...this should not be taken as an endorsement of more formal structures on Wikipedia, but only of support of a good-faith attempt. If we start voting on the undersecretary of the good article candidate preselection sub-committee, I'm outta here! --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:31, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
Like it or not a large organisation such as WP needs some sort of formal structure to make it work efficiently. Note that "formal" does not necessarily mean that there is a need for a hierarchy, which is what I suspect a lot of WP editors would shun. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 19:27, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
This task force is for ALL editors regardless of personal stance on anthropogenic climate change. The discussions on WP talk pages should be on the accuracy of article content not on what the editors believe. It should be realised that an editor (a good editor!) can edit an article in a manner that may be contrary to their own preconceived understandings. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 19:27, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
I have not seen them in action. The sort of thing you are thinking of can be added as a todo box in the WikiProject banner. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 22:48, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
I volunteer for creating the Template:User Climate change task force with the same image used in the userbox, but I would like to hear first suggestions and of course, your opinion regarding changes or improvements to the image/layout of user template I recently created.--Mariordo (talk) 04:40, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
Hello, I'm new here, so I may well be at the wrong place with my comment, or be unaware that it has been raised before.
The Category:United_Nations_Framework_Convention_on_Climate_Change (why doesn't an internal link work?) includes two subcategories: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the United Nations climate change conferences. I consider this incorrect. As I mention in the discussion page there:
It is misleading to list the IPCC here. The IPCC was set up by WMO and UNEP in 1988 (before there was a UNFCCC), and continues to work independently. As such it reports to and responds to requests from the UNFCCC Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, but it is governed separately by its member states and the IPCC Bureau. While UNFCCC negotiators rely on IPCC publications, the IPCC is not a body under the UNFCCC.
I guess there are two options: either delete the IPCC subcategory, or rename the category to something like "Climate change and the United Nations". The latter would be an elegant solution but also a complicated one, because it would require adding many many more links to agencies, programmes and events. So deleting the IPCC subcategory seems the most practical, but I couldn't figure out how to do that.
I just made the article. I'm not a scientist, so I don't quite know what I'm writing about. I could really use a bit of help on it, if you have time. Thanks. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 06:23, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
Was looking at the articles on impact of GW on animals and they seem very choppy. (Note this is nothing to do with debates on content or anything. Am totally cool with "standard" IPCC view. But the articles seem very choppy (like cut and pasted maybe? refs are strange format.) Also not even wikified in formatting. Also I don't understand why we have one on plants, one on terrestrial animals and one on marine mammals. Like where would sea turtles fit? And there are other gaps.TCO (talk) 06:24, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
Use of SAR GWP values
Both on Global Warming Potential and Greenhouse Gas, there are tables showing the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) GWP values. The former also shows the Third Assessment Report(TAR) values. But, Second Assessment Report(SAR) are most widely used for emissions reporting and regulation, including within Kyoto (at least until 2012, see here), the US GHG mandatory reporting rule, and all voluntary programs I'm aware of. I think not explaining this and not showing the SAR values on both these pages will frustrate many readers, as they won't understand why the values they expect are not shown, or they will inadvertently use values that are not allowed by their reporting program.
I propose to update the GWP and GHG page tables to show both the SAR and AR4 values, and omit the TAR values. As this is a major change to two key pages, I'd like to get feedback here before proceeding. See [[2]] for a workup of a chart. And bear with me, esp. on style, as I'm a complete newb to WP.
Also, how do folks feel about the presentation of GWP tables on both pages? Is this too redundant? Maybe we should show GWP for CO2, CH4 and N2O on the GHG page, and then show a longer list on the GWP page?Pjwst6 (talk) 04:01, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
does subsection in wet bulb temperature article merit tagging
Is this project dead enough to merit a proposal for deletion?
....Ping....
I added myself to this project quite a while ago. Unless I didn't do something correctly, it appears there is zero traffic. None, zip, nada. Am I doing something wrong, or does the project no longer serve any purpose? Anybody still breathing here? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:54, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
I created the task force (note that it is not a WikiProject) to try and get all the hotheads (pun!) who where fighting amongst the climate change articles. It seems that they don't want to collaborate at a task force level. After I created the task force sanctions were put in place too cool (!) the hotheads. That was a more effective measure since a number of editors were kicked off WP. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 19:13, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
I am in no fuckin'way implying that I own this taskforce and I am quite aware of the fact that WP content cannot be owned. Did I not`explain that I created it as an attempt to improve WP articles relating to climate change? If you want it deleted you need not ask for my permission but I would prefer that it was kept in the hope that it brings editors together. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 03:33, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
I apologize for unintended ambiguity!!!! By "your baby" I only meant it was your initial stroke of creativity, inspired for a great goal, and something you cared enough to give energy to. As such, it seemed the courteous thing to check with you, using some words or other, about reasons or feelings before blindsiding you with a deletion proposal from someone you don't know. I in no way meant to suggest WP:OWN and I regret my word choice.
Anyone else want to chime in with preliminary input as I decide whether to propose deletion of the project?NewsAndEventsGuy (talk)
Well, I belatedly realized that (ideally) this would have been the better location for the discussion at Talk:Global_warming/Archive_64#Proposed IPCC citation about work I have been doing to improve the citation of the IPCC ARs. And as I discover how dreadfully bad some of the citations/references are (e.g., see IPCC#References), and that there are common trends across articles, this would seem to be the best place to organize improvements. But only if there is sufficient community here interested in that. Do I see any hands? _ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 18:01, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
I set up this task force and it would be a shame to see all of my hard work get undone. Can we just tag it as inactive or just let it remain dormant until a group of editors comes forward to maintain it? -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 19:11, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
22:11, November 24, 2011 Ed Poor (talk | contribs) m . . (2,610 bytes) (0) . . (moved Nephology to Cloud formation and climate change: The term "nephology" is rarely used, and much of the article is about climate change)
Move to form a Wikipedia:WikiProject Global warming
The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
I notice User:Northamerica1000 has made Portal:Global warming into a nice top site that's worth looking after. I think at the same time it would be good to move this page to form the basis of a WP:WikiProject Global warming associated with it. I don't believe where this is at the moment is a good location, it isn't obvious to find. There's problems too with all sorts of people with missions coming along and this would be a good place for them to be directed to and it could help organize the articles better as there's a fair number. I believe this is sufficiently distinguished from the Environment project that it should be obvious in most cases if a topic falls under environment or global warming but it doesn't matter if there is a bit of overlap. Dmcq (talk) 13:20, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
Hi. The aforementioned article is several years old, but seeing that the more recent article that I created, climate oscillation, is longer, I will be merging the two articles to the new title. Hope nobody objects. ~AH1(discuss!)18:49, 25 December 2011 (UTC)
openCCS - resource on carbon capture and storage
openCCS is a new-ish wiki-like resource about carbon capture and storage. It's a very active project supported by a major organization in the carbon capture and storage (CCS) field, the Global CCS Institute.
I mention it because:
I'm sure this will be a very valuable resource for anyone working on wiki pages about CCS. (Much like Wikipedia, more as a starting point for research and understanding, rather than as a "reliable source".)
It is licensed under CC-by, so if there are slabs of content suitable for Wikipedia, they can be copied, with proper attribution.
It would be great to have input from anyone who's interested in writing about CCS in more depth. The target audience includes people in industry looking for information for their CCS projects, so there's just about no limit to the level of detail that could be useful.
It currently requires registration, but will be opening up - the team has a very good attitude to openness, but it's the kind of field where industry sensitivities are to be expected, so there'll be some reviewing before it's opened up. Once you're registered it's all visible, though.
Disclosure: I'm doing a contract with openCCS. But even if I weren't I'd still think it was an important project - I'm sure it will make a significant contribution to the development of CCS and CCS policy.
Even if you're not a big fan of CCS, there's a lot to be said for figuring out what works and what doesn't, and the costing and technical challenges etc, so that rigorous comparisons can be made between alternative forms of carbon dioxide mitigation. --Chriswaterguytalk07:44, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
I was wondering if some folks might take a gander at Physical impacts of climate change, particularly this series of edits. Two of the four sources (one in history) provided do not seem to support the editors claim, as near as I can figure. The other two sources are slated for publication later this year and in 2014 respectively. I removed the edits, but another editor or two taking a look would certainly help. talk page link --TeaDrinker (talk) 23:08, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
Hello! I realize that this page is technically more of a task force than a WikiProject per se, but I am hoping that the editors here can still give me some feedback on my proposal: I plan to create a new article called Climate Change and Gender for my class at Rice University, SWGS 322. There is no current Wikipedia article on this topic, nor is there a section covering it on the Climate change page. In the past, there was a page called The Effects of Climate Change on Impoverished Women and Children, but it was deleted for original research. I do not think I will have this problem because a) I have found many scholarly sources for this topic and b) I have a few years of experience editing Wikipedia articles so I (hope that I) do not draw my own conclusions from other people's research when writing content for Wikipedia. My new article would include a brief definition of climate change, an explanation of the way it affects genders differently (even among low-income and impoverished populations) and why that is the case (social norms like division of labor, biological factors, environment/geography, etc.). It would summarize the research on the subject and talk about the two main types of policy addressing climate change (mitigative and adaptive) while focusing on case studies (in Bangladesh and India). For reference, I think it is of similar importance and scope as the Climate change and poverty page. Please let me know if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions about my proposed article. You can respond here or on my talk page. Thanks! Weatherby551 (talk) 21:34, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Folks, there's a particularly eager editor who has focused her attention on a section of the Yucca brevifolia article because it stated something about how climate change will impact the species. She has initiated a lengthy discussion on the talk page, if you care to have a look. Just wondering, since I'm sure you've run into this before, how have you dealt with possibly disruptive editors like this? The article in question is not the proper place for a discussion on climate change; it very much appears to be turning into a WP:BATTLEGROUND. Thanks, Rkitko(talk)19:36, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
Tim Ball
This is a courtesy notice that the article Tim Ball has been put up for AfD. The article is in scope although has not been added to the wikiproject as of yet, so will not appear on any wikiproject list. IRWolfie- (talk) 15:58, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
Climate Sensitivity and Climate State article
There is currently a discussion at Climate state and Climate sensitivity (see talk pages). The Climate Sensitivity was recently updated by me, still requires some work and could use more cleanup. Climate state is a new article, devoted to the different climate states Prokaryotes (talk) 20:45, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
Hi there! I'm not sure how active this WikiProject is, but it's included at top of theTalk page for The Climate Reality Project so I wanted to leave a message here to let interested editors know that I have written a new draft for that article. I'm looking for editors to review this draft because I have written it on behalf of, and with input from, the communications team at The Climate Reality Project. For that reason I won't make any edits to the article myself.
There are two major issues I'm hoping to address with my rewritten draft. First, the article currently uses mostly primary sources to support information and needs some restructuring and additional information to meet Wikipedia's standards. Second, The Climate Reality Project was formed from the joining together of two predecessor organizations, The Climate Project and the Alliance for Climate Protection. What I'm proposing is that these articles be merged into the article for The Climate Reality Project, where the information about these two organizations would be summarized (as I have done in my draft).
