count is almost evenly split, I think I counted 12 supports and 11 opposes, with a handful of neutrals and one "split" thrown in too. But as we know, WP:CONSENSUS on Wikipedia is always formed through strength of arguments not just voting. So, looking at the arguments presented, the support comments present solid objective evidence that the term "climate change" has superceded "global warming" in common usage by reliable sources, by a large margin. They also presented some evidence that the term "climate change" refers to the phenomenon discussed by this article in more than 95% of cases. So there is solid evidence that the WP:COMMONNAME policy is met. On the oppose side, the principal arguments appear to be - (a) global warming is a more accurate description and a better name all around; in response to this, editors such as Jps agreed with this assessment, but noted that it is not the job of Wikipedia to change such things when the sources overwhelmingly have switched to the alternative name. (b) it was questioned whether climate change really is the common name, but this was rebuffed with evidence; (c) several opposers cited WP:PRECISE, saying that "climate change" can refer to any change in climate throughout the earth's history; this is true but again it was countered, with the argument that "global warming" is equally ambiguous with other warming periods in history, rendering this argument redundant; they also countered (as I noted above) that the in-depth research carried out by Femke Nijsse and others, found that climate change now refers almost exclusively to this current phenomenon. A few editors mentioned US politics, but there is no evidence in the figures of a global divergence, or that the terminology is somehow being driven by the US government. So, overall, I see a consensus to move, when viewed through the lens of Wikipedia's naming conventions and policy. The suggestion to split the article into two separate topics was made by Red Slash, but this was not addressed or supported by any other editor, and appears beyond the scope of this RM, given the detailed discussion that had already taken place, and the general acceptance that the two terms are roughly synonymous.  — Amakuru (talk) 09:37, 21 August 2020 (UTC)


Global warming → Climate change – Currently climate change redirects to global warming. This proposal is to reverse that, having the global warming article renamed to climate change, with global warming redirected to it.

The reason for the move is that climate change has superseded global warming as the term used to describe the phenomena of human-caused temperature changes on Earth and their effects, which is what this article covers.

The google books ngram viewer shows climate change being used 12.6 times more often than global warming as of 2019:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=climate+change%2Cglobal+warming&year_start=1980&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3

In google searches in general, climate change has been searched for more than twice as often as global warming over the last 12 months:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=climate%20change,global%20warming&hl=en-US

Putting our article behind a Global Warming redirect lowers its visibility on search platforms, for instance the wikipedia app has auto-complete that requires fully typing "Climate change" to get to the redirect that is "Global warming", and while you are typing it you get suggested article names like "Climate variability and change". Students are going to be told to search for and research "Climate Change", not "Global Warming", and by hiding the name behind a redirect we are confusing and losing some of our audience.

The change is:

  • WP:NATURAL WP:COMMONNAME: This is the primary term used for the phenomena
  • WP:CONCISE: Being concise eliminates compromise names like "Global warming and climate change", "Climate change (global warming)", and other variants
  • WP:PRECISION: While global warming and climate change are used interchangeably in the popular press, in scientific terms climate change includes the effects of global warming, which this article does

A common concern is that "Climate change" can mean climatic variability that is not modern, human caused climate change. User:Femkemilene performed the -10YEARS test on Google scholar. The first 50 articles all used climate change in the UNFCCC definition [1]. User:RCraig09 reviewed >2800 internal WP links to "Climate change" back when the article talked about climate change as a general concept (see Tracking table) and found that ~90% of the links referred to anthropogenic climate change (i.e., the present article) and not to the generic Climate change (general concept). In modern usage, climate change has meanings other than modern, human-caused climate change only when context is added around the term, e.g. "Pre-industrial climate change" (even then, "climatic change" is the preferred phrasing). This is similarly true for a term like "Evolution", which takes on different meanings when qualified differently, like "Political Evolution", yet Wikipedia's article on "evolution" talks only about Darwin's theory of evolution.

Please consider this rename option vs the status quo, as alternatives like forking the article can still be pursued after this name change. Note related article Climate variability and change, which covers non-human caused climate changes (see its talk page for more naming discussions). A relatively recent and lengthy discussion of naming for this article is located here. Efbrazil (talk) 19:54, 3 August 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. OhKayeSierra (talk) 19:54, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this subsection with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.

*Oppose, but SUPPORT ALTERNATIVE A - Moving Global warming >>> "Global warming and climate change" First, because readers have seen this topic called "global warming" on the English Wikipedia for something like 15 years. Second, because the article is not merely about the heating (global warming) nor about the heating+effects (climate change) but about both of those, in a thoroughly interwoven way, as it should be, given that this is a systemic topic, i.e., what is currently transpiring in earth's climate system. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:03, 3 August 2020 (UTC)Neutral I thought I was back but my heart just isn't in it after all. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:48, 15 August 2020 (UTC)Neutral I thought I was back but my heart just isn't in it after all. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:48, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