I've explained these issues in more detail on the Talk page and linked to my draft from there. If you think this is something you can help with, I'd really appreciate your help here. Thanks, 16912 Rhiannon (Talk · COI) 20:59, 27 September 2013 (UTC)
Hi, could someone here perhaps have a look at this category and its subcats (especially Category:Meteorology journals)? I find the current situation not completely satisfactory. For example, I'm not sure that climatology journals belong in "meteorology". Other journals that currently are in the main cat could perhaps be diffused, but some may be difficult to place in the current subcats. Would it make sense to create a "climatology journals" cat? Would that be a subcat of "meteorology journals", the other way around, or a equal level/parallel subcat within Earth and atmospheric sciences journals? Thanks for any advice! --Randykitty (talk) 16:26, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
This is a courtesy notice that the article Ferenc Miskolczi has been put up for AfD. The article is in scope although has not been added to the wikiproject as of yet, so will not appear on any wikiproject list. IRWolfie- (talk) 09:16, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
Timothy Ball
This is a courtesy notice that the article Timothy Ball has been put up for AfD. The article is in scope although has not been added to the wikiproject as of yet, so will not appear on any wikiproject list. IRWolfie- (talk) 15:58, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
Skeptical Science
I imagine a large proportion of you are familiar with the Cook et al. study which claims to have found that <3% of scientific papers explicitly reject man-made global warming. Well it has been criticized by another paper by David Legates et al. The paper (which can be viewed here) claims that only 0.3% of the papers in Cook et al. actually support the consensus. Someone else proposed adding it into the article Skeptical Science, and I wanted to get some feedback as to whether others thought this was or wasn't a good idea. Jinkinsontalk to me03:21, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
Just noticed this yesterday: [3]. This section looks like it could use a major rewrite. The water temperature on Lake Erie, as well as the other Great Lakes, has risen considerably over the past 100 years. This is unequivocal. Wintertime ice coverage has been decreasing rapidly and steadily (obviously with a few exceptions, like this past winter). The section twice references controversy, but provides no source to support the alleged controversy. I added citation needed tags for those assertions. But really the whole thing should either be rewritten with a more fact-based analysis, or just deleted. Right now it is not particularly helpful to the reader in ascertaining how global warming is affecting Lake Erie, or how it might affect the lake in the future. 50.197.55.49 (talk) 18:00, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
i added this article, which i created, to the climate change task force list. however, im aware that i may not have gone through proper procedure. if this is ok, fine. if not, please inform me the proper way to ask to include it, and i will do so, removing the task force tag until approved. i suspect this authors book "the lomborg deception" is going to have huge ramifications for the debate, and will likely attract problematic editing. it will probably quickly qualify for its own article.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 02:45, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
Could editors interested in climate change issues please have a look at recent activity on Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen. An editor by the name of User:JournalScholar has been attempting to shield Boehmer-Christiansen from the consequences of her actions, which (according to the Guardian) included publishing an article (against the recommendations of a reviewer) claiming that the sun is made of iron. JournalScholar dislikes inclusion of that phrase, and his editing efforts are dedicated to removing it, e.g. here. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 05:49, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
The relevant part of the Guardian article reads: 'Schmidt points to an E&E paper that claimed that the Sun is made of iron. "The editor sent it out for review, where it got trashed (as it should have been), and [Boehmer-Christiansen] published it anyway," he says.' That paragraph supports the passage that JournalScholar has been removing. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 06:07, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
Hello, I recently added the advocacy organization Americans for Prosperity to the Env project and climate change task force, but was reverted by a non-member with an edit summary of out-of-scope. AFP was important in creating the Tea Party movement and in encouraging the movement to focus on climate change, according to The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. AFP's "No Climate Tax Pledge" campaign played a key role in turning back cap & trade in Obama's 1st term. AFP supports fossil fuel development, including expanding off-shore drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline, and opposes renewable energy tax credits. At the state level, AFP works to thwart and repeal renewable portfolio standards. AFP has announced plans to spend on negative advertising against political candidates who support environmental regulation in 2016. Experienced editor here, new to climate change arena. Thank you! Hugh (talk) 22:10, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
Greetings fellow climate change task force participants, I am seeking additional concurrence from my fellow task force participants on the inclusion of Americans for Prosperity within the scope of our task force. Personally I am interested in working on expanding our encyclopedia's coverage of corporate funded, organized opposition to addressing climate change. I believe a compelling case for inclusion has been made, above. Americans for Prosperity is a critically important grass-roots lobbyist in the shaping of environmental policy in the United States, with notable achievements. Your concurrence will help close an unfortunate WikiProject banner tagging dispute. Thank you in advance for your support. Hugh (talk) 17:16, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
(B) It is news to me if NYT, HuffPo, or Slate have adopted an official editorial position on AGW/CC. But there are indeed RSs that the Guardian has embraced the science generally put forth by IPCC (though I don't know if Guardian's statement referenced IPCC specifically).
(D) This particular project is pretty dead, at least from the point of view of a project approach, so maybe we should support an interested ed's efforts to work on it, when the question is unclear.... and last
Ain't gonna happen until we resolve the skeptic vs denialist facas, and that may not be soon. At any rate, for at least a few months I'm only making guest appearances as my avail wiki time has been severely chopped for real life. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 01:00, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
"I'd rate this one pretty low" I would say AFP has done more to raise the avg temp of our planet than Watts ever will. Sometimes I think if we could channel a fraction of the energy going into Watts' lede we could energize this project and have enough left over to achieve energy independence as a nation. How is the skeptic vs denialist nomenclature bottlenecking this project? Hugh (talk) 01:14, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
If you thought I implied a cause-and-effect (between the climate denier/skeptic fracas and status of this project, I apologize. The project has been essentially silent since I learned about it, which was long before the 2015 Watts/denier/skeptic fracas blew up. Look over the names in the version history. Many of the currently-contributing eds have made an appearance here. So they haven't been inspired to approach the topic using the "project" approach. Big deal. An awful lot of the pages are watched by the handful of reliable regulars and content at the article level is still attended to, more or less. Just the project packaging isn't happening. Is that bad? I don't know. FYI, this may be of interest. Note that talk pages are usually not returned via the "recent changes" feature. If you show reasonable, reliable, and consistent leadership here, most likely some others will contribute. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 05:30, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
@ Hugh, thanks for the heads-up, I'm not a great fan of projects but have added Americans for Prosperity to my watchlist, and will possibly link it in articles where appropriate. As for the skeptic/climate change denial dispute, this is essentially an argument about Framing (social sciences) where neither term is ideal. Those trying to undermine public agreement with the scientific consensus (like Watts and Americans for Prosperity) get all upset about how nasty a word "denier" is, and we've got a couple of editors going on about it being a BLP violation and not neutral, but the denial wording is considered more appropriate by mainstream sources including the National Center for Science Education and Spencer R. Weart. As sources are found, this should resolve itself. . dave souza, talk 09:17, 3 July 2015 (UTC) p.s. see Talk:Climate change skeptic#Centralized discussion plus list of redirected pages for a list of pages in dispute, and the response to requests for sources supporting the claim that "calling skeptics 'deniers' is pejorative, and a clear violation of WP:NPOV." . . dave souza, talk10:18, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
Respectfully request concurrence from my fellow task force members on bannering Americans for Prosperity. The article has undergone an extensive collaborative good article drive, and has weathered increased scrutiny as it approaches the completeness required by good article criteria. The article is currently tagged by WikiProject Conservatism, and the content reflects this. A very few seconds of your time to chime in here on this thread with a quick "sounds good" or "ok by me" or even "why not?" will help bring to good status an article about a key player in the organized suppression of the US reaction to climate change. Thank you in advance for your time. Hugh (talk) 18:32, 6 July 2015 (UTC)
Hi everyone! Following 16912 Rhiannon's example, I'm sharing a comprehensive draft update to the article on 10:10, the UK-based climate change campaign in the hope that it can aid the process of bringing the main article up to date. It's saved as a workspace draft here.
As a 10:10 employee, it didn't feel appropriate for me to edit the article directly, but as it hasn't had a significant update since 2013, I thought it'd be good to get the ball rolling.
The new draft includes sections on the more recent Back Balcombe and #itshappening campaigns run by 10:10, as well as past projects and an updated introduction reflecting the organisation's broader focus.
I'd be really grateful for any feedback on the draft as it currently stands, or if interested editors feel it's already good to go, please feel free to incorporate it into the live article as you see fit. Thanks! Simuove (talk) 16:05, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Created new article on book - Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand
Right wing wrong headed admin just decided to unilaterally deleted all climate change denialists. He needs to be reminded of the science. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.176.57.68 (talk) 22:32, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
Created article on satirical comedy film - Climate Change Denial Disorder
Metric used was older than one (1) year, zero new activity, zero responses to posts, and notices to discussions like deletion discussions that were since closed, years ago.
This notice is a cross-post from the Environmental Record task force talk page.
From roughly 2009 until last week, our project's article ExxonMobil included a subtopic of several paragraphs entitled "Funding of climate change skepticism" in the "Environmental record" section. Last week, two of our colleagues teamed up to move the subtopic en mass to the "Criticisms" section, and re-heading it "Attitudes toward global warming." I've hatted the article for POV and re-assessed the article quality from B class to C because of this significant neutrality issue. Respectfully request additional eyes and additional participation of project members at ExxonMobil. Thank you. Hugh (talk) 16:17, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
I would like to ask the members of this task force to clarify the inclusion criteria for tagging with this {{environment}} banner, inter alia articles about major oil companies. ExxonMobil was tagged with this project banner just few months ago. Thank you. Beagel (talk) 17:51, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
RfC: Impact of climate expertise on ExxonMobil operational planning at Natuna
Exxon also studied ways of avoiding CO2 emissions if the East Natuna gas field (Natuna D-Alpha block) offshore of Indonesia were developed. An October 1984 internal report from Exxon's top climate modelers said that the gas field contained over 70% carbon dioxide and that if the carbon dioxide were released to the atmosphere it would make the gas field "the world's largest point source emitter of CO2 and raises concern for the possible incremental impact of Natuna on the CO2 greenhouse problem." Members of Exxon's board of directors told Exxon staff that the gas field could not be developed without a cost-effective and environmentally responsible method for handling the CO2.
A category like this one could become controversial even if only referenced articles are categorized in it, so I'm asking you here instead of boldly creating it. Yay or nay?
I'm not sure that being threatened by climate change is a defining characteristic (see WP:Defining). Also, the number of species threatened by climate change is huge, although the number is smaller when we require that to be referenced (but then I expect there will be a bias; charismatic megafauna are more likely to have references claiming that climate change is a threat, invertebrates and plants less so). IUCN Red List allows searching by threat; it currently returns 5630 species where climate change is a threat. Plantdrew (talk) 16:27, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
I think it would be a worthwhile category. IUCN would be a good list, 5600+ a lot of articles to add, but not insurmountable. Montanabw(talk)00:45, 1 May 2016 (UTC)
Checking out some old merge tags: The "Effects of global warming on human health" article clocks in at 162,975 bytes, which would seem to be ripe for a split. (I'm surprised it hasn't been tagged for being too long.) The article has been tagged since October 2014 to merge the "Deforestation" section to "Deforestation and climate change" (10,486 bytes). This would both make the "Effects" article more manageable to read, and fill out the destination article (which would, of course, be linked). As this would, however, involve moving a substantial amount of text, I hesitate to do it, but post it here for your consideration. Cheers. Mannanan51 (talk) 05:11, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
found some weird article that feeds smear campaign of climate change deniers
You might not yet have found this article called The Gore Effect which is basically a code of practice for climate change deniers. The article comes with some criticism of the alleged “joke” – but the main part is original research and a tutorial on how to plant doubts by cherry picking non related events and manipulating statistics. The article comes with a definiton based on a wiki-based dictionary and more doubtful sources. Maybe the community wants to take care of that.-- Kontrollinski (talk) 22:18, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
Someone misinterpreted a German source. Here is a sentence from the article: "Harald Martenstein in Die Zeit introduced the term to German audiences, describing the effect as "Gore's private climate disaster"." It is nonsense to say that Martenstein introduced the term to the German audience. This text by Martenstein is not important or reliable at all. Martenstein also didn't state, that the effect is Gore's private climate disaster. There are some more poor sources in the article (Wahington Times etc.)-- Kontrollinski (talk) 21:27, 23 November 2016 (UTC)
Updating many climate action pages frozen at ~2011
I'm interested in helping bring climate change info in Wikipedia up to date - have solid grounding in several aspects - but new to the Wikipedia Editor world. It would seem there must be some necessary history or background to explain why so many pages seem frozen in ~2011 (pre Paris, etc). Talk pages haven't been very illuminating.