At the end of the archived discussion, you said this: "I am happy with either climate change or global warming and climate change. Since I have started an indefinite wikibreak, I'd give greater weight to the opinion of folks doing the work. Thanks everyone! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:26, 23 November 2019 (UTC)". Can you consider changing your vote to "neutral" at least, so you aren't blocking this change? Efbrazil (talk) 21:04, 3 August 2020 (UTC) I shrank my dated words to lessen the appearance this was said in this thread. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:20, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Words I said on my way to possible retirement are past their expiration date, sorry. Really though it would be a shame if the same old opinions make the same old arguments. We need to RFC this and then page regulars might want to be mum for awhile to see what new minds/eyes have to say. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:23, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
supplemental Re Efbrazil's opening argument about one term "superseding" the other, that's true and yet it falls short of replacing the other, as shown, for example by Science Magazine headline editors' use of "global warming" just a couple weeks ago. [2]. Google News searching limited to the past month does return more more for "climate change" but there are still many for "global warming". I've long argued we should have both terms, since both are in common usage.NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:56, 3 August 2020 (UTC) Changed to neutral NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:48, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
In another discussion you said this: "if I were active, I'd still favor, in descending order (1) "global warming and climate change" (2) "human-caused climate change" (3, reluctantly)just "climate change". I would be opposed to keeping the status quo just "global warming". NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:32, 20 April 2020 (UTC)" same housekeeping note about my old imported quotes as last time NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:33, 3 August 2020 (UTC) You proposed "Global warming and climate change" in the last discussion and had 4 opponents (I was not one of them). By opposing this rename, are you saying you are planning to successfully push through a rename to "global warming and climate change"? If not, can you see that your opposition here is effectively the same as saying you support no renaming at all? Efbrazil (talk) 23:01, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Since that's rather repetitive I'll just refer to my earlier reply. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:36, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
@NewsAndEventsGuy: Consider that for auto-complete scenarios like wikipedia's app on iphone, you must have the term begin with the phrase "Climate change" to trigger a redirect to the correct article. Currently, the only way on the app to get to "Global warming" from wikipedia app search is to fully type the term, meanwhile the app keeps throwing alternative articles at you, including "Climate variability and change". Also, consider that if you have a name like "Global warming and climate change" you are raising the question of what the difference in the two terms are. Given those constraints, I'd support a compromise like "Climate change (global warming)" as a title, but not something with "and" and definitely not something that does not begin with "Climate change" as the first two words of the title. Efbrazil (talk) 22:58, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Support per my argumentation at Talk:Global_warming/Archive_80#Second_discussion_on_titles_for_potential_move_request. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:10, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Support. We're lagging behind both popular and scientific sources here. "Global warming" is excessively simplistic, and climate change is by now the dominant term in serious discourse. Guy (help! - typo?) 22:59, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Support per nom.--Ortizesp (talk) 23:17, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Support. It's time. jps (talk) 23:30, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Neutral. The term Global Warming gets immediately to the heart of the changes to the biosphere brought about by the rapid anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Global average surface temperatures have already risen about 1ºC relative to pre-industrial levels, and are expected to reach at least 3ºC by the end of the 21st century. This is a severe rate and amount of temperature change that is unprecedented in the last million years of Earth's history. Indeed, the changes to the climate are largely brought about by the rapid increase in average temperatures, rather than vice versa. In this way, the name Global Warming is most informative of the problem as it immediately indicates the most significant change in the climate, that brings about all the other secondary changes. There is another reason we should not change the name, which is that it appears in some ways to be, if unconsciously, a subtly important concession to those who point to a cold day and say the Earth isn't warming. Keeping the name Global Warming means resolutely standing by the overwhelming evidence that the planet is indeed rapidly warming, and that this increase in temperatures is important. Also, the argument that 'Climate Change' is searched more frequently than 'Global Warming' is invalid, because the Global Warming wikipedia page is the first result that appears when searching Climate Change. (Google automatically shows the Wikipedia page reference to Global Warming.) In fact, the argument only serves to support the case for keeping Global Warming as the title because, one searches Climate Change and 'Global Warming' appears, answering their question. Jmurray1997 (talk) 03:41, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
    • I understand that "global warming" may be the better term, but the fact remains that "climate change" is by far the more popular term. By changing the name, we will greatly boost how many people find this article on wikipedia. Isn't increasing the discoverability of this article most important? Efbrazil (talk) 19:53, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
    • @Efbrazil: Given that Google displays Global warming as the first result anyway (even when searching Climate Change), I'm not sure the discoverability of the article would be increased, but perhaps the click-rate? People are making good points here and I suppose I wouldn't be terribly against changing the name to Climate change, as long as the first paragraph emphasizing the rise in average surface temperatures is left unchanged. Jmurray1997 (talk) 22:46, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
      • @Jmurray1997: Yes, we are not proposing content changes except term subsitution as necessary (most of the article already uses the term "climate change" anyhow). As for discoverability, a newbie like a student that is just learning about the topic may not click the article as they have been told to research "climate change", not "global warming". Another example is autocomplete issues- in the wikipedia smartphone app you have to type out the whole term to get the redirect to "global warming". It is also likely true that on search engines this article's visibility is depressed since we use a less popular name for the term (we are currently fourth on Google). We want this article to be "featured" on wikipedia, and to get to that point we think we need to be using the correct term for the phenomena. Efbrazil (talk) 21:26, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
      • @Efbrazil: You make some great points, I do think in most cases, the student in your example would end up using the Global Warming article anyways seeing as there isn't much of a wiki alternative. Would it be possible for someone to report on how the Global Warming article is named in other languages? Do their titles translate more often to 'Global Warming' or to 'Climate Change'? It might be a good point to be in line with what other Wikipedia languages are doing. By my reading, there are generally two camps in this debate, those who want to move to Climate Change to promote accessibility and stay up to date with the current naming convention, and those who want to keep Global Warming out of scientific/political principle. There is a small group that wants to keep Global Warming because they think Climate Change will be confusing or misleading, but I don't really see how these arguments are any more valid for Climate Change than for Global Warming. I'm going to change my position to neutral because I'm somewhat convinced by the arguments of the other side, and I don't want to be a block to what could be progress. MurrayScience (talk) 22:20, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose The fact that the proposal states that the term global warming is "alarmist" and "unscientific" speaks to an "alarming" bias behind the desire to move the page. Rather, it is an accurate description of the warming that the globe is experiencing, with nothing "alarmist" about it, and the fact that the Earth is warming due to fossil fuels is highly documented in the science. There is no need to move it towards a less accurate term that has commonly been deployed to euphemistically reduce the significance of what is, very clearly, a warming effect.ZXCVBNM (TALK) 05:36, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
    • I'm completely sympathetic to the substance of this complaint. I wish that the term "global warming" had stuck. But it didn't. Wikipedia is in no position to change that. jps (talk) 14:37, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
      • I don't agree that "climate change" is the WP:COMMONNAME. I agree that it's used more, but there isn't evidence that all those 12.6 times more usages refer to global warming, and not just various types of climactic change. It's a much more vague term. Which is exactly why it fails WP:PRECISE in comparison to global warming.ZXCVBNM (TALK) 14:54, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
        Zxcvbnm, In the previous discussion, I actually did sample what percentage of times climate change is used to refer to modern climate change. Both in Google scholar and normal google, that percentage was above 97% iirc. I sampled about 50 articles each. Femke Nijsse (talk) 15:40, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
        Femkemilene Thanks Femke, I found your research back in the climate variability and change talk page and put it into the header here. If you find a place where you did more research let me know.Efbrazil (talk) 19:53, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Alright, well, regardless of that, I remain convinced that both climate change and global warming are commonly used in some respect and there is no clear and obvious primary name. As much as people might object to "global warming" being narrow, I also am concerned that "climate change" will function to distort and minimize the topic, being unnecessarily vague for seemingly no benefit. Per WP:AINTBROKE there is no reason to change.ZXCVBNM (TALK) 18:23, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
    Zxcvbnm, fair enough. Just wanna make sure we're all reasoning based on same understanding. :). Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:32, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
    Zxcvbnm Please review the google links above for the popularity of the terms- it's hard to argue for equivalence between use of the terms once you review the data. It's the IPCC after all, and so that's the terminology used in the scientific community, and that's what students will be searching on when going their homework. Please consider the value of increasing the visibility of this page for people that are genuinely curious vs the importance of persisting in the use of a term that has fallen out of favor, even if that term fell out of favor due to malevolent forces. Efbrazil (talk) 19:53, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
When I reviewed >2800 internal WP links to "Climate change" (see Tracking table) I found that ~90% of the links referred to anthropogenic climate change (i.e., the present article) and not to the generic Climate change (general concept), and the ~10% were fixed, so no worries there...or here. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:01, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Zxcvbnm, the problem is that the term "global warming" is simplistic. The warming of the planet may cause, for example, accelerated melting of glaciers and Antarctic ice, leading to local areas of increased cooling (and potentially diverting the gulf stream, causing some of Northern Europe to become dramatically colder).
    The reason scientists now talk about climate change rather than global warming is not just to counter idiots who try to pretend that a snowball refutes the theory. Guy (help! - typo?) 22:46, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose. "Global warming" is more precise than "climate change", which can describe any number of changes to the climate throughout Earth's history. I reject the proposer's notion that "global warming" is not neutral and unscientific. It is a scientific fact that Earth is warming. I would be okay with "anthropogenic climate change", but that is not as concise as the current title. – Anne drew 14:51, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Faulty reasoning - "global warming" just as easily applies to "any number of" climate system warming periods :throughout Earth's history. I think you've assumed an association with this warming period based on the COMMONNAME, but "climate change" can has a COMMONNAME claim to the same topic. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 15:34, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Both Global Warming and Climate Change can refer to any of these types of events in the Earth's history. Would it be reasonable to add a prefix or a suffix? For example, Modern Global Warming or Human-Induced Climate Change. I agree that these are less concise, unfortunately. Jmurray1997 (talk) 15:55, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
      • That won't solve things, unfortunately. That's akin to WP:Disambiguation; usually we do not use a qualifier for the main topic, only for the lesser well used ones, e.g., Global warming versus Global Warming (Pitbull album). Documented past global warming episodes have names, e.g., Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum and Eocene Thermal Maximum 2. Same with past global cooling episodes, e.g., Younger Dryas. For the common reader, I don't think such disambiguation is needed.... the usual reader isn't looking for or thinking about Paleoclimatology but current status of the climate system. So adding "modern" or "human-caused" won't really resolve anything. The only thing that really will resolve this debate is to use BOTH in the title, and to explain both the technical usage (global warming = climate system warming and climate change = climate system warming + effects of climate system warming) as well as and common lay usage where the two are often but incorrectly used as synonyms. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 16:14, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
      • I agree with your point about using a qualifier. If we were to combine both terms, I think 'Global warming and climate change' would be the better combination because the causal direction tends to go global warming -> climate change. Jmurray1997 (talk) 16:22, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Support per Guy. Gog the Mild (talk) 16:08, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Zxcvbnm. WP:COMMONNAME actually says, Ambiguous or inaccurate names for the article subject, as determined in reliable sources, are often avoided even though they may be more frequently used by reliable sources. Policy gives us the freedom go to with the more forceful option, regardless of the various ratios quoted above. XOR'easter (talk) 16:24, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Faulty reasoning - for starters you are implying that "climate change" would be "ambiguous or inaccurate" but you have provided no reasoning much less RSs to support that view. Moreover, what the devil does "go with the more forceful option" mean? Are you saying global warming is more "forceful" than climate change? On what basis do you make this claim and how is that not a textbook WP:POV violation? I sincerely apologize for direct brevity of my questions. They are not intended to be battle minded or put down in any way... only to help zero in on a blessed final solution to this perennial debate. Please share further thinking!! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 16:44, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
      • There are a few relevant sources in the current article's Terminology section about some terms used to prevent confusion. And why bludgeon the process instead of leaving the closing admin to evaluate consensus and the quality of the arguments? —PaleoNeonate – 20:46, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
        • Indeed yes, I will be posting a supplemental analysis pointing out the existence of the terminology section supports global warming and climate change as the preferred rename. But I get ahead of myself. Meanwhile, don't forget AGF please...making rebuttal arguments so the closing admin has the benefit of all of our brain power is hardly a "bludgeon". NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:35, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
          • I probably exaggerated. I think it's the repeated "faulty reasoning" header that raised a flag for me. Arguing is fine, but this looked like a "dismiss this vote" tag or "*buzz* wrong answer". Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 06:42, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
            • It's not my intent to push buttons (yuk yuk)... these long debates are wearisome. I appreciate it when others start with the view from the ISS (e.g, agree... different referenece... wrong policy... etc). Imagine this thread is a messy file drawer of heaps of paper where you have to read through each word of every sentence and organize it all in your head. Now imagine if each comment was in its own file folder and started off with a short label on the folder tab. I wish everyone started off their remarks that way, but that's selfish maybe... it helps me organize all this much easier than reading each word of every sentence and sorting it mentally. That's all I meant. Is there is a more palatable way of generating "file folder tabs" on all these comments and replies ?NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 10:15, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
    XOR'easter, "global warming" gets 80 million hits to 216 million for climate change. Almost all current scientific papers say climate change. So do most current news reports. The common name has, in fact, changed. Guy (help! - typo?) 22:49, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
    Has the common name changed, or is there still a shade of meaning between the two, with climate change being more general? If there is a distinction, and this article discusses both the general and the specific, then a title like NASA's "Climate change and global warming" would make the most sense, I think. Both terms are used in bold in the lede, after all. XOR'easter (talk) 02:11, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Support as the most widely used term by the general public nowadays in my experience Chidgk1 (talk) 19:29, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Support, although I disagree with the OP's characterization of global warming as considered to be a more alarmist term (considered by whom?). Rather, I believe that the main explanation for scientists' current preference for "climate change" over "global warming" is that the public has trouble understanding that the latter term includes not only hotter weather but also much that is not directly temperature-related, such as increased extreme weather events. Because of this common misunderstanding of the term "global warming", some denialists get listened to when they make the (ridiculous) argument that there are a lot of places where it's been unusually cold lately. To the average person, the term "climate change" suggests a wider range of possibilities than "global warming". NightHeron (talk) 21:41, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Support, Hurricane winds may cool a place off, but they are definitely strengthening due to the changing climate. Hyperbolick (talk) 23:56, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
    • That is baseless logic. Hurricanes form primarily in warm areas of the ocean, most of them occurring in summer; therefore hurricanes are evidently associated with heat and hence are a product of rising global temperatures which may explain why record devastating cyclones are becoming more and more frequent. Secondly, cold winds are associated with weather, not climate. Weather is short term, climate is long-term. --HyettsTheGamer2 (talk) 06:32, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose per WP:PRECISE. "Global warming" is clear and precise as a title while "Climate change" is ambiguous and potentially confused with Climate variability and change. Rreagan007 (talk) 02:15, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose This article focuses specifically on human-induced climate change that has disproportionately heated the globe in the last few hundred years compared to the last thousand years preceding the Industrial Revolution. It does not cover the naturally shifting climate patterns that resulted in glaciations, ice ages or warm periods in the course of the last billions of years in Earth's history. Therefore, I'd even go as far to argue that "climate change" and "global warming" should not even be redirected to one or the other; one is specific, one is broad. --HyettsTheGamer2 (talk) 02:44, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose. While it's true the two are loosely used as synonyms with "climate change" possibly even being more popular today, this article is really about "anthroprogenic warming in the past 150 years". "Climate change" unadorned, in an encyclopedic context (not just a newspaper), can also refer to long-term geological climate change like ice ages and such. So best to be clear: global warming is much more specifically about "the climate change that's been happening in the past 150 years". SnowFire (talk) 02:49, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
@Rreagan007: @SnowFire: @HyettsTheGamer2: In researching this change in prior discussions we found ambiguity in use of the term "climate change" to no longer be true. Femke Nijsse performed the -10YEARS test on Google scholar. The first 50 articles all use climate change in the UNFCCC definition [3]. We also reviewed popular search and found similar results. Consider that "global warming" can also refer to warming that is pre-industrial, or the article on "evolution" could talk about topics other than darwinian evolution. We understand that the term "climate change" may have been ambiguous in the past, but as of 2020 we believe the data shows that the term "climate change" is synonymous with modern, anthropogenic climate change. Does this help address your concerns? If not, is there another study we could do that would help to address this concern? We believe this change is very important for improving the visibility of this article with the public (e.g. students will be searching for "climate change", not "global warming"). Efbrazil (talk) 21:26, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
@Efbrazil: You raise a good point that people who search "climate change" won't be looking for climate variability and change. I guess it would be appropriate in that sense to have "climate change" redirect to "global warming". However, I still stand my ground on some issues, and I will have to agree with some of my other colleagues on this discussion page that the term "global warming" emphasizes the unprecedented dangers that the planet is facing in modern times. I understand your argument that the term "climate change" is more commonly used to describe the disproportionate rise in global temperatures by scholarly and scientific analyses, but why should that matter? If we assume that the global community finds a way to stop global warming sometime in the near future, "climate change" will still be a term, though it will no longer be referring specifically to the unprecedented rising global temperatures. As an event in history, I guarantee it will be labeled "global warming". Take World War II. Most people living in the time of World War II simply referred to it as the "War". Because back then, whenever you said "war" people would know automatically what you were referring to. If Wikipedia existed in 1941, would the page about WWII just be called "The War?" Moreover, Darwinian evolution doesn't change; global warming does change, and will inevitably change. In the hypothetical and probable future in which climate change will probably meet a different global trend, that new climactic trend would be the new definition of "climate change" while the past climactic event would be known as "global warming". Just like how World War I was once the "War," World War II also possessed the same namesake not too long after. --HyettsTheGamer2 (talk) 22:55, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
@HyettsTheGamer2: This is a bit theoretical- As an encyclopedia we should keep up with how words are being used now. It's the IPCC, and almost every student on the planet is going to be told to research "climate change", not "global warming". "The war" has always been slang for the most recent war- it was the civil war in the US before is was World War 2, and it was WW1 before WW2. If climate change falls out of favor and people prefer a new term down the line (The Climate Crises? Who knows?) then I'm all for switching to that. As User:NewsAndEventsGuy said, Wikipedia follows, we do not lead. See WP:Neutral point of view. Efbrazil (talk) 22:58, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
@Efbrazil: But haven't you just proved my point by further elaborating on the World Wars? Yes, exactly! "The war" is a slang of a present war, therefore most people at the time referred to it as the "war" whether it be in daily conversation or in the media. The term "climate change" could be considered a slang in that same sense. During World War II, people would automatically know what you were referring to if you just said the "war". During the crisis of global warming, people would automatically know what you are referring to if you just said "climate change". Therefore, I don't think changing the name to "climate change" would be neutral, but instead would be simplistic. Yes, when students search "climate change" they are most likely intending to research global warming. But that problem is already solved on its own, since climate change already redirects to global warming. So why is what students search for a problem? Besides, a lot of people who research Ireland would be looking for the Republic of Ireland and those searching for Great Britain would be looking for the United Kingdom. There are a lot of terms used interchangeably. HyettsTheGamer2 (talk) 03:26, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@HyettsTheGamer2: Is what I was trying to say was that "the war" was shorthand for "world war 2" in the same way that you could ask somebody if they were caught outside in "the hurricane" without naming the hurricane. "Climate change" is not shorthand for "global warming", it is an alternate term that has been agreed upon by the scientific community and in popular culture. Let me try explaining from a different angle, and that's Wikipedia standards. Wikipedia [recommends using the google books ngram viewer] to establish term popularity as that establishes how often a term is being used in published materials, which is a better measure of long term / official usage than the more fleeting world of popular culture captured by general online search. Climate change is appearing in published materials at a rate of more than 12:1 over global warming according to the ngram viewer, and we have established that those uses nearly all correspond to the IPCC definition of climate change. Regarding redirects not being damaging, they unfortunately are depressing our visibility on many search platforms. For instance, in autocomplete scenarios like in wikipedia's own app you have to fully type out "climate change" to get to the redirect, and while you are typing those words out all sorts of other articles are being suggested to you, most confusingly including "climate variability and change". Don't you think students will be more likely to click our article if it is titled "Climate change" than if it is titled something different than what their teacher tells them to research?Efbrazil (talk) 23:20, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Efbrazil: Getting mixed up between "global warming" and "climate variability and change" would be no different from getting mixed up between "United Kingdom", "Great Britain", or the "Kingdom of Great Britain"; when people want to study the Republic of Ireland, they will most likely just search "Ireland". Many people get confused between the country and the island, and many published materials would not regularly refer to the country as the "Republic of Ireland". So it's not like this confusion is unique to "global warming" and "climate change". NASA refers to the topic as "climate change and global warming". They are two related yet separate terms. NASA specifically states that "Earth's climate has changed throughout history." If the name of the article must be changed, it has to be more specific. Using the NASA term "Climate change and global warming" sounds like a more reasonable compromise to me, because the terms are often used interchangeably. And in regards to climate variability and change, how often do published materials really refer to long-term climactic changes as "climate variability"? And if you search "climate variability and change," global warming would also be a topic in the first search results. Therefore, it is evident that "Climate change" and "climate variability" are both applicable to "global warming".[4] Why would just simply removing the "variability" make it a whole other topic? --HyettsTheGamer2 (talk) 05:58, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
Supplemental: Caution against non-WP-policy-based reasons—such as political history, political impact, communicating "urgency" or "significance", being "forceful", etc. Such would likely violate WP:NPOV. Also, demanding a third name at this point amounts to an 'oppose' !vote. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:28, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
All of those phrases are still new enough to be considered WP:NEOLOGISM and we have an article on the drive to adopt such language. Some of this might have potential for adding to our page at Climate crisis. But they're not in common use in the scientific journals (yet) and Wikipedia follows. We do not lead. See WP:Neutral point of view. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 00:46, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Mildly opposed. At Talk:Global_warming/Archive_80#Second_discussion_on_titles_for_potential_move_request I mentioned my concerns with the history of this issue, which, given the current level of climate denial activity, still has some relevance today. My current position is similar to that of NewsAndEventsGuy. I am mildly opposed to changing the name to climate change, although Efbrazil’s data on search interest may be compelling. A key issue/question for me has to do with what the <title> tag on the web page could say. I think the NASA pages on this topic provide a good model for where we should be heading. They seem to rank similarly to WP in terms of what sites show up first in GW and CC searches. They actively work to keep both climate change and global warming highlighted on their website (although their official title is “Global Climate Change”), and their <title> tag uses the phrase “climate change and global warming” in it, thus keeping both terms. If we could ensure that the <title> tag on our article’s page could do the same, i.e. use both terms, I would be more comfortable with renaming the page.
Efbrazil, I know you have a lot of skills in this area...would you be able to figure out whether, if the formal title of the article was changed to “Climate Change”, we could work with the background software to ensure that the <title> tag on the page source code showed something like <Climate change and global warming - Wikipedia> rather than just <Climate change - Wikipedia>, which I imagine, based on the current source code title, would be the default case? The reason I ask this is that I think the prominence of the page in any “Global Warming” searches would be higher if we could do this. Thanks!Dtetta (talk) 18:59, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
@Dtetta: I think this would be seen as a bug- you click a link to a page, the title of the page should be consistent with name of the page. You can't do script insertion in wikipedia, that would allow for all sorts of evil hacks. I expect the only alternative here would be to have something like "Climate change (global warming)" be the actual title, which would be my second choice after just a straight rename. Efbrazil (talk) 22:58, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
I disagree with the rationale under the WP:Neutral criterion in the proposal. In their 2014 research on this, The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, indicates that the term “global warming” is associated with: greater certainty that the phenomenon is happening, greater understanding that human activities are the primary cause, and greater understanding that there is a scientific consensus about the reality of the phenomenon - all of which we are trying to communicate in this article. From this standpoint the GW term seems more appropriate, rather than “alarmist”. Further, despite its name, The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which supports this work, continues to use the term “Global Warming” in its most recent research (2019) on this topic.
I also am strongly opposed to forking the contents of the article. Instead, I would propose looking at topics/sections that could be further condensed, and their more detailed contents moved to related pages, perhaps based on the frequency of search terms related to them, like Efbrazil has done as background information for our renaming decision.Dtetta (talk) 02:55, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
When I look at the Wikipedia:Article titles page, it describes a good Wikipedia article title as having the five following characteristics: Recognizability, Naturalness, Precision, Conciseness, and Consistency. After reading through that page a couple of times, I don’t believe there is any significant difference between Climate Change and Global Warming in terms of meeting those policy criteria, and I have not seen anything in this discussion that convincingly supports one term over the other in terms of these criteria. I think the lack of consensus here is partly a reflection of that, and argues for some sort of compromise that recognizes the suitability of both terms as article titles. Wish I had a solution.Dtetta (talk) 03:40, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
@Dtetta: I pulled the "WP:NEUTRAL" reasoning, as it muddied the rationale for the move, and I may have been using the rationale incorrectly according to User:NewsAndEventsGuy. Given the similarity of the terms, why not go with the term used more than 2:1 as often in search, and more than 12:1 as often in publications? Efbrazil (talk) 22:58, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Mildly opposed as per Dtetta and NewsAndEventsGuy. Also with a similar position, would support something akin to Modern climate change. On a side note; as a geologist involved with education we distinctly clarify between anthropogenic climate change (which we also call global warming) and climate change. We deal with both when teaching due to the nature of geologic time, so it is very important to be as precise as possible.
If this were moved to Climate change I would be of the opinion that it must then include all research about climate change as in Climate variability and change (i.e. merged) to remain scientifically WP:PRECISE rather than just the focus on recent warming that it currently has. I do not not think this would be good for the page as it would dilute the information on the page currently.
I do not agree that Global warming is an alarmist term and think it conforms to WP:NEUTRAL. It has been, and is still, used as a term about the warming of the global mean surface temperature, see [IPCC SR15] glossary for an example. Jarred C Lloyd (talk) 05:06, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jarred C Lloyd: I pulled the WP:NEUTRAL argument out of the rationale, it was just muddying the waters here. The key point is the climate change is what is used more than 12:1 in academic literature, and more than 2:1 in popular search. Regarding ambiguity in the term, a few others also raised this issue and I tried to address it up top in the rationale- there's been a lot of work put into studying that issue (see "A common concern is that "Climate change" can mean climatic variability...."). Efbrazil (talk) 22:58, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
  • (A) CLOSER per WP:Neutrality please ignore arguments about perception, forcefulness, political usage.... none of that is supposed to matter per WP:Neutrality
  • (B) CLOSER per WP:Verifiability please ignore any non-referenced arguments about supposed ambiguity. Global warming can mean any period of global warming such as the PETM [5] but the same can be said for Climate change (Id.) Same ref, correct usage of both terms but neither one meaning today. So all arguments based on supposed levels of ambiguity in average readers minds which are not supported by quality RSs are likely the opinion of the speaking editor and should carry very little WP:WEIGHT.
  • (C) Kudos to Efbrazil for analyzing per the naming criteria in the OP. This is what matters, and I mostly - but not entirely - agree with that analysis. The reasons we part company slightly leads me to advocate for Global warming and climate change instead. Let's compare....
(reserved) I am working on the part that goes here and will post it within 24 hrs, if real life allows....

NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:36, 8 August 2020 (UTC) I'm bowing out. Carry on. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:48, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Well I have. Maybe I attend more seminars and read more journal articles? More to the point, I think, is that whether the speaker/writer uses "global warming" or "climate change" if they mean anything other than the human-related one we're now experiencing there is always a temporal qualifier of some sort. So in my view, they are not ambiguous at all, because if the past (or future) GW or CC is meant, the communication always says so. But in any case, what is NOT a stretch is that the closer should disregard WP:Original research, where we're opining on the basis of anecdotal experience. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 15:37, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Supplemental from NewsAndEventsGuy - FYI.... although researchers previously found that using "global warming" vs "climate change" at one time produced different belief/urgency responses in lay audiences, that work was just repeated and the difference has gone away. So opinions above that word choice yields different belief/urgency responses seems to have been overtaken by evolution of language/cognition/education in the general public. I noted this new paper in separate thread but here is a link direct to the paper itself. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 10:22, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Support Global warming falls under the category of climate change, so it only makes sense to change the name of this article to climate change. Lightning1115 (talk) 04:29, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose as ever William M. Connolley (talk) 08:06, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Split - two separate aspects deserve two separate articles. Red Slash 03:09, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose EN Wikipedia serves the whole English speaking world. Which country are we talking about here where usage may have changed? Australia? India? South Africa? England? No, I think we mean the USA. Honestly, we can't keep changing the name of the most important problem ever faced by a human civilisation to suit the ebbs and flows of the US polital process. The globe is warming, end of. --Nigelj (talk) 07:42, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

Any additional comments:
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Yes, yes, yes! I am really happy with this move, User:Amakuru. I somehow missed this particular survey but I have been arguing for, and hoping for, a name change for about two years and knew it would happen eventually. Thanks.EMsmile (talk) 12:56, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 26 August 2020

Right after the sentence that suggests that climate change will make dengue fever worse, I recommend adding these sentences:

"However, IPCC names 'poverty alleviation, public health interventions such as the provision of water and sanitation and early-warning and response system for disasters and epidemics' as more important factors than temperature change. The spread of dengue fever can be controlled through low-cost interventions similar to the ones that have for over 100 years been used to reduce malaria deaths. It’s true that disease modelers predict higher temperatures will create favorable conditions for dengue. But again, notes the IPCC, “the adverse effects of climate change are balanced by the beneficial outcomes of development.” And dengue can be addressed in simple ways. The IPCC notes that treating water drums with insecticide where dengue-infected mosquitoes breed is often all that is required."[1] EnvironmentExpert (talk) 18:59, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

 Not done thanks for your suggestion. This article needs to be written in summary style. The edit your requesting puts too much weight on dengue fever, compared to equally important other aspects of climate change. Furthermore, it reads too much like a newspaper paragraph, quoting/reporting the IPCC too much instead of using our own WP:WIKIVOICE may give our readers the impression that the quoted text is an opinion instead of a fact. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:12, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Smith, K.R.; et al. ""Human Health: Impacts, Adaptation, and Co-Benefits"" (PDF). IPCC 2018 Assessment Report on Climate Change 2014, Working Group II, Impacts. II. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |last= (help)

Negative emissions

Interesting new review paper about framing. I think our article falls in the "trap" described by this paper: [1] carbon brief article about it. We talk about it slightly in the hypothetical. I've done a small change removing the word may, maybe we need to slightly more. Femke Nijsse (talk) 11:24, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Carton, Wim; Asiyanbi, Adeniyi; Beck, Silke; Buck, Holly J.; Lund, Jens F. "Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal". WIREs Climate Change. n/a (n/a): e671. doi:10.1002/wcc.671. ISSN 1757-7799.

Discovery section

Hi, I'm copyediting this article now and have hit a bit of a snare in the discovery section. Currently it reads as a list of experimental anecdotes without context or historical background, which, to me, is very jarring and does not actually provide much of a history of the discovery---in particular, compare it to the linked main article--which does not include either of the first two facts. I would think that this subsection should read less like it does now and more like a summary of that main article--thoughts? After I copyedit the rest of the page I will come back to this and try to rework! Mehmuffin (talk) 14:28, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

dave souza and EMsmile were involved in a last discussion about this section quite recently in Talk:Climate_change/Archive_82#Shorten the section on History of the science?. In the previous round of edits, we condensed this section, which probably contributes to it reading like a list. I agree that this is not the optimal form to present this information. I propose the following direction:
  1. Indeed remove those two first sentences, making place for some more background comparable to the history of climate change science article
  2. I think the second paragraph is good as it seems to tell a story.
  3. remove as many names as possible. Telling the history of science pretending it all lies on the shoulders of geniuses feels wrong to me. I feel at max four names should remain: Fourier, Tyndall, Callendar and Arrhenius. Maybe Keeling. James Hansen is more famous for his science communication than his science. He is already mentioned in the next section, and I don't think he sufficiently notable to be mentioned twice. Removing all those names in the third paragraph will greatly reduce information density and improve the flow.
  4. If we choose to include the congressional testimony, we need to specify the country which that took place. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:49, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
I agree with all those points! I should be able to propose a draft incorporating them by the end of the week. Mehmuffin (talk) 15:15, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

First two paragraphs

With the renaming, has become necessary to change the first paragraph. I also believe we have to change the second one. The problems with the top paragraphs as I see them now:

  1. the causation isn't mentioned till the second paragraph. Considering the first paragraph is often used on YouTube and other platforms that use snippets from Wikipedia, I think that is quite a big problem.
  2. The most recent edit substituted the word effects for consequences. I feel the word consequences also includes consequences for the biosphere and for human society, which is not part of the definition of climate change.
  3. We don't state the cause of climate change in Wikivoice. I think that is a copout that we inherited from when climate denial was more prominent within Wikipedia's editors.

As such I propose a few changes to these two paragraphs. I very much welcome people better at the English language to make this flow a bit better. Specifically NewsAndEventsGuy and Dtetta.

Human emissions of greenhouse gases are driving climate change: via rising surface temperatures, global warming, rainfall patterns are changing, storms are intensifying, heat waves are increasing in frequency and sea levels are rising. While there have been previous periods of climatic change, observed changes since the mid-20th century have been unprecedented in rate and scale.

The human cause of climate change has been recognised by the national science academies of major nations and are not disputed by any scientific body of national or international standing. In the words of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): "human influence on climate has been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century"

Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:31, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

We could tighten things up too- the second paragraph is a bit meandering. Here's my attempt to address your concerns and condense things:

Climate change is the ongoing, unprecedented rise in average temperature of Earth's climate system, and the effects of that rise. The effects of global warming include changes in rainfall patterns, more extreme storms, heat-wave intensification, melting ice sheets, and rising sea levels.[1] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reflects the consensus view of national science academies in concluding that "human influence on climate has been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century".[2]

The largest human influence has been the emission of greenhouse gases, with over 90% of the impact coming from carbon dioxide and methane.[3] Fossil fuel burning is the main source of these gases; agricultural emissions and deforestation are also important. Temperature rise is enhanced by self-reinforcing climate feedbacks, such as loss of snow cover, increased water vapour, and melting permafrost. Land and ocean carbon sinks can act as negative feedbacks, lessening the rate of warming.

Partial response before I go to bed: I want to avoid using the words effects twice, and I think we should avoid starting the article with climate change is. There are multiple definitions of climate change, and it feels weird to choose one as the only definition. Instead we should just define the topic of this article, using a structure comparable to the one I gave above. Femke Nijsse (talk) 21:50, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
Too many cooks spoil the broth, so I merely urge that the difference between "GW" and "CC" be clearly articulated in the first paragraph, since the public is foggy about that and readers will arrive here after having searched both terms or having been redirected. —RCraig09 (talk) 22:04, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
I’m with RCraig09 about the cooks, so rather than attempt any specific rewrite I’ll just put in my two cents. I also concur about the importance of articulating the difference between GW and CC. I’ve mentioned the NASA weater/GW/CC page as a good model, and suggest that it be consulted when figuring out how to characterize the GW and CC terms in the first paragraph. In addition, I thought the last sentence of Femke’s version, which talks about these changes being unprecedented in rate and scale, is both effective prose and a good way of addressing the skeptics’ contention that these are common, cyclical patterns. So I’d be interested in seeing that particular sentence kept if possible. Of course I am still happy to provide input on specific issues if needed. Dtetta (talk) 00:49, 30 August 2020 (UTC)


Thanks for your inputs. Some further comments on Efbrazil's suggestion: it is contentious to what extent effects of global warming outside of the atmosphere actually belonged to climate change. I'd rather not have two changes outside of the atmosphere in the definition. Furthermore, it feels a wrong to only single out scientific academies, as most of the consensus formation took place via normal peer-reviewed articles. To safe space, I'm okay with ditching the first part of that sentence and just say that it's not disputed by any scientific body.
The definition of NASA was indeed the inspiration for the suggested changes. I'm still looking for a small change in the first sentence to avoid using the -ing version of all those verbs. Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:08, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
At the risk of adding more confusion, here is an attempt to incorporate some of Femke’s and Efbrazil’s text, Femke's comments on what the paragraphs should look like, RCraig’s suggestion to define both terms, as well as some of the ideas from the NASA page.

Climate change, which results from increased heat-trapping greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, is causing changes in rainfall patterns, more intense storms and heat waves, melting ice sheets, and sea level rise. The term “climate change” is frequently used interchangeably with “global warming”, though it encompasses both human and naturally produced warming, as well as their effects on our planet. While there have been previous periods of climatic change, observed changes since the mid-20th century have been unprecedented in rate and scale.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has determined that "human influence on climate has been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century". This conclusion is not disputed by any scientific body of national or international standing. The largest human influence has been the emission of greenhouse gases, with over 90% of the impact coming from carbon dioxide and methane. Fossil fuel burning is the main source of these gases; agricultural emissions and deforestation are also important. Temperature rise is enhanced by self-reinforcing climate feedbacks, such as loss of, increased water vapour, and melting permafrost. Land and ocean carbon sinks can act as negative feedbacks, lessening the rate of warming.

Dtetta (talk) 19:45, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I think it's a boo-boo to affirmatively mention that GW and CC are used interchangeably, especially in the lead. I continue to urge clearly distinguishing GW and CC, so that they are not implied to be interchangeable. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:02, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
Not sure how to respond to your comment. Here is the language from the NASA paragraph on global warming, which I would consider a gold standard: "The term is frequently used interchangeably with the term climate change, though the latter refers to both human- and naturally produced warming and the effects." Would you be willing to take a shot at language that gets at your concerns? Dtetta (talk) 20:34, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Well, it's also not accurate to say climate change "is causing changes in rainfall patterns", since that's what climate change includes. I think we need to avoid singularly defining climate change up front due to opening the can of worms of multiple meanings (eg does it include non-atmospheric effects, is it the IPCC version or NASA or UNFCC or whatever). The wording I originally used up above was just from the current version User:Nihil novi wrote with the definitive "Climate change is".

Here's another take attempting to integrate the work so far, considering these points:

  • GW vs CC we need to gloss over in the intro. The article intro is already dangerously long, so we must avoid pedantic nomenclature exposition in the intro. Effects being mentioned twice is how I tried to define the difference between CC and GW without belaboring the point. The sentences effectively say CC is GW and its effects without adding a long nomenclature sentence like User:dtetta did.
  • The changes being unprecedented I stuffed into the first sentence above (...ongoing, unprecedented rise...) I agree it's not as powerful or clear that way, but it saves a whole sentence of space, and I thought that was more important. The reference is still there.
  • The scientific academies thing is awkward, I was trying to keep the existing idea of the current second sentence of the second paragraph- "These findings have been recognized by the national science academies of major nations and are not disputed by any scientific body of national or international standing." I actually think maybe we just cut that and leave the reference. Brevity needs to be a top level goal here.
  • The bit about feedbacks at the end of the second paragraph is also pretty convoluted, I condensed that.

So, with all that in mind, here's another cut at things:

The term climate change is used to refer to the ongoing, unprecedented rise in average temperature of Earth's climate system, and to the effects of that rise. Effects of global warming include changes in rainfall patterns, more extreme storms, heat-wave intensification, melting ice sheets, and rising sea levels.[4] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that "human influence on climate has been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century".[5]

The largest human influence has been the emission of greenhouse gases, with over 90% of the impact coming from carbon dioxide and methane.[3] Fossil fuel burning is the main source of these gases; agricultural emissions and deforestation are also important. Temperature rise can be accelerated or tempered by climate feedbacks, such as loss of snow and ice cover, increased water vapour, and changes to land and ocean carbon sinks.

I think that's pretty good, and it is nice and focused. Drawbacks include: 1)using the two terms (CC then GW) in successive sentences like you have done begs the question of what exactly the differences are - I think it is more confusing than what I proposed. As you have written it, CC seems to refer to warming, while GW seems to refer to the effects of warming, which is the opposite of how I would describe it. In effect you are using the two terms interchangeably, like NASA says is often done. 2)I would still like to see the sentence about "unprecedented in rate and scale" kept. It could be included just before the last sentence of the first paragraph. Dtetta (talk) 21:52, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
I agree with the two drawbacks, and there are a few unnecessary words in the last version (term, is used to). I am still trying to figure out a way to not overstate IPCC's role. Efbrazil's version dropped the consensus altogether. I prefer we drop the IPCC's statement instead if we chose to drop either. Femke Nijsse (talk) 23:02, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
Subject matter experts will improve on my rough suggestion: "The term climate change denotes the predominantly human-caused global warming that has occurred since the industrial revolution, and more broadly includes the ongoing effects of that warming on Earth's climate system." Omit mention of interchangeability since, properly, GW & CC are not interchangeable. —RCraig09 (talk) 03:38, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Well said. I think that statement, or something similar, would be a good addition in the first paragraph. Dtetta (talk) 05:40, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes I like that as well. I agree interchangeability should not be mentioned. I think the major difficulty so far in getting the 1st sentences correct, is that we tried to mention all of these effects. Considering the fact that we have an entire paragraph dedicated to the facts, I like RCraig's suggestion to not enumerate them all, also avoiding the double use of effects and putting non-atmospheric effects in the definition. This is similar to how the Met office does it: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/climate-change/what-is-climate-change.
By saying that global warming is predominantly human caused, it implies humans have been responsible for less than 100% of observed warming, whereas the best guess is that humans have caused more than a hundred percent of the warming (the earth would possibly have cooled if humans had not been there).
I think I've got it now. Any objections to my hopefully final suggestion? Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:47, 31 August 2020 (UTC)


Climate change refers to global warming driven by humans since the Industrial Revolution, plus the large-scale shifts in weather patterns caused by the rising temperatures. While there have been previous periods of climatic change, observed changes since the mid-20th century have been unprecedented in rate and scale.

The human cause of climate change is not disputed by any scientific body of national or international standing. The largest human influence has been the emission of greenhouse gases, with over 90% of the impact coming from carbon dioxide and methane. Fossil fuel burning is the main source of these gases; agricultural emissions and deforestation are also important. Temperature rise is enhanced by self-reinforcing climate feedbacks, such as loss of snow cover, increased water vapour, and melting permafrost. Land and ocean carbon sinks can act as negative feedbacks, lessening the rate of warming.

Looks good to me. When you say “loss of... “ do you mean loss of ice sheets? Nice job everyone! Dtetta (talk) 14:56, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Loss of snow cover, copied some other mistake from above. Now adjusted. Femke Nijsse (talk) 15:02, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
I think we are getting close. I cut "the" from rising temperatures. I also prefer my last sentence in the second paragraph that groups all the feedbacks together. I think it reads better, groups snow and ice appropriately (albedo), and doesn't fall into the trap of beginning to enumerate every feedback as positive or negative. For instance, carbon sinks are currently dampening the rate of change but may saturate, at which point they could be characterized as positive feedbacks since the rate of change will accelerate. Another large negative feedback is emission to space, which increases as overall global atmospheric energy levels increase. Better to just introduce the idea, give some examples, then describe it in detail down below. References and links were also dropped in the above version. Adding everything back in leaves this: Efbrazil (talk) 16:06, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Climate change refers to global warming driven by humans since the Industrial Revolution, plus the large-scale shifts in weather patterns caused by rising temperatures.[6] While there have been previous periods of climatic change, observed changes since the mid-20th century have been unprecedented in rate and scale.[7]

The human cause of climate change is not disputed by any scientific body of national or international standing.[8] The largest human influence has been the emission of greenhouse gases, with over 90% of the impact coming from carbon dioxide and methane.[3] Fossil fuel burning is the main source of these gases; agricultural emissions and deforestation are also important. Temperature rise can be accelerated or tempered by climate feedbacks, such as loss of snow and ice cover, increased water vapour, and changes to land and ocean carbon sinks.

I hadn't seen this changes the feedbacks, they are definitely an improvement. Let's go for it. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:43, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Great, done! Efbrazil (talk) 17:00, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Glad you followed up on that issue Efbrazil...I was starting to lose focus in the discussion. Dtetta (talk) 17:59, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policymakers 2013, p. 4: Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased; IPCC SR15 Ch1 2018, p. 54: The abundant empirical evidence of the unprecedented rate and global scale of impact of human influence on the Earth System (Steffen et al., 2016; Waters et al., 2016) has led many scientists to call for an acknowledgement that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
  2. ^ Gleick, 7 January 2017; "Scientific Consensus: Earth's Climate is Warming". Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. NASA JPL. Archived from the original on 28 March 2020. Retrieved 29 March 2020.
  3. ^ a b c Olivier & Peters 2019, p. 14, 16–17.
  4. ^ IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policymakers 2013, p. 4: Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased; IPCC SR15 Ch1 2018, p. 54: The abundant empirical evidence of the unprecedented rate and global scale of impact of human influence on the Earth System (Steffen et al., 2016; Waters et al., 2016) has led many scientists to call for an acknowledgement that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
  5. ^ Gleick, 7 January 2017; "Scientific Consensus: Earth's Climate is Warming". Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. NASA JPL. Archived from the original on 28 March 2020. Retrieved 29 March 2020.
  6. ^ IPCC SR15 Ch1 2018, p. 54: The abundant empirical evidence of the unprecedented rate and global scale of impact of human influence on the Earth System (Steffen et al., 2016; Waters et al., 2016) has led many scientists to call for an acknowledgement that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
  7. ^ IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policymakers 2013, p. 4: Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased Gleick, 7 January 2017
  8. ^ "Scientific Consensus: Earth's Climate is Warming". Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. NASA JPL. Archived from the original on 28 March 2020. Retrieved 29 March 2020.

Use of abbreviations (GHG and CO2 in particular)

Sorry now I'm just spamming new discussion questions. But I wanted to check for consensus before dealing with any of these, as although the abbreviations should really be standard throughout the article right now they are very far from it. I can think of a few ways that seem reasonable:

  1. Define GHG/CO2 in the lede and use the shortened versions throughout the rest of the article.
  2. Define GHG/CO2 in the lede of sections that use them and otherwise stick to the shortened versions.
  3. Use the spelled out greenhouse gas(es)/carbon dioxide throughout.

Per some person in 2005 and also I think to a degree MOS:ABBR (in particular, we have no length restrictions) I lean towards option 3. Using the full names is inconvenient when writing but improves clarity reading. I think for an article this big few people are going to be reading consistently from the top, and hence it may be valuable to eliminate any confusion for people starting halfway down the page. Thoughts? Mehmuffin (talk) 15:36, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

I'd say 3 for greenhouse gases, but one for CO2. I believe CO2 is better known under its abbreviation then its full name. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:40, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Of course, quite often the term greenhouse gases can be omitted altogether before emissions. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:03, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia standards call for limiting lead sections to 4 paragraphs (we have 5)

Wikipedia standards for lead sections state that there should be no more than 4 paragraphs (the article character count is about 50K): Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section#Length

Our current paragraphs roughly cover these topics:

  1. What is climate change
  2. Climate change causes
  3. Climate change effects
  4. International commitments and actions
  5. Mitigation

I'm thinking maybe we just cut the last paragraph (looking to move the content down in the article where appropriate). Mitigation mostly amounts to undoing the causes, which we already cover. Alternately, we could look at condensing and merging a couple paragraphs. Thoughts? Efbrazil (talk) 18:43, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

I think it's fine as the first paragraph is quite small. I've seen featured article where they didn't really count the first paragraph as long as it wasn't as long as the other ones. If necessary, I think the most logical paragraphs to merge the last two: one talks about the technical aspect of mitigation/adaptation whereas the other one talks about the international aspect and the political aspect. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:47, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
Each of the listed concepts is important, and the casual Wikipedia reader who only peruses leads should not miss out on any of them. Few lay readers will scan the whole article, and fewer still will grasp which concepts are most important if they're not in the lead.
More generally, we should not sacrifice substance for form in content-intensive articles such as this. In any event, the MoS explicitly says this is a "general guideline—but not absolute rule", and I agree that paragraphs 4 and 5 may fairly be combined, to meet formal guidelines. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:09, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Proposed Edits (Particularly re: Human Health) to Effects Paragraph in Lede (and to Humans Section)

I have been working on some edits to the lead paragraphs, and wanted to post some proposed changes in the paragraph starting with “Land surfaces are heating…” here before I made any changes to the article itself. Below is the proposed paragraph, with proposed edits in underline/strikeout format, and an explanation in italics. For ease of reading, I haven't shown the original citations (not proposing any changes to them), but do show the two citations I am proposing to add re: human health effects.