See for instance:
Can someone offer guidance here? Last thing I want to do is corral a few associates to join me, spend hours working on edits, only to have them revert or reject through embargo or edit war.
@ECarlisle: has gone on and on trying to insert stuff into the Climate change denial article. I thought at first they just did not know how to get a decent reference but it seems to be more to it than that. The discussions are at
and you can see all the insertions and removals in the history of the article. They have gone on and on just reinserting with small changes and silly references rather than discussing. In that last bit they possibly have at last found a reliable source but they say 'Reliable sources are not required to be available online'. I think that just shows it isn't of sufficient WP:WEIGHT for the article as they haven't attracted enough notice compared to what else is there. Besides which the previous sentences in the article cover most of what they want to put in anyway, the only extra is to puff up some think tank. Dmcq (talk) 20:16, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
Can you help to get PV Magazine removed from the blacklist?
PV Magazine was added to the blacklist for spamming in 2011. Although, as far as I know, this blacklisting was correct I feel that after 8 years on the blacklist they should be removed and given another chance. Their new editor and I (I have no vested interest or connection to the editor or magazine) and several others have separately failed to achieve this. Given the importance of photovoltaics to climate change mitigation I wonder if anyone on this project could use their influence. The original blacklisting and attempts over the years to remove the magazine from the blacklist are detailed here: [5]. Any administrator can delete the line \bpv-magazine\.com\b from MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist.
I recently wrote an article on the climate system (yes, that had been lacking before). Could somebody assess the article on importance and quality? Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:43, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
Nice work! Well done I've gone over it and given it a light polish. Not much to report there: some minor grammar and/or punctuation tweaks, mostly on prepositions and so on; one or two shuffles of sentences for clarity or ease of reading. I've made more specific the thickness of ice caps and added conversion between km and miles for the non-metric enabled folks. Also changed one statement: plants can't fix nitrogen, that's naturally done by micro-organisms in the soil, which is why we're over-using fertilisers. And I picked up one other thing. In the section "Components of the climate system", is it worth mentioning that evaporation at the surface increases the proportion of salt in that layer of water, therefore increasing the density of the water, which helps with circulation? I think it's a fairly minor effect, so it may not be that significant.
Otherwise, nicely done! And good catch that there was no article in place already. Didn't occur to me
New proposal to "Upgrade" to a Wikiproject (Climate Change or the like)
Hey everyone,
since I don't mean to do things in hiding, and I've already pinged two currently active editors of the topic, I thought I should point out that I'd like to get a new Wikiproject into swing :D ! I have no clue as to the formal procedure (if there is one?) of doing this, but I reckon that should be the least hurdle.
The idea is mostly born of the frustration of editing climate topics (or perhaps better - not even starting to edit them for worry of edit-wars and frustrating discussions on the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the like... :/ ).
Anyhow, I just realised I'm not even sure of the scope I'd choose for the Wikiproject... Since in a (very strange if you ask me) twist, Climate change is partially referred to as "Global warming" here (and climate change then refers to any and all changes - at geological time scales and the current one), I'm not even sure which scope the current task force saw itself as having. I guess the choice is - all climate change (ie including over geological time scales), or more narrowly, anthropogenic climate change (dunno if narrowing it down to that makes sense to the physicists that may engage... I guess for me its what I'm more familiar with and can conceive a conceptual map of).
I have no idea of procedures either, but I'm in favour if this could strengthen our community here. I've recently boldly clarified the scope of this task force, so that it deals with current climate change, and the climate system in general as insofar that is relevant to the current climate change.
There have been very little edit wars of late. I've actually never seen one with any climate contrarian, after a years of activity. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:39, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
I'm in favour. I'd seriously recommend narrowing the focus to the current climate crisis right up front, so "anthropogenic climate change" would certainly be one of its major topics if not the overt focus.
Ok, not exactly a deluge of support, but enough for me :P (there was some encouragement elsewhere as well. I'll be looking into procedure for setting up Wikiprojects later today (ie, whether its "bold", or some kind of request process).
Focus still seems a little open to me. I personally would agree with Cadar's statement. I don't know if that's a somewhat different angle to what you have in mind though Femke Nijsse ? I guess I can start getting the ball rolling on the project and we can still look at clarifying the precise focus as we go ... ? Regards Sean Heron (talk) 13:44, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
Just reread what I wrote, and I think my personal suggestion really would be to structure the group around / focus on the current state of affairs with regards to the climate - be that scientific, political, economic or other. I just realised that that may be quite a different take than that others have though (I'm not sure how different it is to what the Task forces focus was). Hmm... Sean Heron (talk) 13:54, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
I think the current structure already is around the current affairs. The some articles, such as climate system would still fall under this WikiProject with lower priority, is that we need to understand the system itself to understand the changes in the system. Also some general climate article are important for Attribution of recent climate change.
P.S. I agree with Cedars actual point, but think we should really stick to neutral terminology: climate change/global warming, and not climate crisis.Femke Nijsse (talk) 14:00, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
OK, so we're agreed. I tend to not beat around the bush and call the situation what it is - a crisis - but I agree that for the purposes of neutrality we should probably restrain our terminology. There's enough trouble getting deniers to swallow the basic facts without adding shrill language into the mix. Personally I believe it's a catastrophe, but I've had personal experience of people choking on that particular word for describing it.
So to summarise: the new project's focus is the current climate - (ahem) - "situation" and how it impacts the world now and in the short-term future. Is that a fair summary?
OK, done. I've created a new proposal. I just called it "Climate Change" and "A WikiProject focussing on all aspects of the climate change which faces Earth now and is an immediate threat to mankind and the planet." as a description. Link is here (sorry, not sure how to get the Wikilink for that page): https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals/Climate_Change
Please can all those in favour go and add their usernames in support and pass on the page to anyone you know who might be interested. Thanks!
I think we should start by renewing this inactive project, and then, based on the experience we have right here, make a dispassionate assessment of the pros/cons of converting to a stand alone project. Question, once we step away from teh topic of climate change, do climate project advocates understand the Wiki-differences between task forces and projects well enough to guide a Billiards enthusiast through a careful thought process to help them decide which structure best meets their needs? If we can't do that with the emotional distance of something like Billiards we probably can't do it for our own issue. I know I can't. I've been here 8 years and have never dealt with task forces/projects in any depth at all. So let's start here, and then if we discover we are so successful we need a bigger house, then we can talk about upgrading. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 04:57, 14 July 2019 (UTC)
Sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to the note on my Talk page, but I edit in streaks with gaps in between. As noted, I have been keeping the lights on at this task force in the belief that editor interest would resume sooner or later. Certainly the topic is drawing attention on a global scale, and deserves a resurgence of organized, targeted article work across Wikipedia. As far as creating an entire new WikiProject, I agree with NewsAndEventsGuy’s original position that the current WP framework here seems adequate for current needs, but that if the numbers grow to unwieldy proportions, a new WikiProject would be called for. Thanks for your interest! Jusdafax (talk) 21:44, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
Please share your thoughts about how we describe consensus
{{Ping|KimDabelsteinPetersen|TMLutas|Nsaa}}
Greetings folks, from your contribs I see you've been editing within the past two months. Long ago you listed yourselves as members of the climate change task force. As you may have seen, we are now a stand-alone WikiProject. If you'd like to join us as verified "active" members please move your from the uncertain status list to "active" at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Climate_change#Participants. Alternatively you can delete your name or move it to inactive. Thanks! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:47, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
FYI Misc threads posted elsewhere which relate to housekeeping and recruitment options here
See open threads on this talk page
There are a lot more users with our userboxes on their user page than are listed as participants, so I asked about bulk messaging those eds when we're ready for beefed up recruitment.
FYI, I just verified, cleaned, polished, and gathered all the full citations in the RefList at this article. The text should be easy to work with in case anyone wants to take a crack at tuning that one up. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:16, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
Tools on the list at Help:Citation_tools that you or I have found useful (feel free to add)
reFill .... this tunes up {{cite web}}: Empty citation (help) entries and puts bare urls into that form
You enter the name of the page, e.g., Greenland ice sheet. The tool presents you with the proposed improvements in a conventional Help:DIFF window before they are saved
Visual Editor: In Visual Editor mode, there is a button to add a citation. It brings up a handy form with a field in which you paste in a URL, DOI, or ISBN number, and it automatically fills out the appropriate markup.
WikiProjects are not normally included in mainspace categories; accordingly, I have removed those categories from this page. Any questions, please let me know. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:13, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
I'm trying to add references to this chapter of an IPCC report: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf . The chapter has a ton of authors and another ton of editors. I'm not sure if I should cram the entire list of authors and editors into one of our citation templates, or shorten it. Can anyone point me to an example of a correctly formatted reference to a chapter of an IPCC report? Thanks, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 01:06, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
BTW the chapter itself says to cite it as "Bruckner T., I.A. Bashmakov, Y. Mulugetta, H. Chum, A. de la Vega Navarro, J. Edmonds, A. Faaij, B. Fungtammasan, A. Garg, E. Hertwich, D. Honnery, D. Infield, M. Kainuma, S. Khennas, S. Kim, H.B. Nimir, K. Riahi, N. Strachan, R. Wiser, and X. Zhang, 2014: Energy Systems. In: Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Edenhofer, O., R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, E. Farahani, S. Kadner, K. Seyboth, A. Adler, I. Baum, S. Brunner, P. Eickemeier, B. Kriemann, J. Savolainen, S. Schlömer, C. von Stechow, T. Zwickel and J.C. Minx (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA" but this does not look appealing. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 01:06, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
There is no one correct way of citing it. You can do it as the IPCC suggests, or you can save yourself the pain of having to type out all of names and have a lot of repetition if you cite multiple chapters from one of the reports by taking a look at WP:IPCC citation, where all AR4, AR5 and SR15 chapters are ready to be copy-pasted. In the global warming article, we adhere to the standards in these. Femke Nijsse (talk) 06:41, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
Kudos also to J. Johnson, who has been refining IPCC citations since AR4 (2007). With Femke's recent support and help, JJ has done most of the heavy lifting. I would just like to keep saying for the benefit of any lurking newbies and listening veterans that we should keep an open mind and enthusiastically embrace anyone who improves articles with citations that allow us to find the RS even if we think the cite formatting sucks. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 17:01, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
Thank you, you're all very kind. I should mention that NAEG has also been quite helpful in working out some of the problems. Unfortunately the AR4 citations are not all done quite yet, but getting there. Also, "correctly formatted" is somewhat asympotic in the inattanability of perfection, so even the "done" parts are still subject to tweaks.
Clayoquot: the IPCC requested form is, indeed, quite unappealing. Also cumbersome, hard to read, and even intimidating to implement. (It is a result of making each citation fully complete in itself.) I believe you will find the forms at WP:IPCC citation much more satisfactory. Please advise if you have any questions or problems. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:24, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
Describing global warming as a "crisis" in wikivoice
As I've said here and there, making up cats and banners is easy, but setting specific editing and organizing goals and designing cats and banners to efficiently acocmplishing those goals is hard. So with that said, I'm not real sure what to do with the article Ecocide but it keeps coming up in sources I'm reading about Extinction rebellion, Greta Thunberg, etc.
Would someone with a grip on cats please think about appropriate treatment for this article, in terms of climate cats and the project in general? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 09:56, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
It's a difficult one in the sense that, so far as I'm aware, it's only been linked to climate change by climate change activists and not by legal experts, legal activists or scientific sources. I'd say that for now it falls mostly outside of the scope of this project, but that will likely change in the future. So far the article mentioned one red-linked activist linking the two. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:22, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
How we mark things so they are included (talk page banner template)
The best and easiest way to mark articles for the assessment process is by placing a project banner template on the talk page. Wow, powerful possibilities come with the banner options. Suggested reading for anyone who wants to know more (and even better, help)...