Land surfaces are heating faster than the ocean surfaces, leading to heat waves, wildfires, increased disease, undernutrition, and the expansion of deserts. Surface temperature increases are greatest in the Arctic and have contributed to the retreat of glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice. Increasing atmospheric energy and rates of evaporation are also causing more intense storms and weather extremes, damaging infrastructure and agriculture. Surface temperature increases are greatest in the Arctic and have contributed to the retreat of glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice. By mid-century, annual climate change related deaths are estimated to be well over half a million people per year due to decreased food supplies, heat stress, and disease alone. WHO 2014, Lancet 2016 Environmental impacts include the extinction or relocation of many species as their ecosystems change, most immediately in coral reefs, mountains, and the Arctic. Even if efforts to minimize future warming are successful, Surface temperatures would stabilize and decline a little if emissions were cut off, but other some climate change impacts will continue for centuries, including rising sea levels from melting ice sheets, rising ocean temperatures, and ocean acidification from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

The most significant edits to this paragraph are probably the addition of more detail on the kinds of human health impacts, and the inclusion of specific estimates of mid century deaths from climate change. I will be working to edit the human health impacts paragraphs part of the article as well to include these specifics, and also to reduce some redundant text that is there. Hope to have that done in the next couple of days (and will post that proposal in this section of the talk page), but wanted to post these proposed lede paragraph edits first. I also edited the first clause of the last sentence, because: 1) the “but other impacts” statement, which is meant as a conjunction I believe, reads to me like it is connecting “surface temperatures” with "other impacts", which doesn’t make sense to me, and 2) I did not find support for the first clause int the sentence on p.64 of the IPCC chapter that is cited. So I went with a more simple, general statement for the first clause instead.

Interested in any thoughts/reactions to these proposed edits.Dtetta (talk) 22:19, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

thanks yet again for your suggestions. I see the current version of the effects paragraph doesn't contain enough information about human impacts. A previous version contained the sentence: Climate change threatens to diminish crop yields, harming food security, and rising sea levels may flood coastal infrastructure. The structure of the paragraph used to be first physical effects, then ecosystem effects, then human effects. I liked that structure, but not sure what the reasoning has been to change it. Now more specific to your changes:
Thanks for that quick response Femke. I tried to address each of your points immediately beneath each bullet.
  • I think it is good to include increased disease and undernutrition, but I don't think it fits well within the first sentence. I think the best way to included is to have a new sentence about human impacts.
Good idea - that makes sense to me as well. Are you ok with the proposed changes in the order of the sentences?
Yeah the other changes are fine. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:12, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • I strongly believe that very subjective estimates of the amounts of deaths should not be in the lead. That is the level of detail that might already be too high for the normal sections of the of the article, in the sense that we would probably have to give even a bit more context to convey information of the studies
The 2018 Lancet Countdown report, which is “the product of a collaboration of 27 leading academic institutions, the UN, and intergovernmental agencies from every continent” states that climate change is “is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”....I believe we need to capture that idea in this paragraph, and was trying to do so with numbers, but there are other ways.  Options that come to mind: 1) simply reference that statement from the 2018 Countdown report, or 2)provide a brief analogy without numbers... like a statement that the amount of CC related global mortality by 2050 could be comparable to what we are experiencing this year for COVID-19 (which looks like it will be around a million at years end), but which would be occurring every year. The idea, for me, is to give the significance of the public health threat some perspective. To date the lead paragraph dealing with effects has been silent on this particular issue, which I think is a serious defect.
I think the statement about climate change being the biggest global health threat originally came from the WHO. If that's true I think it will be a good thing if we replace the sentence Generally, impacts on public health will be more negative than positive with this stronger statement, attributing it explicitly to WHO. I'm not entirely comfortable attributing such a bold statement to a single study, even if it's a high quality review paper. For the lead, I think it should be two short sentences or one long sentence about the effects of climate change are humans, and I'm okay if half of that is about global health in strong but not specific wording. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:12, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • the Lancet study is a primary source. We shouldn't use primary sources for medical information per WP:MEDRS. It furthermore uses a reference scenario RCP 8.5, which is now believed to be quite unrealistic. I would like to have a very recent secondary source to included in the body of the article. I've not looked at the older WHO study, but probably too old to be included, as information and knowledge about health effects of climate change is very quickly increasing.
I don’t think the WP:MEDRS policy is relevant here; I think it refers to an entirely different situation. I don’t think the Lancet report is the kind of primary source/biomedial information being referred to in this guidance. That article starts with ”Wikipedia’s articles are not meant to provide medical advice.“ It then goes on to describe a primary source as: “In the biomedical literature: A primary source in medicine is one in which the authors directly participated in the research or documented their personal experiences. They examined the patients, injected the rats, ran the experiments, or at least supervised those who did. Many, but not all, papers published in medical journals are primary sources for facts about the research and discoveries made.” Although Lancet is a medical journal, the article itself is in no way similar to the examples they use as a “primary source”. The Lancet article is a modeling study based on other studies and models, essentially the same as what many other government agencies have done for basic human health risk assessments since the 80s and 90s. To me these are entirely different things.
Regarding the reference scenario used, I agree that the RCP 8.5 scenario is no longer considered a realistic one. However, the Lancet report notes acknowledges this difference, which seems to be around 0.6 C in 2050 for RCP 8.5 compared to some of the more realistic scenarios (as I’m sure you know, the predicted temperatures amongst the various scenarios start to diverge more drastically after 2050). Furthermore, the report goes into detail about all of the uncertainties associated with their analysis. They appear to have looked at these fairly thoroughly, and conclude that, in the end, the net affect of the various model assumptions and limits lead to their numbers most likely being an underestimate.
Although I agree with you that more recent studies would be better, I’ve been unable to find them. And even though the WHO study is from 2014, so are nearly all of the references, mostly IPCC AR5 related, used in the human health related paragraphs in the CC article, though there are a few exceptions. I’ve spent some time looking, haven’t seen anything in the literature (other than the Lancet article, which details how  their estimates have improved on the WHO’s food/nutrition related mortality numbers) that would provide better findings on human health impacts, and be a more reliable source, than WHO’s 2014 report. I think these two reports are still our best references for current information, but would much appreciate any other studies that folks could find.
Thanks for trying to find newer articles. I think you're right that is not a classical primary source that is almost prohibited from being used to Wikipedia, but it is still a single study, which is discouraged when secondary sources are available. I've looked at how the IPCC describes the study, in the hope they report these numbers and we can just cite the IPCC. They do not do this however and there might be a good reason for that. I think the two studies that you cited can be used in the effects of global warming article, whose health section is very much out of date. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:12, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
It sounds like you are ok with this suggested edit? I do remember a lengthly Talk page discussion on this issue, but could not find it in the Talk archives... still not skilled at searching archive or page histories. I think page 64 does support the second clause of the current sentence, so the citation is fine from that perspective. Dtetta (talk) 21:30, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
yeah I'm okay with this edit. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:12, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Here is the revised version of the “Land surfaces are…” paragraph, with proposed edits to the Humans section of the article beneath. Still using underline strikeout format, and listed references only for the two instances where they are associated with new text not in the current paragraph.

Land surfaces are heating faster than the ocean surfaces, leading to heat waves, wildfires, and the expansion of deserts. Surface temperature increases are greatest in the Arctic, and have contributed to the retreat of glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice. Increasing atmospheric energy and rates of evaporation are also causing more intense storms and weather extremes, damaging infrastructure and agriculture. Surface temperature increases are greatest in the Arctic and have contributed to the retreat of glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice. Rising temperatures are limiting ocean productivity and harming fish stocks in most parts of the globe. SROCC p.503 Current and anticipated human health impacts from undernutrition, heat stress and disease have led the World Health Organization to state that “Climate change is the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century”. WHO Environmental impacts include the extinction or relocation of many species as their ecosystems change, most immediately in coral reefs, mountains, and the Arctic. Even if efforts to minimize future warming are successful, Surface temperatures would stabilize and decline a little if emissions were cut off, but other some climate change impacts will continue for centuries, including rising sea levels from melting ice sheets, rising ocean temperatures, and ocean acidification from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

Below are proposed changes to the five paragraphs in the Humans section. One of the drivers for the structural changes to the sentences in these paragraphs was the idea of covering current impacts first for a given area (general health/food/economic impacts), and then describing estimated future impacts. I tried to collect sentences dealing with general health, then food, and then economic impacts into individual paragraphs, and left the last paragraph as a somewhat miscellaneous collection of additional human impacts. I added a short paragraph dealing with impacts on fisheries just below the paragraph that details food impacts. I also eliminated a few sentences that didn't seem to add much explanatory value or seemed redundant, although maybe I misunderstood what they were intended to state. References are shown where there is new text added.

I had originally approached this latest effort with the idea of just doing copy edits for the lead paragraphs, which is what I was doing last week. But once I noticed that there was no real mention of human health impacts in the lead paragraph on effects, it lead me to look at the Humans section, and to see some issues with how it was written. But I understand there may be concerns about these proposed edits being poorly timed.

Humans

The effects of climate change on humans, mostly due to warming and shifts in precipitation, have been detected worldwide. The social impacts of climate change will be uneven across the world. Regional impacts of climate change are now observable as well on all continents and across ocean regions. All regions are at risk of experiencing negative impacts, with low-latitude and less developed areas facing the greatest risk. Regional impacts of climate change are now observable on all continents and across ocean regions. Populations in the Arctic, Africa, small islands, and Asian megadeltas are regions that are likely to be especially affected by future climate change. Many risks increase with higher magnitudes of global warming.

I moved the last paragraph of the current version up, so it is now the second paragraph of the section.

Generally, impacts on public health will be more negative than positive. Human impacts include both the direct effects of extreme weather, leading to injury and loss of life, as well as and indirect effects, such as undernutrition brought on by crop failures. Various infectious diseases are more easily transmitted in a warming climate, such as dengue fever, which affects children most severely, and malaria. Young children are further the most vulnerable to food shortages, and together with older people to extreme heat. The WHO has classified human health impacts from climate change as “the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century.” WHO It is estimated that, by mid century, climate change will be responsible for well over 500,000 additional deaths globally per year due to malnutrition, heat stress, and disease alone. WHO 2014, Lancet 2016 Climate change has also been linked to an increase in violent conflict by amplifying poverty and economic shocks, which are well-documented drivers of these conflicts.

Based on local and indigenous knowledge, climate change is already affecting food security in mountain regions in South America and Asia, and in various drylands, particularly in Africa. At the global scale, research has found that climate change between 1981-2010 has decreased global mean yields of maize, wheat, and soybeans by 4.1, 1.8 and 4.5%, respectively, relative to preindustrial climate. SRCCL Ch5, p.451 Increased global temperatures warming of around 4 °C relative to late 20th century levels poses a large further risks to global and regional food security. Crop production will probably be negatively affected in low-latitude countries, while effects at northern latitudes may be positive or negative. The impact for the four major crops was negative for wheat and maize, and neutral for soy and rice, in the years 1960–2013. Each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature could, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.Zhao et.al. 2017 Up to an additional 183 million people worldwide, particularly those with lower incomes, are at risk of hunger as a consequence of warming. While increased CO2 levels help crop growth at lower temperature increases, those crops do become less nutritious. Based on local and indigenous knowledge, climate change is already affecting food security in mountain regions in South America and Asia, and in various drylands, particularly in Africa. Regions dependent on glacier water, regions that are already dry, and small islands are also at increased risk of water stress due to climate change.

The effects of warming on ocean productivity has already impacted the growth, reproduction and survival of fish stocks globally; recent analyses of worldwide stocks suggest that the maximum catch potential has decreased by over 4% since 1930, although there is significant geographic variability in this trend, with polar stocks showing an increase. SROCC p.503 Even under more optimistic climate change scenarios, global catch potential is projected to further decline 4-8% by mid century, with growth in the Arctic Ocean being the exception.SROCC p.505

Global warming has likely already increased global economic inequality, and is projected to do so further exacerbate it in the future. The majority of severe economic impacts from of climate change are expected in sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, where existing poverty is exacerbated(edit by FN) already a significant burden. Current inequalities between men and women, between rich and poor and between people of different ethnicity have been observed to worsen as a consequence of climate variability and climate change. The World Bank estimates that global warming could drive over 120 million additional people into poverty by 2030. Current inequalities between men and women, between rich and poor and between people of different ethnicity have been observed to worsen as a consequence of climate variability and climate change. Regions may become uninhabitable, with humidity and temperatures reaching levels too high for humans to survive.

In small islands and mega deltas, inundation from sea level rise is expected to threaten vital infrastructure and human settlements. This could lead to statelessness for populations in island nations, such as the Maldives and Tuvalu. Some regions may become uninhabitable, with humidity and temperatures reaching levels too high for humans to survive. Climate change can also be a driver of migration, both within and between countries, and has been linked to an increase in violent conflict by amplifying poverty and economic shocks, which are well-documented drivers of these conflicts.

Thoughts on these proposed edits? Dtetta (talk) 15:34, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

works for me. I've checked out most of the sources and it's nice to see review papers. Found no mistakes. I think the quote mark around the WHO quote in the lede should go but maybe people with more copy editing experience know better what the rules are for English. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:03, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
Great:) - Thanks for your ideas and edits. I will work on getting this posted over the weekend. Dtetta (talk) 14:29, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

Ready for copy-edit?

We've tackled all suggestions from the featured article review pre-review as far as I'm concerned, and also rewrote the mitigation section. Are we ready for a copy-edit before we ask for a proper FAR? Signing off for a few days. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:10, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

I vote that we are ready for a copy-edit.Dtetta (talk) 19:22, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
I identified and rewrote a very weak subsubsection. Going to wait till to see if that new version is stable. Femke Nijsse (talk) 05:36, 27 June 2020 (UTC)
There isn't any real "see also" section. ~ R.T.G 20:25, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
That's fine, see WP:SEEALSO. Because the article is comprehensive, there aren't many internal links that haven't been mentioned in the body of the text. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:40, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
Then I am going to take the liberty starting with global warming potential. ~ R.T.G 08:48, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
That has already been linked from the article (be it not using that jargon), so that one doesn't work. Per WP:ONEDOWN we shouldn't use any unnecessary jargon in this article. Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:22, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
I can't find it by searching the source text. ~ R.T.G 09:49, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
It's in this sentence: Global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in 2018 excluding land use change were equivalent to 52 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:42, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
FYI at the time of this thread that sentence wikilinked to a redir; on account of htis thread I updated the wikilink to point to the target article, global warming potential. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 16:22, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

I have signed us up. The current waiting list is about a month. I might rewrite one paragraph before then (or not), but am now quite satisfied with what we've got. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:10, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

I've gone over part of it, feedback welcome. HLHJ (talk) 04:07, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for that. I see many of my monstrous sentences have been transformed in readable text. I've clarified, shuffled some citations, and corrected a few (understandable) mistakes. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:52, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Seeing the "ready for copy-edit" note, I boldly worked on the first paragraph, with the intent of keeping all content in place. Another professional copy editor might have made different choices, but shorter sentences is the goal. PlanetCare (talk) 16:44, 5 September 2020 (UTC)PlanetCare
A second point is that I highly recommend making the "human impact" statement boldly the first time it comes up. It was originally mentioned as a passing thought in a clause in the first paragraph. That was not nearly as clear and persuasive as the first sentence of the second paragraph. (That human activity has caused climate change is not disputed....) I think about clarity of content. You are the science expert . PlanetCare (talk) 16:44, 5 September 2020 (UTC)PlanetCare
Glad to see "industrial revolution" taken out. I think it's better to just reference mid-century.PlanetCare (talk) 16:44, 5 September 2020 (UTC)PlanetCare

Semi-protected edit request on 9 September 2020

26kmarshall (talk) 13:49, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Climate change is mainly occurring because of humans and nature. They are both a cause of climate change. Lots of people say the weather is the main cause but is weather, not nature? It is! Therefore nature is a cause.

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. —KuyaBriBriTalk 15:38, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Cloud study

Efbrazil I think your edits yesterday were a bit sloppy, not what I'm used from you. What happened to bold, revert, discuss? I think we can both enjoy Wikipedia most if we stick to that guidance. Can you revert your reversion until this is sorted out? The WP:ONUS is on you to find consensus for inclusion. And our CITEVAR? With my RSI I'm not fancying cleaning up after other people. Now to content:

Sorry you didn't like the edits, I wouldn't have done them if I didn't think they were an improvement. The cloud study I think is important to include for a few reasons:
  • The study hasn't been overturned, there's just questions about the level of CO2 that triggers cloud dispersal, or whether the effect is a "tipping" effect
  • It highlights the issue that there may be key tipping points that could unleash a process we will not be able to bring back under control
  • It received a lot of press, and if we don't address it then I think that comes across as "they missed it" and will likely reappear in the article later
So here's what you didn't like:
One study shows that clouds can abruptly disperse at about three times the current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, leading to up to 8°C of warming in addition to that caused by greenhouse gases.[94]
Maybe this works for you?
As CO2 levels increase uncertainty does as well, with one study proposing that some clouds will disperse at about three times the current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, leading to up to 8°C of additional warming.[94]
In context:
Cloud cover may change in the future. If cloud cover increases, more sunlight will be reflected back into space, cooling the planet. If clouds become more high and thin, then clouds can act more as an insulator, reflecting heat from below back downwards and warming the planet.[93] As CO2 levels increase uncertainty does as well, with one study proposing that some clouds will disperse at about three times the current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, leading to up to 8°C of additional warming.[94] Overall, the net cloud feedback over the industrial era has probably exacerbated temperature rise.[95]
Thoughts? We should have references to both the original paper and the discussion article you pointed out: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/world-without-clouds-hardly-clear-climate-scientists-say Efbrazil (talk) 22:35, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
None of these proposals take away my principal objection to include this information: it's a single study. Whenever we cite papers in this article, it is almost always something that is either a review type of paper, or the results don't deviate much from other papers on the topic. This paper is a single outlier. The study is based on studying a small region and then massively extrapolated to the entire globe. To me this is akin to citing a mouse study in one of our top articles about human disease. And mouse studies also feature dominantly in a media, but we have consensus Wikipedia not to use them. You're not gonna convince me, so you need to convince others. Femke Nijsse (talk) 06:22, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
OK, I'm happy to defer to anyone else that wants to pipe in here and offer an opinion. It would be helpful if there were more studies on the issue. I hope it is being looked at in IPCC models the next time around. Efbrazil (talk) 17:33, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
Fyi, the IPCC doesn't have models, it only gives a summary of model output from models developed all over the world. The standard CMIP models (sometimes wrongly called IPCC models) will not have this feedback, as it requires a model with a very high resolution, which is not feasible for a global model. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:03, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Indigenous knowledge. Bias towards global north?

Fyi: Efbrazil noted that the citation of indigenous knowledge had disappeared somewhere in the editing process and deleted the sentence. The page number is 8 from the IPCC SRCCL report. I'm okay with deleting it. I added it because I wanted to decrease a Western bias in the article. It might be that I forgot to cite, or possibly more likely our constant shuffling of text is done uncarefully (I may have delted it myself while shuffling..)..

Do we think there is a bias towards the global north in the article? I'm thinking of deleting that Bush quote as outdated, and possibly misleading. Reason I've not done it yet is that I don't want the article to be biased left... Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:39, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Request regarding future significant edits

Yesterday Femke messaged me in one of her edits, flagging a reference that I had created for a sentence that no longer exists in the “Technologies and other methods” section in the Mitigation subtopic. The original sentence (regarding CCS) read “Although ongoing high costs have been a concern with this technology, recent work indicates that, by mid-century, it may be able able to play a significant role in limiting atmospheric CO2 concentrations.” The edited (I’m not sure when) sentence now reads “Although costly, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is likely necessary to meet global climate change mitigation targets negotiated in the Paris Agreement.”; the same reference Bui 2018 is used to support that new language. Femke points out that a page reference should be included, as this reference is 115 pp; that makes sense to me. However, I am somewhat at a loss as to what pages to specify, not knowing what the real intent of the editor was when s/he left that reference at the end of the revised sentence. Offhand, I would think p.1068 would be adequate for the current text. But I am not sure that Bui is the best reference for this new text, and I don’t even agree with the statement. I don’t find the “is likely necessary to meet” conclusion in either the UNEP or One Earth reports, which are both more recent than the AR5 report that Bui references; they both paint a picture of meeting a net zero, or close to net zero, target without CCS.

Long winded intro for making this request. If you are doing an extensive edit, i.e. a major change to a paragraph, please either: 1)post your proposed language here (my preference and what I try to do) or 2) double check the references you are leaving to make sure they are still valid. I realize the idea of bold, revert, discuss, is an oft cited WP policy. But I have a hard time tracking edits for a variety of reasons, and would find it helpful (and a more cooperative environment) if folks would propose significant edits on the talk page first. Thanks for your understanding. Dtetta (talk) 03:47, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying. I've put back the information from the old sentence but in a slightly condensed manner to make the tone the more in line with Wikipedia. Does that work for you?
Yes, thanks:) Dtetta (talk) 13:49, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
I second that big changes should either be done on the talk page, or if you've been bold and there might be as chance that you made a mistake, flagged up simultaneously on the talk page, with a possible ping to others that have worked significantly on that part of the article. I also have a hard time tracking edits at the moment. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:04, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
I third and I guilty of being heavy handed in recent edits, so thanks for raising this point. In general, I think it is fine to revert an edit with the message that it should be proposed on the talk page first as we are preparing for FAR. Efbrazil (talk) 16:26, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

Free-rider vs prisoner's dilemma

femke: I think you are wrong about the sources not saying "free-rider". The first source is focused on stranded assets, not prisoner's dilemma vs free-riding. Way down in the article it does mention prisoner's dilemma, but in the context of saying that climate change mitigation is NOT a prisoner's dilemma problem because of the producer / consumer dynamic (Mercure et al. 2018):

Importantly, the macroeconomic impacts of SFFA on producer countries are primarily determined by climate mitigation decisions taken by the sum of consuming countries (e.g. China or the EU), and thus a single country, however large, cannot alter this trajectory on its own. Also, critically, this finding contradicts the conventional assumption that global climate action is accurately described by the prisoner’s dilemma game, which would allow a country to free-ride.

The second source specifically mentions the free-rider problem in the abstract, and does not mention prisoner's dilemma anywhere (Rauner et al. 2020): Our results suggest that these domestic effects potentially eliminate much of the free-rider problem caused by the discrepancy between the national burden of decarbonization costs and the internationally shared benefits of climate change impact mitigation.

I think dumping "prisoner's dilemma" from our text is necessary. Climate change mitigation is a textbook free-rider problem- there are many parties involved, not just 2, and since there's no issue with "snitching" or otherwise taking direct action to cause harm. I would like the edit restored. Efbrazil (talk) 20:05, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

I agree that removing prisoner's dilemma was an improvement. Your edit was not supported by either source and I believe wrong. As far as I'm aware, a consensus has recently emerged about climate change not being a free-rider problem (anymore) with health costs better estimated and mitigation costs down. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:24, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, what's there now is fine by me. It's still a free-rider problem, even if you can make the case that certain actions pay off for the country taking the action. The free-rider part of it just means that costs are born individually but that benefits are shared. Efbrazil (talk) 20:37, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

Uninhabitable regions

Efbrazil: that information is vital. Seriously, in some region we're passing past the physiological limit... Estimates of future warming and the human physiological limit haven't changed much in 10 years, but you're welcome to find a new source. I don't want to own the article, and I would like other people to give their opinion... Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:29, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

I agree with the issue, but uninhabitable is bad phrasing. With enough air conditioning and water piped or dams built then places will continue to be "habitable". What I did was consolidate the idea into the prior sentence, but with less alarmist phrasing. If you want to expand on the habitability idea that's fine, but please be precise about what you mean so it doesn't come across as alarmist. Efbrazil (talk) 19:43, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
no seriously people still have to go outside, and these temperatures in combination with moistures aren't survivable. Also, where all these countries get the money to buy air conditioning? I really don't like the framing of extreme heat only driving migration (which is what Western countries usually focus on because it impacts them), instead of the normal human suffering that most people live through. Drivers of migrations are difficult, reaching physiological limits is actually quite easy science. I think the sentence was fine, if things are alarming they should be phrased alarmist. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:48, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
of course always open to alternative wording and more up to date studies. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:50, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
I found a more recent article (2018) studying the combined effects of humidity and heat that uses jargon, which is by definition less alarmist. [1]. It states , substantial parts of the Earth’s surface may be too hot and humid for human thermoregulation. The paper identifies this as an adaptivity limit; you cannot air-condition yourself out of it. A further benefit of this article is that it's more of a review. Saying that humans cannot adapt to this is the same as saying it's uninhabitable but it might sound more palatable? What you think about the following sentence: "Under severe climate change, regions may become so warm and humid that humans cannot adapt to it"?


To clarify, the edit in question is changing this:

... Regions may become uninhabitable, with humidity and temperatures reaching levels too high for humans to survive.[2] Climate change can also drive migration, both within and between countries.[3]

to this:

... Climate change can also drive migration as populations are displaced by desertification and heat stress.[4]

The reason I trimmed it back is that I think the uninhabitable claim is too dramatic and imprecise to just throw it out there and not back it up with precision. If we are really talking "uninhabitable", then I think to myself the permian mass extinction, which seems to be a scenario where Earth's chemistry got so messed up that Earth really was uninhabitable for many types of organisms. If we're talking with precision, then we could go into how places that have AC will use it more and will have days where going outside is unsafe, places without AC will have more days where manual labor is not possible and people need to rely on water to cool off. In places like Bangladesh there will be flooding unless massive infrastructure is built. There will be desertification in North Africa and water scarcity in other places. So on and so forth. If you believe the point needs to be laid out in more detail, then please make it with precision. Efbrazil (talk) 20:19, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

the point that studies about the combined humidity and heat extreme are making is that people cannot cool with water, as it's too humid to lose heat by evaporation. And yes, this poses massive problems for other animals. These studies are not talking about sea-level rise, which does have valid adaptation options for most regions. I think the previous sentence and the newly proposed sentence are clear, but I'm keen for a counter-proposal. Preferably one that doesn't imply migration is as simple as coming from desertification and heat stress, as it has many many many factors. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:38, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
There are also claims that places like the interior of Australia may become uninhabitable simply due to heat, where humidity is not relevant. Maybe this for combined phrasing, bringing back the 2010 reference? A better reference would be good...
... Climate change can also drive migration as populations are displaced by desertification and heat stress.[5] Some regions may pass human adaptability limits, with heat extremes that exceed the human ability to cool off with water.[6]
Efbrazil (talk) 20:57, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
(1) migration as I indicated before, I don't like attributing migration to particular aspects of climate change. Migration is very complicated, and just taking to the broad categories that these papers indicate (climatic trends and extreme weather) would work better for me. The more vague sentence we had before would also be good. An advantage of the previous sentence is that it corrects this common misconception that climate change would mostly drive people to other countries (ignoring internal displacement). (2) heat stress I'm not entirely sure what you mean by cool off with water, and I prefer the newer source to the one you half deleted (half, because it's still in the list of used sources. See User:Ucucha/HarvErrors for a script that can snuff out when this happens, changed my life). My new proposal:
... (2a) Temperature and humidity increases may lead to deadly conditions in multiple regions.[7] (this is similar to how the IPCC words it in the SR15 report, p.264) or (2b) Rise in temperature and humidity may be too severe too adapt too.[8] (1) Climate change can also drive migration, both within and between countries.[9]
Thanks for proposing text, I think that's the best way to manage this discussion. 2a I don't like as it says "deadly" without specifics. 2b is fine except for text tweaks. I don't think "within and between countries" adds much value, but I have no objection to it. So with further text tweaks, how about this as the full paragraph? Changes are only in the last 2 sentences, but I have the full paragraph here for context. I think things could be further improved by including examples environmental migration:

In small islands and mega deltas, flooding from sea level rise is expected to threaten infrastructure and human settlements.[10] This could lead to statelessness for populations in island nations, such as the Maldives and Tuvalu.[11] Rise in temperature and humidity may also be too severe for humans to adapt to in some regions.[8] These factors plus weather extremes can drive environmental migration, both within and between countries.[12]

Efbrazil (talk) 18:10, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

I still think it downplays it a bit, but for the sake of moving on and accepting good rather than perfect sections, I can agree on this with one tweak to the prose (word order of in some regions):

In some regions, rise in temperature and humidity may also be too severe for humans to adapt to.[8] These factors plus weather extremes can drive environmental migration, both within and between countries.[13] Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:27, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

That works, thanks! I changed the main article to add that. If you want to "up-play" it, then I think adding specific examples would be effective. Efbrazil (talk) 20:43, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Matthews, Tom (2018-06-01). "Humid heat and climate change". Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment. 42 (3): 391–405. doi:10.1177/0309133318776490. ISSN 0309-1333.
  2. ^ Sherwood & Huber 2010.
  3. ^ Cattaneo et al. 2019; UN Environment, 25 October 2018.
  4. ^ Cattaneo et al. 2019; UN Environment, 25 October 2018.
  5. ^ Cattaneo et al. 2019; UN Environment, 25 October 2018.
  6. ^ Sherwood & Huber 2010.
  7. ^ Matthews 2018, p. 400.
  8. ^ a b c Matthews 2018, p. 399.
  9. ^ Cattaneo et al. 2019; UN Environment, 25 October 2018.
  10. ^ IPCC AR4 SYR 2007, Section 3.3.3: "Especially affected systems, sectors and regions" Archived 23 December 2018 at the Wayback Machine; IPCC AR4 WG2 Ch16 2007, Executive Summary Archived 23 December 2018 at the Wayback Machine.
  11. ^ UNHCR 2011, p. 3.
  12. ^ Cattaneo et al. 2019; UN Environment, 25 October 2018.
  13. ^ Cattaneo et al. 2019; UN Environment, 25 October 2018.

Less nutritious crops

The food security section of the IPCC report is giving more and more attention to aspects other than simply calories when describing food insecurity. One of the major aspects is poor nutritional quality. Both the IIPC and the most prominent Lancet study on this put quite some emphasis on an decreased nutrition. I think it should remain in the text. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:05, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Interesting! Soil depletion and new breeds of crops that grow faster have already had a significant effect, see here. So, it has already become more difficult to eat a climate friendly diet by cutting down on meat and dairy, and this will become even more difficult due to climate change. Count Iblis (talk) 18:32, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
The reason I was saying this, is that Efbrazil just deleted the content about this. I'd like to see whether there is consensus to do so. Do you believe this should be included in this top-level article, or delegated to a lower-tier article such as effects of global warming. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:31, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
The scientific american article points to the real issue, which is not climate change- they say "Davis and his colleagues chalk up this declining nutritional content to the preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition." When people talk about food nutrition declines it is often offered up as a weak counterpoint to climate denialists who say that CO2 is a fertilizer and will cause a great boom in agricultural productivity. My understanding is that both points are being raised to fit a narrative about climate change being "all bad" or "no big deal", they are not a reflection of climate change science. Efbrazil (talk) 19:53, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
the IPCC very clearly in their summary statement (both chapter and SPM) connects CO2 fertilisation with lower nutritional value. I don't know whether any other issues are also important (I'm not putting that much trust in a 2011 single study), I am familiar with the scientific literature showing this connection and the prominence it has within the climate food security literature. I'm okay with replacing this with another aspect of food security not related to calories. I think the other parts of food security are just way more difficult to explain and we shouldn't simplify too much by only focusing on calories (another aspect mentioned in the summary of the IPCC chapter of food security that fruit trees may suffer from the fact that they need cold acclimatisation, and that is possibly offset in some regions against a longer growing season and difficult difficult...) Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:33, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
Yes, if the IPCC report mentions this then we should also include the main point made there in our article here. Count Iblis (talk) 20:50, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
The IPCC report mentions lots of things. If you sort all the things from most to least important, this issue belongs near the bottom. CO2 fertilization effects are easy to counteract if you want to, regaining lost nutrition- the issue is that CO2 accelerates growth, which limits nutrient uptake. If you simply don't water plants as much then their growth is slowed and nutrient uptake is restored. The whole issue is a red herring that dilutes all the other important points we need to make in this article. Efbrazil (talk) 21:03, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Efbrazil is right that mentioned in the IPCC report is not sufficient for proving that something is due: we have to figure that out ourselves. Even their 40 pages summaries are still quite big.

It's an illusion however that nutrient loss can be easily reverted. Many places don't irrigate at all, or have other reasons not to decrease irrigation. I can't imagine many farmers willingly decreasing their crop yield. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:54, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

Irrigation is one method, switching breeds to slower growing varieties is another. I wouldn't mind a sentence talking about CO2 stimulating plant growth and the side effects of that, some good and some bad. What I'm trying to filter out is content that seems editorially biased towards the narrative of "climate change all bad apocalypse coming". What we want is "here are the facts, you decide". Efbrazil (talk) 16:12, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
I understand your motivation to want to delete this. You may be aware I spend quite some time removing climate apocalypse nonsense from Wikipedia. I'm just looking for a way to not oversimplify the effects on food security. Not entirely sure how to proceed without input from others. I won't lose sleep over it if we decide to keep it out.


I’m glad we’re including stuff like this. I would emphasize the development of more resistant crops (genetically engineering seeds) to sustain subsistence farmers through more frequent crop failures as a result of temperature extremes, droughts, etc. particularly located in subsaharan Africa. Not my area of expertise but I appreciate the emphasis here as an important form of climate change adaptation. MurrayScience (talk) 15:20, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 18 September 2020

SDG Boina (talk) 11:01, 18 September 2020 (UTC) Hello, I am part of the Global Goals Week Virtual Edit-a-thon on SDGs, I would like to edit this article. Thank you!

Hi SDG Boina, thanks for being part of our edit-a-thon (for the others: more info about it here: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Online_edit-a-thon_SDGs_September_2020). The article is locked to prevent vandalism but once you have made some other edits you can quickly gain auto-confirmed status. Meanwhile, do let us know the kinds of changes you'd like to see and maybe one of the other editors (like me) can do them for you? EMsmile (talk) 13:05, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

Red green colorblindness

https://www.color-blindness.com/deuteranopia-red-green-color-blindness/

Observed temperature from NASA[1] vs the 1850–1900 average as a pre-industrial baseline. The main driver for increased global temperatures in the industrial era is human activity, with natural forces adding variability.[2]
This was already addressed in a prior discussion. The shading of the lines is very different, so people that are color blind will see gray scale differences. The graphic was even verified as good by a color blind person. --Efbrazil (talk) 14:36, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for clarifying. I'm not color blind myself but I saw the red and green next to each other and thought it could be an issue. By the way, I love your graphs! If I knew how to give you a barnstar, I would. By the way, I highly recommend this recent article from Our World in Data. It explains a lot of the recent edits I've been making and hope to continue to make in climate change and other related articles.

https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector

Thanks! That's an impressive graphic in the linked article, although it suffers from only working on desktop. One key goal I have for the graphics here is that they work as thumbnails / on smartphone. Efbrazil (talk) 22:56, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
Global greenhouse gas emissions by sector
I very much agree with Efbrazil. Our world in data is brilliant, but often requires quite a lot of editing before it suitable to Wikipedia, the big chunk of our readers are on phones. Femke Nijsse (talk) 13:45, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ "Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change". NASA. Retrieved 23 February 2020.
  2. ^ USGCRP Chapter 3 2017 Figure 3.1 panel 2, Figure 3.3 panel 5.