Thanks to UnitedStatesian for interest in getting a talk page banner out there. In case other project members didn't notice, besides the testbanner above (a sub page of this article, not yet released to the "wild") UnitedStatesian has created Template:WikiProject Climate change. I was hoping we'd have some discussion about possible things we could try to accomplish with banner design before setting one loose. Among other things, we have to think about categories for articles so that assessment will work correctly. There are many articles in Category:Climate change and its various sub-categories (which include Category:Global warming). I hate to see us create redundant categories if we don't have a reason, and this new banner template appears to create a redundancy at Category:WikiProject Climate change articles. Aren't all the climate change/global warming articles within the scope of the project? Why would we create yet another category to be maintained and synchronized? Instead, let's just use the climate change category to get assessment process started. To that end, see these instructions; I've already started learning about this and created Category:Climate change articles by quality and Category:Climate change articles by importance. My thought was to change the banner template to tag articles for the subject CLIMATE CHANGE instead of the PROJECT, get it up and running, and if we outgrow that basic setup we can add bells and whistles to add on layers of assessment for the largest subtopics (physicial science, mitigation, adaptation, for example). If instead we start putting these things into a project category, then we have redundant cats... one tree for the subject and a tree here for the project...... I admit I'm new to all this. Is there a reason to think the subject and project trees would be significantly different? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 11:59, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
@NewsAndEventsGuy: There is an important difference between the two "master" categories (and their descendants). Category:Climate change is for articles, and not every article within the scope of this project will necessarily be in that master article cat or one of its subcats. Category:WikiProject Climate change articles is for talk pages, (of all types except user talk), is populated only via application of the project's talkpage template, and it has a very specific subcat structure (two subtrees, one for quality and one for importance). The broader project cat also drives the project's article alerts.
I am grateful for the help! The how-to pages are hard to decipher fir this project newbie. Am travelling now, will study your work and try to learnmore next week. Thanks again. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 11:18, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
ps the assessment banner works! I just added it to the talk page of climate change (as a top-importance article of course) and the categories populated correctly. Now.... we have a question on our hands. Do we overwrite the WikiProject Environment banners, changing them all to WP:PROCC banners, or do we just add a second WikiProject Climate Change banner in addition to the environment ones to each relevant article??? -- phoebe / (talk to me) 10:32, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
My impression is that the Wikiproject Environment is inactive, but it can't hurt to leave it there in case they'll become active again. There are some topics like veganism that have to do with other aspects of the environment as well. We might want to automatically remove the task force bit from the template if that is possible. Femke Nijsse (talk) 14:58, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
Glad to see this project getting underway! Hope we'll consider ways to avoid duplicating work between enviro / climate change projects.
Info that follows may be useful for getting a sense of scope of work and priorities.
Please remember that activity on the project talk pages isn't the only indicator of an active WikiProject! Some of us gnomes who work on cleanup projects like to focus our efforts by WikiProject. We rely on accurate WikiProject tagging of articles to create cleanup queues. Many talk pages have no tags, or need additional WikiProject tags.
Haven't spotted other editors who are making major efforts on the assessment backlog at WP Environment. For the most part, it's been just me the past several months, with an occasional random assessment from editors who assess articles throughout WikiProjects. Am becoming somewhat less active recently, so new articles in environment/climate will have missed tags.
Many of the substantive environment articles are edited as a part of WikiEdu assignments. These articles are not typically reassessed after they are improved by students. Creating a queue for reassessment of WikiEdu contributions would help focus reassessment and tagging efforts.
Practical scoping info for how much work is involved in this WikiProject: One gnome with a day job, editing manually without tools, can accomplish the following: Keep up with new assessment on a WikiProject the size of WikiProject Environment; Take a backlog of 1000 unassessed articles over the course of several months down to one or two hundred; Cleanup enough bare URLs per month so as to stay even with "cleanup needed" tags on a very small wikiproject.
So this may give you an idea of how many people or how much effort is needed to keep up with maintenance tasks.
The optimum situation is getting really high-quality article improvement from skilled academics or WikiEd participants.
However, if article improvement comes mostly from editathon and contest participants, gnoming and cleanup becomes more important. When large numbers of articles are generated by less experienced editors, as has happened with some of the biography WikiProjects, it is easy to swell the WikiProject cleanup queues well past the point where our limited supply of gnomes can keep up. Oliveleaf4 (talk) 15:14, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
Giving it a try. Looks like it might need extras like climate effects of aerosols and maybe a more general section giving links to radiative forcing. I'll see if I can attempt a bit of expansion.
Some expansion done. Still want to include albedo though is that more of a feedback? Forcing/feedback split is rather dependant on length of time being considered and perhaps that is why this has run into trouble in past.crandles (talk) 14:10, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
I've never seen earth-surface albedo changes described as an external climate forcing in anything I've read. As a feedback definitely. But not as an external forcing. As you may have done yourself, a search for everything containing "albedo" quickly turns up relevant articles such as Ice-albedo feedback, Cloud albedo, Albedo feature, etc. Not sure what to do with that, just thought to mention it in case it hasn't occurred to you to go there yet. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 17:00, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
Agree albedo is usually a feedback. Clumsily explained by me. But land use change that changed albedo would be a forcing not a feedback wouldn't it? Likewise say anthropogenic fires that put soot on glaciers. We have light scattering in the volcanic section as a mechanism but not a specific mention of albedo and I wanted to include it somehow. Seemed like a major mechanism (not a forcing) that was missed. However if you feel it is better without it, I won't attempt to revert to including it. crandles (talk) 13:29, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
I think we're talking about our mutual edits to climate system today... I generally agree albedo is a biggie and we need to work on how we talk about it, not if. We should have this discussion at that talk page probably. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:45, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
This old and neglected article needs serious redoing, and in my mind should be considered a parent article for the topic of climate change. This would make an ideal focus for a wikimania or class project. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 11:58, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
Hi there, I have just joined this project after seeing Phoebe's presentation about this project at the recent Wikimania conference in Stockholm - very inspiring presentation! (I probably can't contribute much to this project initially but hope to ramp up my engagement over time). Here is a suggestion: how about we cut out Phoebe's presentation from this long video and then include it in the WikiProject page introduction? See long video to the right.
Climate change, civil engineering, and butterflies - a panel
You could jump to 8 minutes into the presentation. But I am hoping someone who is tech-savvy could just cut her part out of the long video, i.e. start at 8 minutes and then stop after 10 minutes or so (can't remember how long her talk was); thus creating a short video just about Phoebe explaining why we are having this WikiProject on Climate change. EMsmile (talk) 13:38, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
Thanks EMsmile I just watched it, and thanks Phoebe for your interest! The idea of coordinated global coverage is rather breathtaking in vision and equally in intimidation! It's hard enough to clean up just the English pages, how on earth (yuk yuk) do we do a worldwide multi language cohesive set of articles? Alas, I don't think we should use this clip unless we agree that our articles can say "if we haven't acted by 2031 we're toast" and the bulk of science RSs do not say "we have 12 years to act and that's it". The unfortunate soundbite has roots sort of like this. But the idea of a project video to help recruit members and build enthusiastic community is a fantastic idea. I wonder if Phoebe and you could put heads together to think of crafting one designed specifically for that purpose? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:33, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for this EMsmile, I am sorry I could not attend Phoebe's presentation in person as I was committed to the advocacy space next door but it was something I had planned to attend. So thank you for digging up the presentation and putting it up here. I agree with NewsAndEventsGuy that this is a great video to help build the Wikipedia community on climate change related subjects. --Discott (talk) 15:53, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
I am waiting to hear from Phoebe on this. Making a new video is a project for the future but quite a lot of work. Why not just use the existing video for now, labelling it clearly as a presentation from Wikimania (this is what has been presented). If that sentence of hers is problematic then it could be cut out if needed. Easy to do for someone who knows how to cut video segments (I don't know how to do it). EMsmile (talk) 08:52, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
I am sure it's technically feasible to cut out that sound bite before "recycling" the video for our purposes... EMsmile (talk) 12:07, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
Hi friends, thanks for linking the video and I'm glad it was inspiring. It was more a broad proposal than a refined proposal, and I did not mean to imply that we should be putting any particular phrasing or terms *in articles*. EG I mentioned "12 years to act" meaning that we should get on with improving Wikipedia articles now-- rather than assuming we have forever to work on these articles, as we do with most topics. It could just as easily be rephrased as "climate change is urgent, and of global importance, and we should make sure our articles reflect this." What would make sense to me is to start to make to-do lists. I think we've already done a lot. To my mind, what we need to do is:
rating existing articles for quality and identifying a to-do list for articles (merges, splits etc) -- the new templates made for this wikiproject will enable that, now we need to put those templates on articles
identifying a list of 20 or so "core" articles that are essential to the subject. Eg Climate change, global warming, .... what else? These might be essential by readership numbers or by topic or both.
identifying related sets of articles - eg articles about solar panel technologies.
looking at other related reference works, eg encyclopedias of climate change, to see what we are missing.
then getting to work - we want our core articles to be good articles, and to have lede sections that are easily translatable across languages. So: polish ledes. Check references. Improve grammar. Update facts. etc etc. etc. :)
make an edit-a-thon guide (and yes maybe video) for interested groups of scientists or whoever wants to work on this
and then... I don't know what else! This project page is a good start. I think a video as an intro to the project is a fine idea, but I would want to hash out the infrastructure for doing stuff, and get a solid to-do list going, first. (Because given that these articles are difficult, I wouldn't necessarily throw new editors at them cold...)
As a side note, this is of interest to me on two levels - one, because it's an important topic. Two, because we are not that great on Wikipedia at tackling very complex subjects systematically. I think WikiProject Medicine has done some of the best work in this area. But our campaigns have tended to focus on things like biographies where each one stands apart. For climate change, that's not true: articles interlink and are deeply socially and scientifically complex. So I'm interested in how we can handle, and maintain, such important but yes intimidating-for-an-individual-editor articles. best, -- phoebe / (talk to me) 13:04, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
Hi phoebe, I am tempted to move your statement into a new section called "To do lists" as it deviates a bit from the topic of the video. Just to finish off the video discussion: do you agree with the idea that we take the long video, take your section into a new video (cut out the statement that is perhaps confusing) and then place it on the project page - just to give it a personal touch ("hey, there are real humans behind this project!"). If you agree, then whom could we ask who knows how to edit videos? It should only take 10 minutes of someone's time. EMsmile (talk) 02:22, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
Regarding your other points, I totally agree with you that Wikiproject Medicine is awesome and can teach us a lot of things! Two things that they did which I think are super helpful: they created a Manual of Style (Medicine) and they created standard headings for different types of articles. I think that's very useful and something we could think about doing it as well. I copied their model to the much smaller WikiProject Sanitation. It looks like this. It's an iterative process but once a workable system of standard section headings is in place, they get gently applied to all the relevant articles. It makes it much easier for the reader to find what they are looking for. EMsmile (talk) 02:22, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
@EMsmile: hi yes cutting & pasting my video is fine. (I wouldn't try to edit it; I said what I said). I am not sure who can cut the video off the top of my head... but I can ask around. Maybe a post in Wikipedia Weekly would do the trick :) As a side note, we'll probably have another session at the upcoming WikiConference North America on this topic! -- phoebe / (talk to me) 16:08, 15 September 2019 (UTC)
@UnitedStatesian: thanks for making "hot articles" work! I asked json to add that several weeks ago, and have been waiting for cats to become established before trying to teach myself enough about cats to make it work. Meanwhile, voila, you have again worked your magic! Thank you very much. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 17:31, 9 September 2019 (UTC)
Hi, at least here in Europe the Summit is quite discussed, page itself is visited, but I do not think that the content is good. I made some remarks in talk page there. Maybe more - speech of Greta Thunberg was important (and I support her very much), but it was not the only important speech there - there were other good speaches there etc.Jirka Dl (talk) 04:00, 27 September 2019 (UTC)
Skeptics, deniers and POV
I think that this is probably problem on more Climate change pages - just now there was this change on Greta Thunberg page. I agree that "denier" can be POV, on the other hand I feel very misleading to use "skeptic" for those who do not agree with scientific consensus.Jirka Dl (talk) 11:26, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
Many WikiProjects have developed their own barnstars to recognize constructive contributors. We can design and submit a candidate to the barnstar process. If you have ideas, please shout out! Better post a sample. Here is my first attempt.
On reflection, I think I screwed up when I uploaded this. I gave it a file name that was quite limited to work on the project itself, or done on subject matter articles by project participants. But there are several deserving editors who are not part of the project. So to mirror how our parent project (Environment) handled this, I have asked to change the name to the subject matter, and in the text we can explain something similar to what they said, which was
The Environment Barnstar. This barnstar can be awarded to Wikipedians who have made significant contributions towards environment-related articles, raising environmental awareness in Wikipedia, or assisting in Wikipedia:WikiProject Environment.
The name change request is now pending. Once that's done, I'll have someone check the design for Barnstar 2.0 criteria, and finally will post it at project barnstars seeking final consensus to add it to the "official" barnstar list. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:51, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
Opinion please on climate change denial in English Wikipedia
There is a popular public opinion in various places of climate change denial. I expect everyone here is familiar with what this is and what it means.
This project is watching 1600 pages. Can someone who is a regular here please briefly give their opinion on a Wikipedia editorial culture which I am trying to understand?
I want to know generally how many, how often, how much advocates of climate change denial edit Wikipedia. Approximately how many regular Wikipedia editors do we have taking this position? How often do casual or new editors come to wiki sharing content in advocacy of this position? How much of this position have editors integrated and accepted into these 1600 Wikipedia articles?
My read on things is that English Wikipedia has not incorporated this content except on the page for the topic. Thanks for any brief insight anyone can share. I would be especially interested in anyone can point to a discussion or controversy where the balance of opinion was strong for the denial camp. Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk)23:58, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for bringing this up. I've been watching Sustainable energy and several other articles about the mitigation side of things since February, and haven't seen any climate denialism. I'm very interested in hearing what others have experienced. Cheers, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 04:34, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
I saw attacks on Greta Thunberg page from the very beginning of the page, but this is probably very specific. I am almost only one who is actively working on climate topic on Czech Wikipedia and see an interesting situation there - the "basic" page "Climate change" has "good article" label and during last 2 years there were almost no attacks of deniers, but one specific page "Global warming controversies" is systematically and "sofistically" attacked by some anonymous denier(s) and I am not able to follow rules and keep the page in good condition.Jirka Dl (talk) 05:32, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
Climate denial has been described in five stages Deny warming, deny cause, deny harmfulness, deny solutions and 'it's too late'. The first two are basically not held by any of the active editors in this project on the English wiki as far as I can see. We do get regular new users, users active in other areas and IPs that take either of those positions, but they're always asked the same question they can't answer: please provide a reliable source.
This hasn't always been the case. It was only a few weeks ago that I removed the undue weight on one 'climate denier' hypothesis, the cosmic ray hypothesis, on the climate change page (confusingly, climate change is NOT about current climate change, but about climate change in general). A lot of the less-widely read pages still hold positions that were somewhat questionable at the time of adding, but completely out of sync with current understanding.
The Dutch Wikipedia is different. There are a few climate deniers active. When I nominated the article about (current) climate change for FA five years ago, a lot of the votes against were from deniers. Being a third-year Bachelor in Physics back then, I didn't know that much about CC and allowed a lot of their talking points to seep through. When I revised the article a year back (a climate contrarian had asked its featured status to be removed), I managed to get all of these talking points out without many objections. Same as in the Czeck version, the page Dutch controversy about climate change attracts more deniers. At the time of the 'hiatus' there was a lot of activity, which I still need to clean up, if at all possible. The entire Dutch talk page is one where deniers don't have the upper hand, but do have some significant concessions made.
@Femkemilene: Yes, I am asking about this because I wanted to be able to better advocate for the Wikimedia community in nominating everyone for the award which I describe below in this forum. Thanks for your reply.
@Clayoquot and Jirka Dl: Thanks for your replies here. I was hesitating about how to draft the application and getting answers from you helped me write it. My colleague Daniel Mietchen set up WikiProject Climate Change on Wikidata for this nomination and to complement this project here. Thank you a lot. Everyone in all WikiProjects for Climate Change merit special recognition and even if the award does not come everyone here is awesome. Blue Rasberry (talk)21:18, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
Hi Bluerasberry. How does the prevalence of denialism relate to your nomination? I'm wondering if you might have been wondering about whether POV pushing in general, rather than denialism specifically, has affected climate change content on Wikipedia. To that question, I would definitely say yes. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 16:42, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
@Clayoquot: My thought was that denialism was maximum crazy, and if there was any maximum crazy around here I wanted to be conscious of it as I drafted the award nomination. At this point I submitted the nomination and I do not see a point in coaching anyone on an acceptance speech until and unless the organizers message us to prepare just in case. If I get some news then I will come back here to ask for and assist with documenting talking points about this content. Blue Rasberry (talk)17:38, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
Please add to the main thread at the link Femke provided
The following discussion 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.
Our current article climate change is not about global warming/climate change, but instead about climate changes in general. I've proposed a renaming, so that climate change can redirect to global warming. Input is very much welcome. The discussion is on the climate change talk page. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:13, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
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.
Prelim discussion is over... "formal" rename proposal is pending
I've added it to our project. There must be a lot of pictures on low-carbon buildings on the Commons, such as the picture of the NIOO-KNAW building. They might not be tagged in Commons. It seems to be a page in need of improvement. Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:20, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
Maybe some remarks - maybe possible changes in diets, as it is mentioned in Special Report on Climate Change and Land - Chapter 6 should be mentioned. As I understand - till now the article is talking only about cattle grown in the stable. What about freely grazing cattle? And what about using of manure to improve quality of soil (and keep carbon in soil)?Jirka Dl (talk) 19:51, 20 October 2019 (UTC)
This was in response to frequent discussions that touch on the technically limited meaning of "global warming" vs "climate change", and related arguments about how we structure those articles. Since the technical meanings of these terms simply means longterm change in average GST, it seems to me we should really have a technically oriented top article about GST, where we can talk about how it is calculated, history, how its used, and what it means if it goes up (or down). There is already a good article on Sea surface temperature but surface temp over land is rather scattered across a variety of articles.
Please help build the stub for GST into a decent article, and I propose we have a paragraph (with section heading) for both "global warming" and "global cooling"... and in using those phrases here I mean the general concept of those terms in technical writing, not tied to any particular time period.
Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.
We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma (talk) 04:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
Media article has a section on alarmism and no denialism
Daniel Mietchen and I submitted an application nominating the Wikimedia community for the 2019 "Climate Change Public Outreach Award" from Climate Outreach.
We felt that the Wikimedia community should get this award because so many people in so many languages contribute various perspectives in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
This is the page for some queries to come to understand Wikimedia community engagement in this space.
Special thanks to participants here at WikiProject Climate Change on English Wikipedia. The activity of the community here is easily accessible to me as a native English speaker.
Wow! Thanks for such kind thoughts. I'm wondering - how did you get the number, "About 10,000 people editing climate change-related content"? Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 16:35, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
Daniel Mietchen, Thanks for the clarification. I'm still curious about what that number represents. E.g. for the content within scope, does the scope on the English Wikipedia represent the 1600 articles within our WikiProject, or other articles that are more peripherally related? And does the 10,000 number represent people who intentionally contribute to climate-related content, or does it also include the vandals, spammers, Recent Changes patrollers, bots, and AWB users making minor edits who also show up in page histories?
Part of where I'm coming from is that when I do outreach, I emphasize that the number of people who are actively working on climate change articles is very small, that many our articles are suffering from neglect, and that new volunteers could make a huge a difference. Personally I reckon that our workforce in this WikiProject is in the low double digits. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 19:37, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
OK, let's try to decompose this. The estimate was roughly
, where
A is the number of concepts within scope (I am thinking in terms of Wikidata items here, so probably a bit more than the number of articles on enwiki), estimated at around , i.e. an order of magnitude of 3;
B is the number of entries per concept (i.e. number of Wikipedia languages or Commons files on the topic), estimated at about 10, i.e. an order of magnitude of about 1;
C is the number of contributors per entry, estimated at about 10 (with no distinction as to what they contributed), i.e. an order of magnitude of about 1;
D is a correction factor that takes into account that a contributor might have contributed to multiple entries, estimated at about 10, i.e. an order of magnitude of about 1.
All together, this gives an order of magnitude of ca. 4 for the number of contributors to entries on concepts within the scope of the WikiProject, which means .
Considering that these 10,000 are distributed over about 10 years and about 100 wikis that have content on the matter, that gives on the order of 10 contributors per such wiki and year on average, which is a very rough estimate but consistent with your observation.
As for the "200,000 others in a supporting role", we added an additional correction factor of 20 to take into account that many pages within scope are linked to and from other pages, whose contributor base we estimated to be about 20 times larger than that of the within-scope pages alone. Again, this is an order of magnitude thing. --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 18:59, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
I'm concerned about the phrase "Wikipedia invites organizations to edit Wikipedia." We invite individuals to edit Wikipedia. Everyone belongs to organizations, and people who belong to certain organizations might be more likely to be interested in editing than the population in general. However, we don't want people to come as representatives of organizations, promoting the POV of a group they belong to. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 16:50, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
Yes, that phrase is not ideal — something like "contribute to" instead of "edit" would have been better. We did not have much time for the drafting and at the same time had to deal with technical difficulties accessing the submission form. In any case, we certainly did not intend to imply that NPOV or other community rules would not apply to such organizations. --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 06:50, 20 October 2019 (UTC)
Daniel Mietchen, No worries. I understand time pressures and technical difficulties, and I'm grateful that you took the time to do this. Outreach to expand our editor base is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. If you have access to Facebook, there is a good discussion in the Wikipedia Weekly group about POV concerns here. If you can't see it, let me know and I'll email it to you. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 19:51, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
I'm afraid I really do not want any such award. Wikipedia is supposed to operate with a neutral point of view and the only thing we support is the dissemination of knowledge. We're not here to do outreach for climate change science, that what we have agrees with the science and we try and write it up well is not because we are trying to push a point of view or trying to convince people of anything, we are not involved in outreach of anything except education in general. Dmcq (talk) 20:09, 21 October 2019 (UTC).
Just to clarify since I brought up outreach, I meant outreach in the sense of recruiting editors to Wikipedia, not in the sense of creating content that is suitable for advocacy. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 00:10, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
Opposed Many thanks, @Dmcq:! I hadn't bothered to look into this, and once I did I was dismayed. The sentiment is well intended and it is very much appreciated, but we can't accept this award. The award webpage [6] says "For this award we are looking for projects that listen, start a conversation, empower, and enable people to talk and take action. We are particularly keen to hear about projects that have engaged new audiences, beyond the ‘usual suspects,’ in innovative ways. Projects should be able to demonstrate that they have generated a shift in attitudes and empowered ongoing engagement with climate change." I agree with Dmcq. This appears to be in stark contrast to Wikipedia's core WP:Neutral point of view policy, and I'm retracting my enthusiasm and support, even though it was done in good faith and the sentiment is appreciated. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:31, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
Of course, merely providing reliable (mostly) information on a topic can be considered activism, and information often "favors" one side or another, which some will see as bias. In that regard I suspect that journalistic neutrality requires avoiding any kind of benefit that might reward leaning one way or another. However, this is likely the wrong place to discuss this, as I don't see that the small number of us in this tiny corner of the English Wikipedia can speak for the Wikipedia community. I think this ought to be bucked up to the office folks. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:33, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
Yikes, many good points raised above. While I totally appreciate the sentiment and the risk-taking, associating ourselves with activism is definitely problematic. I see that nominations that are shortlisted will go to public voting this week. We will be opening up the award for voting the week of 21 October. Our judging panel is in the process of selecting a shortlist from all the people who were nominated in the first stage, and we'll be asking who you think should win. So if the nominators are open to having a discussion on withdrawing the nomination, that discussion needs to happen very soon. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 23:20, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
Opposed Well if we're being formal about it yes I'd prefer if it the application withdrawn. Thanks for the thought but really it would sit badly by me. Dmcq (talk) 12:32, 23 October 2019 (UTC)
I would also prefer having the nomination withdrawn. We have to be perceived as a neutral educational resource, and perceived as recruiting editors who want to educate not advocate. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 22:25, 23 October 2019 (UTC)
From my point of view is nomination OK exactly because it is (or it should be) neutral educational resource - in climate change this is really important that we have such resource. I do not see advocation.Jirka Dl (talk) 03:30, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
I think we are a decent (albeit not perfect), and neutral, educational resource, and I wouldn't mind some recognition for that. But in this case there is some ambiguity in the wording that could be taken wrong, so it seems best to respond as "thank you, but no." And it does seem a little odd that our work here should be the basis of a cash award to some group most of us haven't heard of. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:28, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks everyone. I am writing to say that Daniel and I have seen the conversation. One of us will post a response in 24 hours. I am really happy to see the comments and appreciate how thoughtful everyone is about this. Blue Rasberry (talk)22:14, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
The award is for increasing public engagement - see the description. As Jirka Dl says, we nominated Wikipedia because we felt that Wikipedia was a neutral educational resource which does not take an advocacy position and which invites everyone to participate. We personally believe that Wikipedia has informed the most people of the most diverse backgrounds on the topic of climate change and invited each of them to meaningfully join the conversation. The contest is seeking the project which accomplished that, which is why we think the Wikimedia community should win.