Not enough citations in lede

I really like the lede and I think it's improved a lot since the summer. But I think there's an uncomfortably large number of sentences without citations. I'm not disputing the information or suggesting the sentences are bad, but I think it would help the credibility of the article if the lede sentences had more citations, that's all. MurrayScience (talk) 23:18, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

I agree the lede has improved; lot’s of good work there. But I would actually prefer to see no Wikilinks or citations in the lede. Re: citations, see WP:When not to cite... “Citations are often omitted from the lead section of an article, insofar as the lead summarizes information for which sources are given later in the article...” I imagine my views on Wikilinks are probably not shared by most, but I subscribe to the views of Nicholas Carr (and others), which is that hyperlinks are largely a short term memory burden that leads to poorer reading comprehension.Dtetta (talk) 06:04, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

Well, I suppose we can agree to disagree. :”) MurrayScience (talk) 06:50, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Dtetta, that having fewer cites increases readability. In March, I signed the article up for WP:TFA, to appear on the main page. The feedback I got then was that the article still wasn't up to featured standards, and that one of the possible improvements was removing unnecessary cites from the lead, only leaving those that support really controversial statements. Initially, I didn't really agree. What changed my mind is that many of the cites in the lead were unique and had unique information, which meant that the lead wasn't a summary of the main article. By removing those cites, we forced ourselves to comply with those rules.
We are still not finished with that task: I think cites 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12 can be safely removed (of course, the sentence before 10 needs rewriting). The fact that were in between, makes readers question why there aren't more cites. Femke Nijsse (talk) 06:56, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
I agree with everyone! Superscripts impress some people as supporting credibility, though others find it distracting. Excluding footnotes invites us to take editorial liberties in explaining things "our way", but such explanations do improve flow and readability for the lay person. Bottomline: I think it should be all or nothing, since partially cited content can actually hurt credibility and still make it less readable. I don't have a strong opinion in either direction. —07:06, 18 September 2020 (UTC) (opinion updated below) RCraig09 (talk) 15:34, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
When I mention to someone that I edit Wikipedia, they almost always say something along the lines of, 'you know Wikipedia's notorious for being unreliable right?'. I appreciate the standards of truth, beauty, and readability, but I worry about what those people might think about no citations whatsoever in the lead. In any case, even if they're redundant, I find citations, just like WikiLinks, provide a window into valuable information. It's almost as though we're saying, 'hey look at where we got this very credible and high-quality information, it's right here in the citation'. MurrayScience (talk) 08:58, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
Update: Thinking about it in view of MurrayScience's comment, I now think the still-controversial-to-some-people nature of GW and CC makes me favor citations-for-everything. Substance should take precedence over formal concerns such as whether superscripted numbers are distracting. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:34, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
I went through the last 10 featured articles. 5 of them have no citations in the lede at all, 3 of them have 3 or fewer citations, and 2 of them use "notes" instead of citations. See Hurricane Hattie for how the notes approach works (there are citations in the notes). I personally like the notes approach because it lets the author explain things further without bloating the text in the lede, and our lede text is already at risk of being flagged for being too long. Maybe we could use notes to trim some text, justify / hide the references, and set a standard so that subsequent edits don't clutter up the lede with references. Efbrazil (talk) 15:52, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
To revisit this, I reviewed controversial / overview topics- nuclear power, evolution, world war 2, world war 1, abortion, weather, climate, the united nations. They all have ledes about as long as ours and, except for World War 2 (which has no references), they use about as many references as we currently do. The more controversial the topic, the more references. They do not use notes. So I think we are OK for FAR using the standards like we already are, which as femke said means putting references on claims that could be perceived as controversial. One additional thing I think is helpful is to include quotes in references. It's helps to ground the text, so that edits don't make it so sentences drift away from the source material. Efbrazil (talk) 15:04, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for doing that detective work. I concur with the recommendation to put quotes in citations when feasible. I still prefer no citations (or wikilinks) for the lead, except for maybe current citations 12 and 13. Let the reader read in peace, and get engaged by informative prose and appealing graphics. But I am fine with adhering to the majority consensus on this. Dtetta (talk) 15:57, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Additional proposed lead paragraph revisions

Apologies for my late comment here. I recently reread the last two paragraphs, and I have to say I prefer the wording that existing in late June better than the current version, although the addition of the net zero concept is a plus. Some problems I see in the current text that lead me to prefer the earlier version:
  • In the third paragraph, the second sentence still makes it seem like there’s some sort of magic tipping point at 1.5 C, which I don’t think the SR 15 report was really saying (this was an issue in the earlier versions as well, but the current language makes it more glaring). The last sentence seems overly technical; I think it would be better to just refer to net-zero GHG emissions in general, which seems to be what the footnote is saying. I think the statement on net zero could also be stronger. It is discussed mainly in the context of the SR15 report, but the CC article itself includes a number of statements indicating that net zero is in fact a strategy for minimizing GW that is being adopted by governments (like the mention of the EU green deal...and others could also be included in the article). The net zero sentence should reflect this reality of action as well as the scientific perspective.
  • In the last paragraph, I don’t think the climate engineering sentence is a correct statement, and it’s very confusing to me. I’m pretty sure that none of the reports I cited in the mitigation section described climate engineering in this conditional sense; some scenarios envision a certain amount of CCS and CDR (i.e. bioenergy+CCS and afforestation)...and others don’t...just like they vary in the amount of total energy use/conservation they assume. But there’s none I noticed that make climate engineering a conditional thing. The closest type of conditionality I see is that some of these are not yet proven, but may become more cost effective and realistic come mid-century. Also, it’s hard to tell from this sentence what we are including when we mention it. Is it CCS (which is not mentioned), bioenergy+CCS, afforestation, or just the more advanced climate engineering technologies like those actually mentioned in the climate engineering section of this article? IPCC AR5 and the wikipedia climate engineering article seem to consider bioenergy+CCS and afforestation as climate engineering. Afforestation is an odd duck as it is also part of many countries current plans, even though it is considered “climate engineering” by IPCC (and the climate engineering article).
At a minimum, I would suggest the “climate engineering sentence be edited, and mention CCS first, and then mention climate engineering as a more remote possibility, rather than express it in a conditional sense. Again, sorry for these late and extensive comments; should have read the proposed changes more closely back in early August. I can take a shot at editing the climate engineering sentence, if folks want that. Dtetta (talk) 18:04, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
thanks as always for your suggestions.
I agree that the second sentence of the third paragraph is not optimal, and neither is the first sentence that goes away too much detail about what the IPCC is actually doing. I can't easily get the June version up on the screen with my voice recognition software, could you give me a link? I agree that just referring to net zero greenhouse gas emissions would be better. As the third paragraph is about solutions that are actually implemented I would like to mention actual politics, but I'm not entirely sure whether we can do so with a global perspective.
I think the word climate engineering should not be mentioned in the lead. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. If people (read the fossil fuel industry, or am I too cynical here?) talk about CCS, they rarely mention it in the context of climate engineering, but instead in the context of climate mitigation.
Corresponding text in the body :::
I feel like our article is a tad bit too positive about CCS and negative emissions, we are not even mentioning the additional air pollution, and the moral hazard that are often mentioned in the literature. Time allowing, I might propose a slightly re-wording of that paragraph. I will need some additional reading as the last time I've really delved into this was four years ago. The IPCC has been criticised for relying overly on neoclassical integrated assessment models, whose biases lead to an overstatement of negative emissions. I'm in the process of trying to figure out what is due here. Dtetta, could you find a proper source for the last statement? The four pages that were cited do not mentioned global implementation really. Femke Nijsse (talk) 11:29, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
Femke, it looks like the wayback site uses server-side coding to show you the archived pages, so I can’t post a link. Here is the text from that timeframe: ” Mitigation efforts to address global warming include the development and deployment of low carbon energy technologies, policies to reduce fossil fuel emissions, reforestation, forest preservation, as well as the development of potential climate engineering technologies. Societies and governments are also working to adapt to current and future global warming impacts, including improved coastline protection, better disaster management, and the development of more resistant crops Countries work together on climate change under the umbrella of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which has near-universal membership. The goal of the convention is to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system". The IPCC has stressed the need to keep global warming below 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) compared to pre-industrial levels in order to avoid some irreversible impacts.With current policies and pledges, global warming by the end of the century is expected to reach about 2.8 °C (5.0 °F). At the current greenhouse gas (GHG) emission rate, the emissions budget for staying below 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) would be exhausted by 2028.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assesses the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant to understanding of human-induced climate change. The IPCC has assessed that there is much greater risk to human and natural systems if warming exceeds pre-industrial levels by 1.5 °C (2.7 °F).[13] Under the Paris Agreement, nations are making climate pledges to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Even if nations follow through on current promises, global warming can still reach about 2.8 °C (5.0 °F) by 2100. Reducing emissions of methane to near-zero levels and CO2 to net-zero by 2050 would limit warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F).[15]
Not quite sure what you are referring to when you ask for ”a proper source for that last statement”, but am happy to do some research. Dtetta (talk) 20:04, 12 September 2020 (UTC)\
If you go to the history of the page, you can get the ID of that version, so no need to use the Wayback machine. I don't have a big preference for either version, except that the two problems you identified should probably be solved. Be bold
When I said a proper source, I simply meant one that doesn't fail verification, IPCC is of course a perfect source. In terms of prose, I think the word uncertainty is overused, so I wouldn't mind a reformulation either if I'm not asking too much. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:26, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
Understand, I meant I can’t tell what wording you you are referring to. Is it one of the statements I made here on the talk page? Or one of the sentences in the two lead paragraphs we are discussing? Dtetta (talk) 21:18, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
Neither, is the corresponding body text. I put a field verification tag after the sentence. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:04, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
OK, I think you are talking about the “failed verification” tag next to what is currently footnote 211. If you go to Talk Page Archive 82, Section 1.6, you can see that the original text had the CCS and land carbon sink mitigation paragraphs are broken out separately. The last sentence, and associated reference about uncertainties with global implementation, was meant to apply only to the land carbon sink techniques, not to CCS. In that text I had described CCS differently, and had put it in its own paragraph. Do you think the four pages I referenced are still insufficient if you consider them just in the context of the land carbon sink techniques? Dtetta (talk) 12:45, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
indeed that is the sentence I meant. I don't see anything about global implementation in those four (dense) pages. There is a lot of text in there about other things, so it's difficult to find the text that supports the sentence. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:03, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
Got it. Ok I will figure out something.Dtetta (talk) 21:20, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
Here are a few sources to consider to support the statement on the scientific uncertainty (and maybe add technical/institutional barriers when you do your editing of that paragraph) associated with using land carbon sink methods on a global scale AR5 GW3 pp 816-817, Sec.11.8, Sec. 11.11, SRCCL Ch6 p 555, Table 6.14, Krause et.al. 2018 Publicly accessible version, Fuss et.al. 2018 - Part 2 Dtetta (talk) 15:51, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. That Krause et al paper seems quite useful and supportive of the statement (and less vague than only saying uncertainty). Some of these IPCC reports summary statements seem to be written so abstractly that it's difficult to get any meaning out of them. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:13, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Here is my proposed language for the next to last paragraph.
”Many of these effects are already observed at the current level of warming, which, as of 2020, is about 1.1 °C (2.0 °F). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a series of reports that project significant increases in these impacts as warming continues to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) and beyond, with higher levels of warming associated with ever greater impacts. Under the Paris Agreement, nations are making climate pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F), in order to avert the most severe impacts. However, even if nations followed through on current promises, global warming would still reach about 2.8 °C (5.0 °F) by 2100. To have a realistic chance of preventing the most damaging effects of climate change, by limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F), GHG emissions would need to decrease to near-zero levels by the year 2050.“ Dtetta (talk) 22:17, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
And my suggestion for the second sentence of the last paragraph, starting with”Climate engineering...”
”CO2 removal methods, including carbon capture and storage, are a part of some scenarios that limit global warming to 1.5 °C. More ambitious techniques involving climate engineering are still considered unproven.” Dtetta (talk) 22:40, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
I think the climate engineering sentence could include CCS, sure, but I think it should also include SRM, as this is heavily emphasized in the climate engineering article as the only form of climate engineering that stands a chance at being safe and effective, and also see the Harvard center on SRM in the citation for that sentence. Also, I agree there’s no magical tipping point at 1.5, still think it’s important to mention methane and CO2 individually and where they need to be by 2050. The word decrease is important, because these emissions need to be cut by 30% or something by 2030.MurrayScience (talk) 08:02, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
MurrayScience, I am proposing to describe SRM as unproven based on the wording on pages 12-13 of the IPCC 1.5C report, which I believe is the latest IPCC report to deal with this:”Solar radiation modification (SRM) measures are not included in any of the available assessed pathways. Although some SRM measures may be theoretically effective in reducing an overshoot, they face large uncertainties and knowledge gaps as well as substantial risks and institutional and social constraints to deployment related to governance, ethics, and impacts on sustainable development. They also do not mitigate ocean acidification.” In the reference you cite I see calls for additional research, but no actual research documenting its feasibility, which again leads me to think of it as unproven at this point. Maybe rather than mention it, only to describe it as unproven, it would be better just to leave it out of the lede?

Thanks Dtetta, I like the beginning of the paragraph a lot better than what we have now. @MurrayScience: please chip in here as well. A few issues with the wording above:

  • We need to tighten up wording as much as possible as our lede is already super long
  • In particular, I think we should not mention 1.5 °C so many times- it's redundant and sounds like we're belaboring a point
  • I think it's more precise to say that Paris set a target of "well under 2.0 °C (3.6 °F)", with 1.5 being more of an aspirational number.
  • We should not use the GHG acronym
  • I'd add a reference to [climate action tracker], as that site tracks nations delivering on Paris agreements

Here's my take on the text with those points in mind:

Many of these effects are already observed at the current level of warming, which, as of 2020, is about 1.1 °C (2.0 °F). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a series of reports that project significant increases in these impacts as warming continues to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) and beyond. Under the the Paris Agreement, nations agreed to keep warming "well under 2.0 °C (3.6 °F)", but countries have only made individual pledges to limit global warming to 2.8 °C (5.0 °F), and current policies will result in about 3.0 °C (5.4 °F) of warming. Limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) will require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to near-zero levels by the year 2050. Efbrazil (talk) 00:13, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Efbrazil...nice work!...I think that’s an improvement. Feel free to post that with the CAT tracker citation if you like, or I will post tomorrow...unless here are any concerns expressed before then. Dtetta (talk) 03:05, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
I like this very much, good job Efbrazil. How about this for the last sentence: Limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) through mitigation would require substantial decreases in global greenhouse gas emissions, reaching near-zero by the year 2050. (I’m trying to emphasize that emissions need to go down a lot and in the interim time and the method of response here is mitigation.)MurrayScience (talk) 08:09, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
Glad you liked the revised language MurrayScience, and I liked your revision of the last sentence, particularly in that it alludes to the UNEP Emissions Gap report that is paraphrased in the early part of the Mitigation section. Thanks for posting the paragraph to the article. Dtetta (talk) 13:28, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

proposed copy edits

Hello, I've finally worked my way up to lede. I have two very small suggestions:

  1. In paragraph 4, remove "(GHG)" as I have now removed all uses of the acronym.
  2. In paragraph 2, reword the sentence 2 to end with "... contributed to the melting of glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice." as it currently suggests that permafrost and sea ice are both retreating, which I do not believe is a verb conventionally used for anything but glaciers. I'm definitely not an expert though and would appreciate clarity on whether a more or less specific verb would be better.

Thanks! Mehmuffin (talk) 19:43, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Good point Mehmuffin. I would suggest something like: "Surface temperature increases are greatest in the Arctic, where they have contributed to melting permafrost and the retreat of glaciers and sea ice." Dtetta (talk) 20:53, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
This is now a more specific better sentence anyway so I'm gonna finally call this copyedit done, sorry for the delay. Mehmuffin (talk) 12:27, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

References

geo-engineering

MurrayScience: be mindful not to add any unsourced text to the article. I think the additions to the geo-engineering section are undue. We are really talk about the non-ridiculous technical solutions in the mitigation section, and the hypothetical remaining technologies are not a big part of the climate change literature and should not too much attention. The article is on the long side as it is. For reference, this was the adage text:

In general, climate engineering techniques require more research to show that they can be effective without incurring negative side effects.

Climate engineering technologies have limitations, for instance, the feasibility of atmospheric carbon dioxide removal on the scale of billions of metric tons annually is highly uncertain. Additionally, while solar radiation management could theoretically restore global average temperatures to pre-industrial levels, it cannot address ocean acidification, which is caused by the excess concentration in the atmosphere. Because of these limitations, climate engineering technologies are not generally viewed as solutions in and of themselves, but rather as ways to limit the effects of climate change while greenhouse gas emissions are being reduced.