I could not republish the text of the nomination because they claim a copyright. However, they asked that anyone making a nomination get permission from all contributors to the project. We laughed a bit about this because by the terms of the call for nominations, Wikipedia is the best fit as a project which is neutral, invites active participation, and has a meaningful impact. However, there is also no way to get consent for a particular prize from everyone who participates in Wikipedia. When we had to list all the contributors, our answer was "About 10,000 people editing climate change-related content and 200,000 others in a supporting role share equal credit" (see Daniel’s outline above about how we estimated that). I feel like anyone could make the nomination, and I also feel like any single individual acting alone is free to contact the award organizers to ask to withdraw. If anyone does withdraw, I think that it would be in wiki-spirit of transparency for someone to take credit for the withdrawal request so that we have a story on how all this played out.
The money involved here is GBP1000, which would not be much to divide. Money is no one's motivation here, and if the Wikimedia community is not a fit for such awards, then I wish we could receive an “honorable mention” or alternative to the prize money. What we really want is external recognition from a knowledgeable organization and public contest that Wikipedia's content is high quality and objective. Our nomination was inspired by the Wikimedia community having received prizes before, such as the Erasmus Prize 2015. We named Wikimedia UK, the Wikimedia Community organization based in London, as the ideal entity to represent the Wikimedia community should it be the award recipient. They are local to the award ceremony, and that organization has standing to represent the Wikimedia community in that region, in the way that Wikimedia chapters do such things at official occasions.
If anyone objects to the nomination and would like to protest, then feel free, but please be respectful of Climate Outreach, the British charity which is organizing this contest and award, as well as Wikimedia community members who think the nomination is appropriate. Typical organizations do not understand community dynamics of the sort which exist in Wikipedia, where anyone can nominate and anyone can protest and there is no designated leader.
Housekeeping note... When I saw real names in the first paragraph I had alarm bells about possible accidental outing. When I realized both editors are working under the real names (in Lane's case, at his user page) I breathed a sigh of relief, and just thought I'd pass that along to spare you any time checking that out too. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 01:08, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks Blue Rasberry! OK everyone, below is a draft of a message I'm planning to send to Climate Outreach early next week. Please let me know if you have any comments.
Dear Climate Outreach,
A few weeks ago, my colleagues Lane Rasberry and Daniel Mietchen nominated the Wikimedia community for the Climate Change Public Outreach Award. They informed the Wikipedia community about the nomination through "WikiProject Climate Change”, which is the English Wikipedia’s primary forum for co-ordinating efforts to improve its articles on climate change (https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change). The English Wikipedia community is a subset of the Wikimedia community, making up around half of its active members.
In the discussion among Wikipedia contributors that followed, various individuals expressed both gratitude for the sentiment behind the nomination and significant opposition based on how the award might affect public perception of Wikipedia’s work. Lane explained to us that you want all organizations being nominated for a Climate Outreach award to have strong internal consensus, if not unanimity, that they want to be nominated. It wasn’t feasible for the nominators to see whether consensus existed before nominating us, but it has become apparent since then that we in the Wikimedia community are not in consensus that we want to receive this award.
Personally, I am a huge admirer of Climate Outreach’s work. I first became aware of your organization last spring when I was preparing to facilitate a session involving people from British Columbia and Alberta, and used your fantastic Alberta Narratives Project materials. Somewhere in your archives from earlier this year is a message from me asking for your organization's help in improving Wikipedia. I would still very much like to chat with you about working together - more on this later.
I am also one of the volunteer Wikipedia contributors who was not comfortable with being nominated for this award. Readers from across the political spectrum trust Wikipedia to be a neutral educational resource that presents all points of view fairly, including (for example) points of view that the U.S. should mine more coal and Canada should build more pipelines. I feel that receiving an award for "generating a shift in attitudes and empowered ongoing engagement with climate change" could jeopardize that trust.
I also believe that there’s a fundamental difference between the type of public engagement you are seeking to recognize and the type of public engagement that the Wikipedia community performs. The Wikipedia community engages with the public in that it invites the public to edit articles, but site policies strictly forbid having people use Wikipedia to add their own opinions, values, and lived experiences to articles. Public engagement initiatives at Wikipedia are primarily aimed at teaching people how to improve Wikipedia content by summarizing information from publications such as IPCC reports. Wikipedia’s public engagement initiatives are not at all intended to change how the person who is being engaged-with perceives climate change.
Let me emphasize that the discussions the Wikipedia community has had around this nomination have been positive and useful. We’ve had an exchange of ideas that exemplifies the collegial spirit of Wikipedia’s inner workings at their best. I would love to have your help in terms of a) participating in Wikipedia discussions on how to make content understandable to readers, and b) helping us find the kinds of volunteers who are likely to become long-term contributors to Wikipedia content. When it comes to recruiting long-term contributors, our outreach efforts typically have a success rate of around 5%. If you are interested in helping, please let me or Lane or Daniel know.
Sincerely,
<my real name + Wikipedia username>
00:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
Well done letter Clayoquot! If it doesn't violate any policies, I wonder if that outfit would provide a grant to do a climate change Wikithon, like just happened in Africa? (discussed elsehwere in the project pages). NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 01:13, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
@NewsAndEventsGuy and Clayoquot: This is great! I support you sending this out as is. I have feedback suggestions which you could take or reject as you like, but feel free to mail immediately how you think best. Propose changes -
your text - "Climate Change Public Outreach Award"
Lane's suggestion - "Climate Change Public Engagement Award"
reason - correct the name of the award
your text - "we in the Wikimedia community are not in consensus that we want to receive this award"
Lane's suggestion - "we in the Wikimedia community are not in consensus that we can accept any such award"
reason: There no particular characteristic of this award which conflicts with any community norm. This organization, like Wikipedia, is stating no advocacy position and only seeks to increase access to objective information from the most reliable sources. Their advocacy, such as it is, is in choosing "climate change" as a topic of focus and in having a bias for reliable sources which is comparable to that of Wikipedia. The problem here is not any identified incompatibility except for the lack of confirmed compatibility.
your text - "Wikipedia’s public engagement initiatives are not at all intended to change how the person who is being engaged-with perceives climate change"
Lane's suggestion - "Wikipedia’s public engagement initiatives are only intended to inform the public with objective information on all topics, including climate change. Wikipedia takes no advocacy position on any issue except general access to reliable information."
reason: We in Wikipedia are trying to change how the public perceives climate change (and everything else), because that is what access to objective information accomplishes. Among climate change education organizations, this one is unusually neutral. See their position papers - they talk about increasing education around source material, but are being careful to avoid advocacy except for increased public engagement.
your text - "helping us find the kinds of volunteers who are likely to become long-term contributors to Wikipedia content. When it comes to recruiting long-term contributors, our outreach efforts typically have a success rate of around 5%."
Lane's suggestion - "improving Wikipedia's coverage of information in this field. In our partnerships, organizations typically offer subject matter expertise and editing engagement, in exchange for the Wikimedia community helping to achieve communication impact and community guidance in navigating our social norms."
reason: the percentage of long term editor retention in outreach is less than 1%, also almost no one understand what that means; long term editor recruitment is not the usual goal of partnerships; and other modes of goal-making and collaboration are lower-cost, lower risk and higher impact. In general describing any mutual benefit makes for more effective persuasion than describing only a deficiency of one side and asking for support.
@Clayoquot, Bluerasberry, and NewsAndEventsGuy: Thanks for sharing the draft. I agree with the sentiment of Bluerasberry's post above but would not send it out as is (mainly because I find it odd to send out something when it is known to contain linguistic errors). I stumbled over the same passages but would change them slightly differently than Lane (we did not coordinate this time):
your text - "we in the Wikimedia community are not in consensus that we want to receive this award"
Daniel's comment - instead of we want, I would go for we would want.
reason: it is not clear at this point whether they chose us for this award, and the conditional reflects that better
Lane's suggestion - "we in the Wikimedia community are not in consensus that we can accept any such award"
Daniel's comment - "such award" can be understood to include previous ones (e.g. Erasmus) that we already did accept, in which case can is out of place.
your text - "Wikipedia’s public engagement initiatives are not at all intended to change how the person who is being engaged-with perceives climate change"
Daniel's comment - this does not work out grammar-wise.
Lane's suggestion - "Wikipedia’s public engagement initiatives are only intended to inform the public with objective information on all topics, including climate change. Wikipedia takes no advocacy position on any issue except general access to reliable information."
Daniel's comment - I would extend general access to reliable information to general access to - and the free sharing of - reliable information or replace it with the free sharing of reliable information.
reason: lots of information is generally accessible but not shareable via Wikimedia platforms. Notability is relevant here as well, but I think it does not make sense to bring it up.
Comment on the comment: in their text "generated a shift in attitudes and empowered ongoing engagement with climate change", the "attitudes" are not tied (via something like 'to' or 'towards') to "climate change", which I interpret such that the attitudes they would like to see changed might not necessitate a direct link to climate change, and I think Wikimedia can well demonstrate that it has generated a shift in attitudes towards the free sharing of reliable information, which was one of the direct motivations behind the nomination.
your text - "helping us find the kinds of volunteers who are likely to become long-term contributors to Wikipedia content. When it comes to recruiting long-term contributors, our outreach efforts typically have a success rate of around 5%."
Daniel's comment - as Lane stated, the focus on long-term contributors here seems odd.
Lane's suggestion - "improving Wikipedia's coverage of information in this field. In our partnerships, organizations typically offer subject matter expertise and editing engagement, in exchange for the Wikimedia community helping to achieve communication impact and community guidance in navigating our social norms."
Daniel's comment - I would change subject matter expertise and editing engagement to subject matter expertise, shareable media files and editing engagement, since providing shareable media files has traditionally been a good starting point for such partnerships.
Comment on the comment: in our contextualization of the posting of the text of our nomination, we stated that we are "hoping for interaction with others interested in communicating information related to climate change", including other nominees. I have thus considered suggesting some additional text around us potentially engaging with other nominees but did not find a good way to do that.
In summary, I suggest not to ship it as is, but after fixing the grammar issue and incorporating our suggestions as you see fit. Feel free to put us in CC to facilitate follow-up.