Especially that last sentence is highly dubious, as most scientists would say geo-engineering should not be on the table at all (except for BECCS for those people categorising it under climate engineering). Femke Nijsse (talk) 13:44, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

I second what Femke said. This is an overview article that has already been through several edit passes, so please be careful making changes as we are preparing for FAR. In general, I think the most valuable edits that can be made at this point are removals of text or other changes that would help us get through FAR.--Efbrazil (talk) 14:05, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
I was going to add citations, figured more detail made sense considering how short that section is currently. That SRM cannot address ocean acidification, but rather deals with radiative forcing, seemed important to include. MurrayScience (talk) 22:42, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
the section is indeed short, but I think that is mostly a reflection of the fact that climate geo-engineering is not a big topic compared to the entirety of mitigation and adaptation. I think one extra sentence on ocean acidification cannot hurt. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:01, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

Lead is too vague

A lot of effects on society/people are missing, such as pollution deaths (which is related), deaths due to possible pandemics because of thawing permafrost, loss of habitability in certain regions, economic effects, migration, security etc. Third paragraph needs to be expanded with several more sentences. Bogazicili (talk) 19:12, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

The lead currently doesn't have space for more information. The effects paragraph is already longer than the other paragraphs. Mortality due to air pollution is strictly speaking not an issue of climate change, but a co-benefit of combating climate change, so to indirectly related to be in the lead. Research on economic effects is very poor, so difficult to translate to a small sentence. Migration and security may have been in previous versions of the lead, and I'm not against it in principle, as long as we delete other effects. Ideally, the third paragraph should be one sentence shorter.
I see you added primary sources about the effects of climate change humans. Per Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(science), we strongly prefer secondary sources that put research into context. The most prominent review paper about health, the Lancet countdown, only mentions these new diseases from thawing permafrost offhandedly in one sentence of 43 pages, which is a very clear indication it is not WP:DUE in a top-level article such as this one.
Also have a look at Talk:Climate change/Citation standards, which details our way of citing stuff. In general on Wikipedia, it is considered bad practice to only use a URL, and we would like to see at least a bare minimum of author date title and URL . In this article we agreed to give all the important information such as journal, DOI and a few others of those. If you need help, just ask. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:47, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
1) Then the lead will have to be longer since important information is being left out or other parts need to be shortened. Right now it reads very "soft", as if it was written by Exxon Mobil.
2) Then you have a bias against newer research. The paper you deleted is from 2018. It takes time for such papers to accumulate and review articles to be published.
3) I'll go over citation standards and update sources this week. Leave them for now please.Bogazicili (talk) 20:07, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
We have agreed we will never delete information if there not yet correctly cited. The Lancet review comes out every year, so the bias against new research wouldn't be big. The same is true for other aspects of climate change: many reviews are being written. I'm open to small suggestions to make the lede clearer and stronger, but not longer. The FA criteria specify that the lede shouldn't be too long.Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:17, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
Bogazicili, I think there are at least a couple of problems with the sentence that you’ve added: 1)It’s an overly technical and complicated sentence for this article, involving a distinction between 1.5 and 2C effects, even as it draws a connection to a co-benefit of climate change mitigation, all in one sentence. 2)As you read the paragraph it’s clearly an outlier compared to the set of ideas that are otherwise contained there.
A more straightforward version of this sentence could work better in a new paragraph of the article devoted to the co-benefits of mitigation. When the mitigation section was being re-written back in June, there was some discussion around including costs and benefits. I had proposed the following WHO article as reference for a sentence stating that climate change mitigation will provide a co-benefit of about 1 million avoided air pollution deaths per year by 2050, but for a variety of reasons that wasn’t included (See Archive 82 Section 1.9). I think the reference you provided as part of the sentence you added is also a relevant one. If you’re committed to the idea of including the air pollution co-benefits of climate change mitigation in the article, I would suggest you propose something along those lines on the talk page. Maybe this time it will get more traction. But I think the current sentence should be deleted from the paragraph it is in, and that has nothing to do with the issue of how current the research is, or other perceived biases.Dtetta (talk) 02:27, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
I'll come back to the lead after improving human section. As I said right now it's too "soft." That whole effects paragraph needs to be rewritten. Bogazicili (talk) 15:48, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
Bogazicili, based on the changes you have made, I would urge you to propose them here first, rather than initiate edits that will only end up getting reverted. Other editors have committed to doing the same for significant new edits. I would categorize the sentence you wrote for the Humans section as in that category. Dtetta (talk)

Giant Undo

User:Mikenorton just made a giant undo. He even reinserted material that was erroneously added ([6]). See why it shouldn't have been added ([7]). He also reverted material that was non-contentious. This is hugely discouraging. Bogazicili (talk) 17:47, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

The edit that you restored is fair enough, but with making so many changes in a relatively short space of time, it makes it difficult to keep track of what's going on. The reason for the undo (if it was "giant" then so was the edit that it undid) was to allow a pause for discussion, as had been asked for by other editors. Mikenorton (talk) 20:06, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
Yeah, I agree with slowing down there. This article has gone through several edit passes recently and is in pretty good shape for FAR. Any edits we make going forward need to be carefully reviewed, plus we need to prevent the article from getting longer. If you have new content to add it is probably best to begin with putting it in a sub article or submitting it here on the talk page for review. Efbrazil (talk) 20:58, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
I'm sorry to hear how discouraging your first steps in Wikipedia are. Sometimes it is easier to learn the ropes by editing articles that are less contentious and with major obvious flaws to correct, to later come back to articles like this. I've had a look at some more parts of this article to see whether wording could be made sharper and already found one instance (that some changes were expected in the future instead of already here) Femke Nijsse (talk) 17:40, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
It's not that fun editing this article actually. I'm only here because so many things were left out. Bogazicili (talk) 23:54, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Ownership of content and Wikipedia:Conflict of interest

Before continuing discussions on talk page, I reviewed some Wiki policies and two seem relevant here.

1) (removed my own earlier comment Bogazicili (talk) 21:30, 26 September 2020 (UTC))

I leave it to others to comment on this, and will adjust my attempt at WP:STEWARDSHIP if people feel I crossed the line to ownership. However, I don't think you interpreted Dtetta's response correctly. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:06, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
Dtetta's response also said "But I think the current sentence should be deleted from the paragraph it is in". Femke is doing an utterly thankless task trying to get this article through a featured article review. One of the issues that has been mentioned previously is that this is a top level summary article and it simply can't have everything in it - it's at the upper end of the acceptable article length range already. Any additions need to be thought through carefully. Mikenorton (talk) 08:57, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
Femkemilene, actually I take what I said back. Considering Mikenorton's response, and looking at talk page histories, some of the work has been lengthy and painstaking. I only intend to add several topics that I thought were omitted and then I might not be as active in this article. Bogazicili (talk) 21:28, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

2) With respect to Wikipedia:Conflict of interest, I'd like to ask Mikenorton if they have any COI editing this article, since they stated they do consulting work for oil industry in their user page. Bogazicili (talk) 23:54, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

That is not how a conflict of interest works on Wikipedia. A conflict of interest is about writing about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:06, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
See: Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#External_roles_and_relationships Bogazicili (talk) 21:43, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
Perhaps I should declare my membership of a well known environmental organisation since 1972 as well. I am personally a little conflicted between what's paid the bills and my own views on the environment, but that's for me to deal with. Mikenorton (talk) 08:30, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
Mikenorton, so, for future reference you say you have no COI? Have you fully reviewed the relevant Wiki article? Bogazicili (talk) 21:43, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
I'm fully aware of the policy in question. If I had a COI I would declare it, just as I would professionally. You can make your own deductions from that. I struggle to see how anything that I have done in any editing on this article would lead anyone to think that I had a COI. Reverting someone as part of a standard WP:BRD cycle doesn't even begin to count. I suggest that you fully review the relevant policy yourself. Mikenorton (talk) 22:12, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Primary source: economic losses

The sentence: Economic losses due to climate change could be between 126.68 and 616.12 trillion dollars until 2100 with current commitments, compared to 1.5°C or well below 2°C compatible action action. Failure to implement current commitments raises economic losses to 149.78–791.98 trillion dollars until 2100, is based on a primary source, which we should avoid. There is also a huge red flag: the paper is pretending to be able to estimate economic damages to five significant digits, which is utterly ridiculous.

The human impacts section is now extremely long, and difficult to read. I cannot keep up with the edits, and I don't think there is consensus for all these additions. Please slow down, and propose edits to talk page. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:53, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

What you quoted is from a 2020 article in Nature journal. It's not reasonable to expect review articles from such newer research. It could be less reliable if it was old and not included in meta reviews or something. I hope others do not have the same attitude with yours. A lot of things were left out in the article. Bogazicili (talk) 17:07, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
A lot of things should be left out of the article to keep it readable (recommended 50 000 bytes readable prose). It's now over that limit (around 60 000). We have lower-level articles that specifically deal with the effects (effects of climate change), or effects on humans (effects of climate change on humans). The newest research isn't necessarily the best, and review articles, even if a year old, allow us to make general statements in this top-level article. There is an WP:ONUS on you to convince other editors your additions are good. If you don't like my input, you can ask for other input at WP:Third opinion, or wait for any of the other people watching this page. Femke Nijsse (talk) 17:40, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
I reverted the recent edits as I don't see any consensus to add all this material. There's no need to rush - we should be able to take our time to reach consensus and get this right. Mikenorton (talk) 17:44, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
I've had a further look at the source. It's based on studying a single model and a specific strategy for countries to do mitigation (self-preservation). The lower bound of damages is the Nordhaus damage function, which is ridiculously low.[1] To their credit, they use it as some lower bound. The final numbers may seem quite high, but they amount to only a couple of percent of global GDP, considering that the total size of the economy is set to grow massively, and considering these numbers are cumulative until 2100. The source is not using modern insights on how costs of new technology decline either, making it dependent on time instead of on how much has been deployed. In conclusion: not meeting the very very high bar we should said singular studies to be included in this top article.
Upon rewording (acknowledged the research question of self-preservation and getting rid of the "crime against significant digits"), I think this can be a useful source for our article on effects of climate change on humans. Any objection to me moving it there? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Femkemilene (talk • contribs)

References

  1. ^ Keen, Steve (2020-09-01). "The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change". Globalizations. 0 (0): 1–29. doi:10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856. ISSN 1474-7731.
I assumed you were an experienced editor? The way understand it, it's not your job as a Wikipedia editor to critique reliable sources in this manner; you are not acting as peer-reviewed journal editor in Wikipedia. Wikipedia editors only need to make sure they are using good sources, and there is a balance (to simplify a bit). Before I added this content, there wasn't much about the economic effects of climate change, besides growing inequality and poverty (paragraph 5 in humans section basically). This is a big omission for a section that is supposed to summarize all effects of climate change. Currently the section also goes on and on about fish stocks. Major economic damage is much more notable than that. My reasoning adding that sentence was to correct this omission with some numbers from latest research. Bogazicili (talk) 00:02, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
I agree that talking about economic damages is more important than talking about fish stock. I'm planning to merge the two paragraphs about food and water security, and cut down a bit on their length. For top-level articles, good sources are comprehensive reviews in independent, reliable published sources (see Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (science)), which means the strong preference for secondary sources or even tertiary sources. I'm willing to consider an exception to that rule when a primary source is exceptionally good, hence me properly reading it. I'll revisit the review literature about this topic and will propose a new sentence, probably added as a first sentence of paragraph 5. I know have tried in the past and not succeeded, hopefully a new review is out. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:51, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
I disagree with this shift in focus. Change can be characterized as an expense or a stimulus, so most economic numbers out there are more political than scientific. If you go to a conservative source they will say this in general: going carbon neutral is all expenses that are horrible, while the effects of climate change can be adapted to and will provide some benefits. If you go to a liberal source they will say this: every change in the climate is an economic wrecking ball, but transitioning to carbon neutrality is an economic stimulus that is all goodness. I'd rather we keep the focus on how climate change will be altering the world, not whether mitigation or adaptation is better economically. Efbrazil (talk) 17:24, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
currently, neoclassical economics (sometimes considered right-wing or liberal politically), and the different flavours of heterodox economics (more associated with left-wing politics) agree on the sign of the economic damage; it will be good to transition to carbon neutrality. There is disagreement about the speed. I think it is possible to make a generic statement that encompasses both schools of thinking, if we don't cite any numbers. Would that work for you? Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:00, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
Femkemilene, I didn't want to add a dated secondary source because economic impacts seem to have been underestimated. Here's a secondary source (Sep 2019) that says that but didn't put a $ value: [8]. 20:33, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
Efbrazil, Your response mainly represents an outdated view. [9] Even IMF is concerned, and they could be considered "conservative" [10] 20:33, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

I think the Grantham Institute document is sufficient. It has undergone internal and external review, and it is written by the leading economists and importantly natural scientists (Ruth DeFries, Nicholas Stern, Tim Lenton among others). Many of the papers about climate change impacts are written by economists that might not know much about climate change, and it's better to have a team with different insights. I'm leaning towards the following sentence, inserted before the paragraph on inequality: economic damages as a consequence of climate change may be severe.[1] The word may encompasses the view that climate change is possibly not really severe economically, a view also summarised on page 3 of that document. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Femkemilene (talk • contribs)

I have no issue with adding that sentence. I think it is much more accurate to say that than to put a dollar value on the damages, tempting though it is to try and be more precise. Efbrazil (talk) 20:18, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
I'm ok with this sentence for now. Bogazicili (talk) 22:02, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ DeFries et al., p. 3.

Deaths due to pollution

This part was removed again:

"Moreover, decreased air pollution that would result from limiting global warming to 1.5 °C (or 2 °C without negative emissions) could prevent an estimated 153 million premature deaths worldwide over the remainder of 21st century, compared to base 2°C scenario which assumes large-scale carbon dioxide removal.[1]"

I had already addressed accessibility concerns with links to carbon dioxide removal. Above should be added because:

1) Relevant to climate change per source. See full article [11]

2) Notable. 62 citations already for a 2018 article [12]. Widely reported on media. Eg: [13] [14] (even a tabloid like Daily Mail [15])

3) This topic has NOT been mentioned in the article. I also don't get the logic of keeping smaller numbers such as tiny percentage declines in fish stocks in this Wiki article while removing information such as this. Bogazicili (talk) 21:17, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

In the edit summaries and the previous discussion there were two arguments why not to include the sentence in the way you did. First of all air pollution is not a consequence of climate change, so if we want to talk about air pollution, we should do that elsewhere (most logically in the mitigation section as co-benefit, possibly in the causes section as a side effect). Secondly, the paper compares to mitigation scenarios that may be quite close related. An additional sentence quantifying air pollution health effects should be more general. For instance, we could cite the 7 million people dying from it each year (UN number) and indicate that climate action can reduce that number. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:48, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
Yes, I'm open to that. I'm only trying to introduce topics that are currently missing. The reason I included that article is that it directly connects pollution deaths to different climate change scenarios. Until you have a better replacement though, I'm going to add back above. As I said, currently, this entire topic is missing. High threshold for inclusion reduces the scope of article, making it miss many topics. Bogazicili (talk) 20:06, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
I am happy framing this in terms of a possible reduction of deaths from the current number, like Femke proposed. It is easier to understand and more accurate. You want to propose new wording Bogazicili? Efbrazil (talk) 20:29, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
Possible reduction of deaths is already what is proposed. Did you read what you removed?? I also don't like putting this into mitigation section, since this is a human impact, specifically loss of human life. There could be an additional sentence in mitigation section though in addition to what's above. Bogazicili (talk) 20:47, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
Given that three individuals objected to the placement of this information in the 'effects of climate change on humans' section, I don't think you will be able to get consensus for that. There is an WP:ONUS on the person that wants to include new information to get consensus. If you really really feel strongly about it, you could decide to open a WP:request for comment, asking a broader set of editors to give an opinion. Also, make sure to WP:Focus on content, not on people (Did you read what you removed??). This allows the discussion to stay rational and productive. Femke Nijsse (talk) 06:58, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
I agree. Also, it's just you and Efbrazil. That is two individuals. Bogazicili (talk) 20:40, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
The wording I reverted was "could prevent an estimated 153 million premature deaths worldwide over the remainder of 21st century", which does not speak in terms of a reduction from a baseline. It implies no deaths from an alternate approach and presents things in terms of "do this or you're killing X people", precluding alternate realities like putting scrubbers on coal plants. It is more accurate to say things as femke did, that X people die from Y each year, and mitigation strategy Z can reduce that number. Anyhow, please present a proposal that factors in the feedback so we can move forward here. Efbrazil (talk) 19:41, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
The sentence you quoted literally gives the NET reduction from baseline, ie: 153 million LESS deaths compared to base 2 C increase scenario. Baseline for comparison is, as I mentioned, base 2 C increase scenario. I also support mentioning 7 million deaths and reduction in mitigation section, but there should be a sentence about it in Humans section too. Bogazicili (talk) 20:40, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
I think maybe we're talking past each other. What I'm trying to say is it's easiest to defend and explain a number if it's framed in terms of "this is where things are at today". Today is the baseline. Numbers based on projections comparing 2 alternate future realities are much harder to justify, as they require making a lot of assumptions that require a lot of explanation and are much more prone to error. Does that make sense? Efbrazil (talk) 21:29, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
My suggestion is to include above sentence in humans sections, and 7 million deaths and reduction (Femkemilene's proposal) in mitigation section. Those 2 wouldn't affect the length much, since it's one sentence each. They are also quite complementary. And I think we need to mention the above sentence in Humans section, because it makes more organizational sense to include all human effects of climate change (or effects of limiting climate change, which is quite related) under one section. Only doing Femkemilene's proposal would make more sense if mitigation section had an additional subsection where all effects of mitigation are discussed (such as economic benefits etc). But it doesn't have such a subsection, it just discusses mechanics of mitigation, so including this topic only there kind of "buries" it. Bogazicili (talk) 21:42, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
I can see the info going in either section (or both, but we don't want to be repetitive). What I'm opposed to is using the 153 million number at all, as per my reasoning above. Efbrazil (talk) 13:50, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Refugees

Bogazicili just re-inserted their addition about refugees. An old (2009) report summarised some previous guesstimates of climate-change induced migration and also summarised the criticism of these figures. The report states for instance: Predictions of migration flows caused by environmental factors are impossible to make on the basis of this literature. Myers’s projection of 200 million ‘environmental refugees’ by 2050 (Myers, 1995) has been dismissed as apocalyptic and based on no more than anecdotal evidence and intuitive judgement. Citing the old guesstimates from this report is cherry picking.

@Bogazicili: usually, re-reversion is only done when it's very clear somebody else has made a mistake. If not, it's preferable you take it to the talk page. Could you please revert yourself? Femke Nijsse (talk) 15:55, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

I changed the source. But 200 million seems to be the accepted number:
"Various analysts have tried to put numbers on these flows of climate migrants, the most widely repeated prediction being 200 million by 2050" [16]. Inside pdf:
"Professor Myers’ estimate of 200 million climate migrants by 2050 has become the accepted figure—cited in respected publications from the IPCC to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change" Bogazicili (talk) 16:27, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
The 2007 IPCC report is quite outdated, it's not present in the 1100 pages long 2014 report (also quite outdated). A review paper this year stated that confidence in the finding (and other figures that are slightly lower) is low, so we should not include it here. Femke Nijsse (talk) 17:01, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
Here is what that paper says. It doesn't really dismiss those numbers, just notes some criticism has been made:

"For example, Myers (2002) warned of mobilization of some 200 million people, based on the population living in areas at greatest risk from climate change. Biermann and Boas (2010) similarly concluded that the number of climate “refugees” by 2050 “could [conservatively] well be around or over 200 million,” by compiling regionally specific estimates of migration from a variety of climate shock types. More recently, Rigaud et al. (2018) predicted that 2.8% of the population of three regions—Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America—over 143 million people, will be forced to move within their own countries by 2050 as a result of climate change. Other studies attempted to quantify the existing environmental migration flow, with estimates ranging from 10 to 30 million people annually (El-Hinnawi 1985; Westing 1992; Myers 2002). Rapid-onset climate-related disasters were estimated to forcibly displace 24 million people in 2016 (IDMC 2017). To put these numbers into the context of overall mobility patterns, the number of internal migrants globally is estimated to be around 750 million, including almost 70 million forcibly displaced persons. Around 250 million people are cross-border migrants (UNDESA 2017; UNHCR 2018). If accurate, these estimates suggest that potential climate migration could represent a large proportion of total human mobility in the next few decades.

However, confidence in these estimates is low (Biermann and Boas 2010; Stapleton et al. 2017; Gemenne 2011a; Hartmann 2010; IPCC 2014) although modeling efforts are becoming more sophisticated (e.g., Rigaud et al. 2018). Notable criticism has been made on conceptual grounds: The migration process, with its many social and economic modifiers and the considerable capacity for human adaptation in many circumstances, is a more complex phenomenon than had been presented in earlier examples from this literature, which often based estimates on the likelihood of natural disaster and the potential numbers of people affected (Gemenne 2011b; Kibreab 2009; Maystadt and Mueller 2014; Perch-Nielsen et al. 2008; Stapleton et al. 2017). This deficiency is a product of what Suhrke (1993) described as a “maximalist” viewpoint, suggesting environmental factors are the primary drivers of human movement. The other extreme, a “minimalist” position, is to argue that environmental factors are a contextual factor about which not enough is known to assert causality. Both are simplifications that, when influential over policy, can limit the options for facilitating household mobility or for building resilience in situ and thus limit adaptation to a changing climate (Stapleton et al. 2017)."

We can change the wording in line with above. Bogazicili (talk) 17:17, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
Yes, please propose some wording. Femke Nijsse (talk) 17:41, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
I'm out of time, I'll return to this and other issues. Bogazicili (talk) 00:16, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
Here's my suggestion:
"Between 143 million and 900 million [this upper limit is from "10 to 30 million people annually" from above (30 million X 30 years] additional people may become refugees by 2050 due to climate change. These numbers have been questioned, but over 200 million by 2050 has been called "conservative"
200 million is also the number quoted in above secondary sources. Or we can just use the 200 million to 1 billion range given in the secondary source I put before, as my own multiplication assumes a linear increase.
"Estimates range between 200 million and 1 billion for additional refugees (both internal and international) by 2050 due to climate change alone.[2] These numbers have been questioned, but over 200 million by 2050 has been called "conservative" ' review paper this year Bogazicili (talk) 20:49, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestions. The review paper seems to put all the numerical estimates in the category of 'maximalist', which it doesn't underscribe. The minimalist viewpoint would say the actual numbers are way lower and unquantifiable. As such, giving numbers would automatically bias us towards this maximalist viewpoint.

With such low confidence in the numbers, and given the fact that migration numbers have been used in bad faith by the extreme right, I'm strongly opposed to publishing any concrete numbers on the matter in this top-level article that doesn't have space to properly discuss it. By the way, the wording refugees is not used any more by reliable sources, being replaced by the word environmental migration. Assuming a linear increase is considered WP:Original research, so that won't work either. Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:37, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

The review paper may be of lower quality, since it has only 7 citations [17]. I don't feel it "trumps" reliable secondary sources, such as UN [18] or UN related IOM [19]. A recent Institute for Economics and Peace report (September 2020) put the number at 1.2 billion. [20] I guess this would have to go to RFC later as well. Maybe we can open mediation or arbitration later too, given the number of issues we seem to have. I also fail to see the relevance with extreme right, since those are usually the types against climate change mitigation. Bogazicili (talk) 21:20, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
Since there was no response I'll put the information in the article within several days. I don't mind the wording to change to environmental migration. Bogazicili (talk) 20:27, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Shindell D, Faluvegi G, Seltzer K, Shindell C (2018). "Quantified, Localized Health Benefits of Accelerated Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reductions". Nat Clim Chang. 8 (4): 291–295. doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0108-y. PMC 5880221. PMID 29623109.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  2. ^ https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/migration_and_environment.pdf

Mention Sustainable Development Goal 13 (climate action) on this page?

I just want to check with you guys: Do you think it would be fine to mention Sustainable Development Goal 13 (climate action) in this article? It would be a sentence like: "Sustainable Development Goal 13 is about climate action and is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations in 2015. The official wording is to "Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts"". If you think yes then where in the article. If you think no then in which next sub-article would it fit? Or under "See also"?. EMsmile (talk) 09:34, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

I feel it is difficult to place it somewhere in the article, but I think it's a good addition to see also. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:05, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
I ended up placing it in the section about the UNFCCC. Not sure if my new text block is now too long? I also thought about placing it in the sub-article instead but the current sub-article for that section is "politics of climate change" where content is actually a bit different to things like Sustainable Development Goals. However, I should probably do some work on the article on United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change next... EMsmile (talk) 14:08, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
I feel it's too long as it is now; there is no need to have both the short and the long version up, and the 13a feels really legalistic. I prefer it as a see-also, or as one/two sentences. Femke Nijsse (talk) 14:24, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
EMsmile ping. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:10, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the ping, Femke Nijsse (nice to see you in the video call as part of the SDG edit-a-thon last week!). Sorry, had missed the question. I am not a big fan of adding more items under "see also". For me that's the lazy way out rather than thinking through how a term can be sensibly included in the text. What sometimes works well is to add the "Further|SDG 13" template. And it's fine by be if you want to shorten it a bit. EMsmile (talk) 09:46, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
I've made some edits accordingly now, Femke Nijsse. See if you agree? EMsmile (talk) 03:49, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Reduce some content in the section on the UNFCCC?

I am proposing to move some content from the section on the UNFCCC to the sub-article on UNFCCC. Basically the part starting with this sentence "This mandate was sustained in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC" (what does this sentence actually say? Not very clear). I think we can condense this, reduce the level of detail, and rather make sure people click through to the article on UNFCCC. Just leave enough to give an overview but not so much detail. E.g. the sentence about Bush rejecting it in 2001 can also be moved. EMsmile (talk) 04:04, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

I think you're right the subsection may benefit from a bit of condensing, but I'm not entirely sure where to start. I think the tension between the global North in the global South should remain, which is exemplified by the negotiations of the Kyoto protocol. I removed that Bush quote yesterday, but I'm okay if that gets moved to the UNFCCC article. I've now also condensed that awkward sentence about Kyoto into the second sentence. What further information do you think should be removed? Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:50, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Rewrite of the food paragraphs

Bogazicili suggest that we should put less emphasis on fish stocks. I've tried to rewrite the two paragraphs about the impact of climate change on food security, taking this into account and trying to make the paragraph easier to digest with fewer numbers.

Old paragrahps on food security:

Between 1981 and 2010 climate change decreased global mean yields of maize, wheat, and soybeans by 4.1, 1.8 and 4.5%, respectively, relative to preindustrial climate.[1] Increased global temperatures relative to late 20th century levels pose further risks to global and regional food security.[2] Crop production will probably be negatively affected in low-latitude countries, while effects at northern latitudes may be positive or negative.[3] Each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature could, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.[4] Up to an additional 183 million people worldwide, particularly those with lower incomes, are at risk of hunger as a consequence of these impacts.[5] Regions dependent on glacier water, regions that are already dry, and small islands are also at increased risk of water stress due to climate change.[6]

The effects of warming on ocean productivity have already impacted the growth, reproduction, and survival of fish stocks globally. Recent analyses of worldwide stocks suggest that the maximum catch potential has decreased by over 4% since 1930, although there is significant geographic variability in this trend, with polar stocks showing an increase.[7] Even under more optimistic climate change scenarios, global catch potential is projected to further decline 4-8% by mid century, with growth in the Arctic Ocean being the exception.[8]

New proposal:

Climate change is affecting food security and will increasingly do so in the future.[9] Between 1981 and 2010 climate change decreased global mean yields of maize, wheat, and soybeans by 4.1, 1.8 and 4.5%, respectively, relative to preindustrial climate.[1] Future warming could further reduce global yields of major crops.[4] Crop production will probably be negatively affected in low-latitude countries, while effects at northern latitudes may be positive or negative.[3] Up to an additional 183 million people worldwide, particularly those with lower incomes, are at risk of hunger as a consequence of these impacts.[5] The effects of warming on the oceans impact fish stocks. Analyses of worldwide stocks suggest that the maximum catch potential has decreased by over 4% since 1930, although there is significant geographic variability in this trend, with polar stocks showing an increase.[7] Regions dependent on glacier water, regions that are already dry, and small islands are also at increased risk of water stress due to climate change.[6]

Further rationale:

  • Starting with a general statement
  • Rely a bit less in a primary source (which was to be fair high quality)
  • decrease the emphasis on the distinction between past and future climate change. It's quite repetitive.
I support as an interim solution. However, I don't think small percentages are notable ( sentence with 4.1, 1.8 and 4.54% for crops; sentence with 4% for fish) since you already gave the human impact ("Up to an additional 183 million people worldwide, particularly those with lower incomes, are at risk of hunger as a consequence of these impacts"). The humans section still lacks mentioning major topics such as security/conflict risk of climate change, potential impacts of crossing over tipping points, and deaths due to pollution which was removed again, etc. Bogazicili (talk) 21:04, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
I'm okay with leaving all percentages out. Dtetta: what was your rational to put them in (it was you, right?)? Femke Nijsse (talk) 21:25, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
Femke, and Bogazicili, although I did not include that issue when I originally proposed the “old paragraphs” on the Talk Page (Section 2– Proposed Edits Particularly re:Human Health - September 4 entry), I went with those percentages because those were the figures used in the references I was citing, and because I thought the text in the previous version of that section was overly vague, so I wanted to give the reader a bit more specificity in terms of both current and anticipated future effects on food and fish production. But I agree the numbers are a bit repetitive, and Femke’s revised paragraph is an improvement in that respect. In fact the second sentence, dealing with crop impacts, could probably just use a percentage range, rather than specific numbers for each crop. The concern I have with leaving all percentages out is that it seems to often lead to overly subjective and vague language in its place. As I understand it, there is a connection between reduced crop yields and numbers at risk for hunger, but it’s not a direct equivalence...one does not replace the other. So I could work on editing to better capture that relationship.
One thing I would like to see kept is a sense of what the future looks like in terms of ocean and crop productivity. I think the third sentence:”Future warming could further reduce...” is an understatement, since there is already evidence of definite effects at 1C of warming, and the sentence that was removed described fairly definitive predictions for each future degree of warming. So that sentence should be worded more definitively, even if it does not list specific numbers. Similarly, I think a statement on future effects of fish stocks is important to keep, even if it is just short and descriptive, without specific numbers.
For me the current level of page editing is becoming dysfunctional. It’s hard to keep up with, and the issues get confused and intermingled. So thanks Femke for proposing those edits before you posted them. Dtetta (talk) 04:59, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

This is my suggestion, which gives the general points. We need more space as we need at least one or two more paragraphs in humans section discussing climate security, human impacts of crossing over tipping points or 3C or 4C increases. Bogazicili (talk) 22:00, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Climate change is affecting food security and has caused reduction in global mean yields of maize, wheat, and soybeans between 1981 and 2010.[1] Future warming could further reduce global yields of major crops.[4][9] Crop production will probably be negatively affected in low-latitude countries, while effects at northern latitudes may be positive or negative.[3] Up to an additional 183 million people worldwide, particularly those with lower incomes, are at risk of hunger as a consequence of these impacts.[5] The effects of warming on the oceans also impact fish stocks, with decreases in the maximum catch potential, although there is significant geographic variability in this trend, with polar stocks showing an increase.[7] Regions dependent on glacier water, regions that are already dry, and small islands are also at increased risk of water stress due to climate change.[6]

I swear I had already commented. I think this is an improvement over the last paragraph. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:28, 7 October 2020 (UTC)


References

  1. ^ a b c IPCC SRCCL Ch5 2019, p. 451.
  2. ^ IPCC AR5 WG2 Summary for Policymakers 2014, p. 18.
  3. ^ a b c IPCC AR5 WG2 Ch7 2014, p. 488.
  4. ^ a b c Zhao et al. 2017
  5. ^ a b c Scientific American, 23 January 2018; IPCC SRCCL Ch5 2019, p. 439.
  6. ^ a b c Holding et al. 2016; IPCC AR5 WG2 Ch3 2014, pp. 232–233.
  7. ^ a b c IPCC SROCC Ch5 2019, p. 503.
  8. ^ IPCC SROCC Ch5 2019, p. 505.
  9. ^ a b IPCC SRCCL Ch5 2019.

If no objection, FAR

If there are no objections, I would like to sign this up for FAR next week. I would like to get feedback on our sourcing standards (are we allowed as many non-peer reviewed sources as we are using now), the use of notes in our quotes, and whether the structure is clear. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:54, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Oppose for now: Featured Article review? I object for now, as there are lots of deficiencies in the article in terms of scope. Some topics are missing. I'd prefer the review after those are done. Bogazicili (talk) 20:21, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
I can wait, but I don't think I agree with you that there are a lot of things things missing. I think the problem with this article lies in having too many details. For me it would be good to have some expert advice on this. Always really happy to review secondary and tertiary sources that show we have omitted important information in this article. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:34, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
To be honest, my impression of this article is that it downplays the effects of climate change. That's why I think a lot of things are missing. Bogazicili (talk) 20:36, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
happy to wait for another few of your proposals. If you don't yet have secondary sources, I might have time to look as well. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:12, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
General observations:
● I think the article covers the causes, nature and effects of GW/CC in enough detail, and if anything has too much detail for a top-level article. The lead is grrreat.
● Re sourcing standards: we should follow the general rule that a source has to be reliable for the particular content for which it is cited. Not everything requires a peer-reviewed scientific journal article, though that of course adds credibility. Related: Our article's narrative should be phrased for our reading audience: non-scientists. Also related: The sourcing standards developed about a year ago were a bit intimidating, even for rather experienced Wikipedians.
The sourcing standards for featured articles are usually a bit higher; we should use high quality reliable sources. I'm not entirely sure whether the general information websites of organisations like the UN and NASA qualify, and if were using those too much. Of course, if a sentence is really uncontroversial, these medium quality sources may suffice. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:26, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
● Having FAR 'outsiders' comment on content and sourcing will give a kind of reality check to those editors who are used to writing at a high technical level—generally a good thing, since our readers are non-scientists. Conversely, 'outsiders' might elevate form over substance because they don't have the substantive understanding that longtime GW/CC editors and subject matter experts have; I don't know a way around this problem. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:44, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
we'll see, I think it's simply the hoop we need to go through if we want to be on the front page (and definitely also useful when we submit to the wikiJournal of science). With coronavirus dominating everything, it might be wise to wait longer still for our moment of fame. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:26, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
Strong support I think the article is in great shape for FAR. I agree with Bogazicili that we omit the range of downside possibilities as to what *could* happen, and in doing so we arguably underplay how serious climate change could be. For instance, we do not cover potential tipping points like CO2 driven cloud dispersal (which I debated with femke earlier) and other uncertainties associated with unprecedented CO2 levels, how natural ecosystem collapse could have impacts on planetary chemistry or human health, or how impacts can snowball one atop the next. I can see the argument for a section somewhere that raises downside possibilities (as opposed to known facts), but such a section would undermine how the rest of the article is focused on areas of scientific agreement. In general, the article is in fantastic shape and I think FAR would be a great move. Efbrazil (talk) 16:00, 8 October 2020 (UTC)
Strong support like others, I have a concern that the article could be stronger in terms of identifying both the current impacts and describing a “reasonable upper bound risk” for a likely future scenario of 2C or more. But otherwise I think its in good shape thanks to a whole bunch of great work this year. Very interested in the feedback aspects you mentioned.Dtetta (talk) 22:14, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
Femke - I was wondering about a couple of FAR issues, and hoped you could provide some answers here. One is, how long will it take? Looking at Wikipedia:Featured article review and Wikipedia:Featured article candidates, I couldn’t quite get a sense of the timeline. Another is, should we stop extensive editing once the FAR review has started, and during the review period? Dtetta (talk) 17:52, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
I guess it would be a couple of weeks. Extensive editing should then probably only be done in response to reviewer comments to keep the process manageable. I would have signed us up months ago if this article wasn't as busy. The case of this article is quite weird; most articles at FAR are simply somewhat abandoned and outdated, whereas this article is edited extensively. I hope that after FAR, the article will also be ready to be submitted to the WikiJournal of Science, which means that each scientific statement should have at least a scientific source (grey or peer-reviewed should both be acceptable). I know people like the public facing websites of WHO and NASA, so I will keep those as the second source whenever appropriate. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:11, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
Further comment: I don't think the article is stable now. After several additions to Humans section, I hope to re-write the lead paragraph that covers effects of climate change. I think it's better to wait until mid November or so. Bogazicili (talk) 01:20, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Technical level

I would very much like to keep the technical level of this article quite low. A lot of edits over the last couple of months have made the article a bit more difficult. I would like to know whether there is consensus to keep this article understandable to 16-year-olds per WP:ONEDOWN? (And a more concrete question, should we use the term enteric fermentation, or is there an easier synonym which is not cow farts?)? Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:49, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

I completely agree that the presentation of the article should make it readily understandable to its audience: lay readers. GW/CC editors as a group constitute the most intelligent, civil, and constructive group I've encountered in eleven years on Wikipedia, but technical expertise sometimes introduces language that is too abstruse, requiring the lay reader to look elsewhere to understand what is written here. This is an encyclopedia article, not a technical paper; it should be technically correct and supported by reliable technical sources, but still be readily understandable to those who read it. The article is for them, not for us. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:33, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
@Femke Nijsse Thanks for flagging this. I completely agree with you and have pushed in many places (e.g. WikiProject Medicine) for improving the readability of many Wikipedia articles. There are some nifty tools that can help track down sentences that are difficult. I love the tool called Hemmingway App (free). I've written about it here: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Online_edit-a-thon_SDGs_September_2020/Tasks#Improve_the_%22readability%22_of_the_entire_article. EMsmile (talk) 09:18, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
Agree and will keep this in mind when making edits. Dtetta (talk) 23:28, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
+1: teenage reading level. Lev!vich 05:29, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
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