Just to be clear, I appreciate the pings but I am not involved with drafting or sending of this letter. Which I think is a good idea, and I'm heartwarmed to see criticism offered and graciously received all around. What a great Wiki Project! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 18:19, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks everyone! I've sent the email incorporating Bluerasberry's and Daniel's feedback, and, cc'ing them. A copy of my final text is here. Climate Outreach will now either be struck with awe at our beautiful process of achieving consensus, or will think we are simply barking mad. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 23:24, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
WikiConference North America
A few climate change editors are going to WikiConference North America next week. There will be a mini-meetup on Climate Change from 3:30 to 4:00 on the Saturday, and I've just added a Climate Change/Sustainability lunch session on the Sunday. There will also be a Sustainability lightning talk on Saturday and a Climate Change lightning talk on Sunday. If you'll be at the conference, please join us. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 17:20, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
Discussion there seems to dislike articles like Soot and Mount Pinatubo being in climate forcings category as the climate change effects not considered defining. If the climate forcings category is to be useful then I think it should attempt to be reasonably comprehensive. Consequently, we may want to consider moving the climate effects of these things to new pages like 'Climate effects of soot' and so on. Any thoughts on whether this is justifiable if the article is already short or other thoughts on this. crandles (talk) 23:08, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
Category Climate forcing agents has now been emptied and deleted. I would prefer the category to be more comprehensive but am running into nondef problem. Probably have to accept sulfate won't be in category but not too bad if Stratospheric sulfur aerosols stays in. While probably need to accept Soot won't get in, I would like to get Black carbon in, but don't want to edit war DexDor over it. Also like to get Mount Pinatubo into Events that forced the climate. If this isn't going to work to try to get a comprehensive list, then the alternative is to create a list of climate forcings. crandles (talk) 15:07, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
At first I thought merging, but on second thought these two might be quite dissimilar. Climatology is a purely physical science, while I suspect that climate change science is a multidisplicanry science, which includes economics. Not sure whether climate change science is a 'real' scientific discipline however. Femke Nijsse (talk) 17:25, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
Looking at articles in 'Climate change science' Cat, I couldn't find any that had much hint of economics, they were overwhelmingly climatology without economics. 'Climate change conferences' sub category articles may well have economic considerations. Maybe that should be a separate category rather than a sub-category of Climatology? crandles (talk) 19:00, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
Moved this discussion here. Left some of major categories on project page, and added climate category tree, in case it helps to stimulate any discussion of scope of project. crandles (talk) 23:27, 31 August 2019 (UTC)
Who knows anything about adaptation?
I've been updating Template:global warming and need some help with the adaptation section. I have no idea whether the terms there are sufficiently relevant and whether we're missing essential terms. Anybody here with a basic knowledge of adaptation that could help me out? Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:05, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
Are discretionary sanctions still needed?
The climate change topic area has been under discretionary sanctions for the past 9 years, following the Climate change Arbitration case. Are discretionary sanctions still necessary for all climate change articles? From what I've seen, the current cohort of editors seems to able to resolve disagreements collaboratively and our normal dispute resolution processes work. Are there articles where that isn't the case? Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 23:47, 4 November 2019 (UTC)
I think the current group of editors being able to resolve disagreements collaboratively is a direct consequence of discretionary sanctions. We are still using them to teach biased editors and when they don't amend their ways, to have them blocked. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:43, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
I would say keep whatever page protection status there is. There is bound to be much vandalism otherwise which would waste a lot of our time. EMsmile (talk) 13:54, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
There are currently 5! good article candidates that fall under our scope, the oldest from January 14th. Shall we join the backlog drive an assess some of these articles? Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:16, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
Elsewhere we have discussed auditing links to "climate change" because some (about 10%) mean the content now at "climate change (general concept)" and the rest mean the content at "global warming". Just counting articles alone there are almost 5600 pages. On an experimental basis to help discuss how we can effectively manage such a large audit, I have created a subpage that we might potentially use to track progress. I'm wide open to other ideas. For now, please see the test sub-page, which is
At Talk:Climate_change_(general_concept)#Project internal link fix an overview of bite-sized pieces (20 mins of work) of links to check. I'm extremely grateful for everybody who chimes in. With a team of, say 10 people, we should be able to do this in no-time. As Google searches have been brought up in the renaming discussion of global warming, those people that consider this as an extra criteria are especially encouraged to help. Google results are influenced by the network of links to the page. Femke Nijsse (talk) 17:13, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
2019 wikiconference NA
Hi, all. Curious if anyone will be around this afternoon to work on to-dos during the hacking/open space. I was thinking of starting to work on materials related to hosting events. I may also know a volunteer who could help with some video production work if desired (saw this as a possible need when browsing the talk). Emjackson42 (talk) 17:20, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
Seems to be the result of a partial split discussed years ago at Talk:Individual action on climate change.
FYI, I just added a DS notice to its talk page and to a number of others. I wasn't on the Committee when we crafted those, but the Committee has from time to time reviewed various DS areas and mainly kept them. This is of course one we decided to keep. Doug Wellertalk12:08, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for noticing, we do indeed have a lot of lower-level sub articles in this topic area and there is a vast opportunity for cleanup and overhaul. At the moment, most of us seem to be focused on revamping the top articles but if you (or anyone) want to take a crack at cleaning these up now, it would be most welcome. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:18, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
While I'm in favour of only keeping the former, a redirect might not work as half of the links (very rough estimate) are about political action of cliamte change. Better to delink them (with Twinkle any autoconfirmed user can do this retroactively. Femke Nijsse (talk) 21:10, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
For IEA, maybe add a warning that they have a horrific record of predicting renewable energy uptake. For the last 20 years, their 5-yr growth projections have typically been surpassed within the year of publication. I could try and find source for that if needed, but a bit busy. Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:54, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
Day two of the African climate change workshop in Cape Town, South Africa. Group discussion on principles of the edit-a-thon/workshop.
Hello everyone. I want to let everyone know of and invite project volunteers help out with (should you be interested) in the African Climate Change workshop and edit-a-thon that Wikimedia ZA and South South North will be running from the 6-8 August 2019. The event seeks to introduce around 40 climate change experts to editing Wikipedia with a specific focus on adding to the topic of climate change articles on Wikipedia. A focus, although not an exclusive one, will be on climate change in Africa. More information can be found on the event page on meta here. --Discott (talk) 13:08, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
Hi Femkemilene and NewsAndEventsGuy, I fully understand. Its a long running event basically covering almost the whole day for three days running in a timezone that might not align with everyone so I dont expect anyone to commit for the ful period (except myself of course). As for being "known", very good question. Let me create a signup section on the meta page for people sign up and make them selves known as volunteers. Will that work?--Discott (talk) 14:55, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
Sure. Recruiting people who know a little about climate is a lot easier than keeping the good ones long enough to become skilled at Wikipedia also. The rules and disputes turn a lot of people away. If I can help folks make peace with those obstacles, I'd be glad to help. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:59, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
I agree entirely, that's why one of the focus points of the workshop will be on how to avoid conflicts and how to deal with them should they happen. Hopefully that, along with some followup mentoring, will encourage participants to stick around on Wikipedia long enough to learn the community's culture and become part of it fully.--Discott (talk) 15:05, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
Possible idea.... I recommend a face-to-face exercise, where participants pair off, and share opinions of favorite color or food intentionally looking for something touchy they strongly disagree about (e.g., I detest cooked ocra). Then spend time asking and listening to the other person describe why they like/hate that thing. Finally, Person A describes Person B's viewpoint without injecting Person A's own opinion to negate that of Person B. The test, of course, is when Person B agrees Person A did fair and respectful job. If participants can do this with non-emotional things face-to-face, try again with a hot topic of sex/religion/politics. If they learn to do that in the workshop, they will be well-prepared to handle online conflict editing hot topics on Wikipedia. See the box at the top of my user talk for more. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 15:15, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
That sounds like a very good exercise. It encourages both to think in NPOV terms and how to summarise things accurately. Two very important Wikipedia skills.--Discott (talk) 15:30, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
Hello everyone, as I write this the workshop's 2nd day has started. Yesterday we worked on introducing the participants to editing Wikipedia for the first time by adding references. We have also covered most of the most important Wikipedia 'editing culture' issues (like NPOV, Be Bold). So far the focus as been on only 3 articles (most notably Climate Change in Africa) but we intend (for today and tomorrow) to start expanding that to a few other Africa related climate change articles. People have now broken into groups to focus on certain categories of climate change articles (which will likely reduce online activity a bit). Categories are: Dry lands, Climate change and agriculture, Climate change in Africa, Climate change adaptation, and one table for people to do their own thing. So if you see lots of activity from new editors on Africa related Climate change it will likely be from the participants. I am coaching them through it but there are a lot of them (about 40) so I am sure a few new editor type mistakes will happen. Please be nice to them. I will try and make a participant badge for each username involved when I get a chance today but so far I have not created one. Thanks, --Discott (talk) 09:22, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
This is really cool, I noticed some of your activity yesterday. I hope no one was upset when I reverted the (very) few honest mistakes! Thanks for doing the project. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 09:35, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
I'm helping out today and we'll create an African-specific task force as sub-page, keeping tabs on tasks, members, and todos. The upstream project can deliberate with the project members how to organise this long-term YaguraStation (talk) 12:22, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
How awesome is that?? Thanks! Welcome! We have not completed the conversion from the old "task force" to the new "project". This impacts the Climate change/Africa task force in a one significant housekeeping way.... First, we have not completed an inventory of all the old categories, userboxes, bots, templates, and banners during our days as Project Environment/Climate change task force. Second, we have not yet learned enough about all that to understand what changes are desirable. I'm trying, but the going is slow. I'm posting at talk pages for both [{WP:WikiProject Categories]] and WP:WikiProject Council asking for help as I try to learn it all. Do any of the Africa task force participants or helpers already have knowledge in this area? Your help would be welcome! Meanwhile, I'll boldly break out your task force announcement so it gets its own attention-grabbing section heading. Congratulations on finding so many interested new topic editors! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:17, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
Thanks again for helping out YaguraStation, I really appreciate it and also thank you for making the task force happen. We will have to catch me up on how the last part of today's event went but it seemed that everyone had gotten the hang of things this morning. Also thank you NewsAndEventsGuy for the positive feedback and support, it is greatly appreciated.--Discott (talk) 19:05, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
A video produced by The Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) and Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) about the Wikipedia edit-a-thon on climate change held in Cape Town in August 2019. A quick update on the African Climate change edit-a-thon. The event partners have just released a video about the event that I want to share with everyone here. Thanks again to everyone for your support in helping make this event a success.--Discott (talk) 09:49, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
I am writing to check for interest and consensus in members of this project organizing to draft demand text for a free media license from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the upcoming IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, which is in review in 2020 and I think gets publication in 2021. In summary, we ask that organization to apply a Wikimedia-compatible copyright license to their next report.
The 2014 IPCC Fifth Assessment Report was 3 parts, with 500 pages per part so 1500 pages total. The executive summary was 150 pages. There were several supplementary reports on specific topics. All of this content has conventional copyright. We cannot easily bring parts of it into Wikipedia for integration into our coverage of this topic.
The IPCC claims that what it has to say is urgent, but I am not aware of any individual in the organization claiming that their words are urgent enough to make more accessible with a free and open copyright license. Consequently, Wikipedia has conventional copyright restrictions on adapting their text into Wikipedia, reusing their data visualizations, or remixing what they have to say in translations. When this next report comes out, either it will be closed and have access restrictions, or perhaps somehow we can convince people to make it free.
How would people here feel about signing on to a drafted text which lays out a case for free and open media, saying that we wish for them to arrange a free media license for this report, and being public about the request? I am imagining that we could do this in a crowdsourced way as public letters. There might be 100-1000 people and organizations who need to agree to this, so applying a Wikimedia-compatible license to this one report would be an extraordinary feat of permission logistics. However, I feel like the IPCC is really operating with an anachronistic worldview for designing their publication to be incompatible with integration into the free media commons. The goal of restricting access with copyright is in conflict with the goal of increasing publicity, and I sense that there is a ripe opportunity to ask and request that the next IPCC report be free.
It might take a few months to coordinate writing letters or messages to enough people in IPCC to get all the consent to make this report free. What do others think? To what extent would Wikimedia projects benefit if this upcoming report were free? What reasons are there to avoid asking authors to make it free? Do we have standing to make requests of this sort to divisions of the United Nations, or is that somehow disrespectful or inappropriate? Blue Rasberry (talk)19:24, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
While having some of the IPCC graphics available would be nice, I think you're going about this the wrong way. For starters: I think that any kind of demand or pressure campaign would be unhelpful, might even create resentment. I suggest that a better way would be to start with some polite inquiries re the possibilities of "free" content, possible difficulties, and also whom to take this up with. In other words, check out the situation before pushing forward blindly.
Something to consider: many of the IPCC graphics are taken from journal articles, and are used by permission of the original copyright holders; the IPCC can't make them "free" because they are owned by someone else.
Another consideration: they may consider a standard copyright necessary to deter misuse of the content. We should know about that before making any broad requests.
I don't know what portion of the IPCC's vast output of graphics we could actually use, but I suspect it could be relatively small. In that case (and considering some of the other issues) it might be effort better spent to try getting a few graphics released to a suitable CC license. (That could also be an iterative approach in working out any problems.) If that can be done (and them and us work out how to do so) then we could see about a general process for getting individual graphics. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:27, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
I agree with J. Johnson here that we should see the IPCC as an ally and first inform what their barriers are. In terms of figures, they are often only useful if we can further simplify them as the IPCC makes abundant use of very detailed large figures. It is now very difficult to request permission (a signed physical letter that needs to be sent to Switzerland), so maybe we can request a simplification of that process? My supervisor is one of the lead authors for the next round of reports, I might ask him whether he's aware of any barriers. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:48, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
IPCC materials are free for non-commercial use and perhaps this already meets your requirements. Please see our copyright policy https://www.ipcc.ch/copyright/ . If you have any specific requests for us to consider please send them (ipcc-media@wmo.int as well as this page). We are currently reviewing copyright policy in the context of providing Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for our reports.Jonathanlynn (talk) 12:04, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for your quick reply! Unfortunately, the non-commercial license doesn't meet our requirements for two reasons: under IPCC's current licence we're not allowed any derivative works, which means that useful graphs cannot be simplified to be made useful for our audience. Secondly, we're only allowed material that is free for commercial use as well. The philosophy behind that is to provide true free knowledge to everybody and to make sure we can convert all of Wikipedia into offline resources that can be sold for a small fee in regions with limited internet access. Femke Nijsse (talk) 12:13, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
I agree with the philosophy of "if you want people to get your urgent message, make it freely licensed", but if it's going to be hard to persuade the IPCC of this then I doubt it's worth the effort. I appreciate how Blue Rasberry set out what kind of effort it could realistically take. From what I've seen of the IPCC's reports, there is some content that would help us if we could re-use it verbatim, but there isn't a ton of it. Even the IPCC's summaries "for policymakers" are more technical than what I think most policymakers can understand, so if the content was freely licensed, we would still need to rewrite it to make it more accessible. I think the best way for the IPCC to help us would be in providing subject matter expertise, so @Jonathanlynn:, it's great to see you here! Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 05:59, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Let's be clear: the restrictions in the IPCC copyright licensing (see https://www.ipcc.ch/copyright/) are, in some degree, inherited from the original licensors. There is little point in trying to persuade the IPCC regarding something controlled by a journal. For that we need something like Plan S. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:25, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
Collaboration with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
One of the great things that came out of WikiConference North America is that we met someone from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, who had come to the conference to discuss ways to work with Wikipedia. They understand the reach of Wikipedia and are particularly interested in working with us to educate the public on climate change. This is absolutely fantastic.
As a first step, this February they will host an editathon in Washington, DC focusing on climate change. We've been brainstorming with them around planning ahead to identify sources and target articles, so that the editathon makes the best use of attendees' time. If anyone would like to help with the planning, please contribute here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Climate change/NASEM EditathonClayoquot (talk | contribs) 19:08, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
Wonderful progress so far! I'm planning to focus on the Negative Emissions Technologies report as just getting my head around this report and our many articles in this area will probably take all my available time between now and the editathon. Does anyone else want to look at the other NASEM reports, or should we recommend focusing the editathon on NETs? NETs are plenty to cover in two days, I think.Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 18:34, 6 December 2019 (UTC)
Help with an edit on Climate change in the United States#Current and potential effects of climate change in the United States?
Hey all! The climate change in the United States article is big, old, and fairly popular. I've been doing some tinkering around the edges of the article, and now I'm doing some bigger section re-writes.
Sustainability wiki organization, plus vote for logo
For those who might not know this, we are in a "WikiProject", which is an on-wiki collaborative community. Off-wiki, there is a network of meta:Wikimedia movement affiliates where Wikimedia community members coordinate activities globally, offline, and often with non-wiki expert partner organizations such as universities. Typical "Wikimedia affiliate" organizations have $0 budget for 2-3 years as they develop, then often fundraise to an annual budget of US$3-5,000 to run some events or programs when they are stable. After two years groups get an invitation to participate in global Wikimedia administration at the Wikimedia Summit, the next of which is meta:Wikimedia Summit 2020.
I am sharing this context to invite anyone here to join meta:Wikimedians for Sustainable Development, a proposed new affiliate organization. There are not many defining goals for this community yet and there is no dedicated leadership, but the intent of the group is to develop Wiki knowledge about sustainability. I joined this organization. Everyone else is invited also.
Additionally - the organization is seeking community comment on its logo. See logo nominations at meta:Wikimedians for Sustainable Development/Logo. Even if you are not interested in joining, consider checking out the logos and participating in the decision, because this logo might get displayed in outreach which affects the field of study of this on-wiki WikiProject. Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk)21:29, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
At the Flickr album of Finnish scientist Antti Lipponen (@anttilip) are over fifty climate change graphics, almost all being videos (Link). The ones I've checked are licensed under "Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)" and may be valuable on Wikipedia.
While they are not scientific graphics, the photos at climatevisuals.org do a great gob in creating awareness about the climate crisis. If someone were able to implement one of these into an article, it might help a lot. Just make sure you only use those that have been licenced as creative-commons or were released to public domain.--80.110.20.106 (talk) 02:28, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
Unfortunately, most if not all of their CC images don't allow commercial reuse. Wikipedia requires that content be licensed in a way that allows commercial use and modification. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 06:28, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
That's right, most of them use CC-NC or ND licences, but some of them are also licenced as CC BY 3.0, and then there are the pictures which are public domain(rookie me assumes you can use and modify them). Even when you are making use of filters you have to search for a while until you find a good picture, and then you have to see if it fits into an article. It's some effort, but it pays out: For example, this picture[7](CC BY 2.0) of the demolition of Richborough Power Station might fit well into the wiki-article about the power station. They linked the flickr photo direcly on their website. Just wanted you to know, I will not take care of this myself because I'm currently busy with other things.80.110.20.106 (talk) 00:33, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
Suggested new articles
At Wikipedia:WikiProject Climate change/NASEM climate change editathon, we're in the process of analyzing what articles could use certain IPCC and NASEM reports as sources. There are some aspects of climate change that I could not find an article for. What do you all think about the following suggestions for new articles to create either before or during the editathon? In particular, does an article already exist for any of these that I've missed?
Should we add an article on Climate change temperature targets, e.g. what is the difference in the consequences of 2 degrees vs 1.5 degrees of warming? What was the history behind those targets? What is the concept of "overshoot" for a temperature target?
Should we add an article on Climate change mitigation pathway, an essential concept for understanding the IPCC's Global Warming of 1.5ºC report? We have an article on Climate change mitigation scenarios but the concept of a pathway seems to be different from what's described there.
The community has created a number of articles about climate change that didn't exist before. (evidenced by the number of articles that didn't have any pageviews)
The quality of articles are increasing the amount of engagement on the top and interlinking with other articles (evidenced by the increased traffic to some of the more visible articles) .
The broader public awareness that it's time to pay attention to climate change.
Anyway! Wanted to do a shoutout to everyone editing, paying attention to this, and the opportunity to have high impact and reach more eyes. This is the year of the Paris Agreement commitments, so expect more interest to come. Sadads (talk) 23:55, 21 January 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for letting us now, this is important information. My gut feeling is that it's the third of your three bullet points (which is good and sad; sad because climate change effects seem to be accelerating in many parts of the world...). All the more reason to put more effort into making this suite of articles good and informative! EMsmile (talk) 11:49, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
I'm not really here now, and don't expect to return any time soon. Thanks to everyone who has edited in the past is currently giving of themslves to do so now! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:13, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
Hi! I'm spending a fair bit of time editing the "Climate change in X" articles (Climate change in the US/Florida/Alaska/etc). I'm also expanding sources for other purposes over at my user page. Jusadi (talk) 02:43, 22 January 2020 (UTC) Edit: recently, though I realize that the vast majority of my time is going to edit wars over at Judith Curry. Ah well. Jusadi (talk) 17:55, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
So far I have mostly focused on trying to encourage climate scientists to contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia. This includes introducing them to the rules and style of editing on Wikipedia. I have a little bit of success with one three day workshop I co-organised and help run but I would like to do more such events. I personally have not -yet- gotten to the stage of adding a significant amount of content to Wikipedia on the subject. I tend to get distracted by current affairs type articles these days instead. Sadly it looks like current affairs/natural and human disaster topics seem to be rapidly merging with the issue of climate change. My editing tastes will likely evolve to reflect that change as time goes by.--Discott (talk) 07:44, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
I'm not a climate scientist, but I'm somewhat busy with computer science. If I find errors, I chime in, but I'm not actively looking for work right now. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:40, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
I have on my to-do list to work on readability aspects, i.e. I want to improve the language of the climate change articles to make them easier to understand for people without university degrees. Also, I would like to work on the "tree of articles" to make sure we don't have too many overlapping ones but have a clearer structure. To do this better, we had to move from "global warming" as a name to "climate change" so that all the sub-articles make more sense, i.e. many of the sub-articles had climate change in their title, e.g. "climate change adaptation" etc. The recent name change was highly welcomed by me (but is not yet complete). I am hoping to get some additional budget for my time so that this can become part of my day job, not just a hobby. EMsmile (talk) 11:47, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
@Goldsztajn: Very cool! I think the readability topic is really important, especially for these articles which straddle expert and public areas. Do you have any general suggestions about readability? Jusadi (talk) 12:48, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
I see Wikipedia as one of the few sources of information where people of different political schools meet and as a bridge is a polarized society. I like editing highly read and controversial pages for balance, friendliness and scientific accuracy. To make sure my prose is easy to read, I often ask for help from the WP:Guild of Copyeditors. My ultimate goal is to make sure all of our top10 mostly read articles are at least of WP:Good Article standard. Femke Nijsse (talk) 22:34, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
I developed articles on solar manufacturers and their scientific and technological progress, and work now on an article telling the story of robotics and autonomous vehicles. I have been 'verbally thanked' for some of those. I do 'stylistic adjustments' on many articles (involving phrasing, punctuation, etc.). MaynardClark (talk) 05:05, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
I mostly update environmental articles about Turkey, where I live. Now the block of Wikipedia in Turkey has been lifted it would be great if other people here could join in, and anyone who starts working on the Turkish language environmental articles might like to contact me to co-ordinate, especially if you can find the power plants missing from List of active coal fired power stations in Turkey which I am struggling with. Occasionally I edit more general climate change articles to relax, because it can be hard work finding sources for Turkey. If anyone is going to work on "greenhouse gas emissions by countryx" you might like to first review greenhouse gas emissions by Turkey, point out my mistakes and maybe reuse the pie chart code.Chidgk1 (talk) 12:49, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
I've been mostly working on the Sustainable energy article. I'm primarily interested in solutions to the climate change issue, i.e. mitigation and adaptation. I've also been identifying project-wide gaps in content, and I'm working with the NASEM collaboration to help experts understand Wikipedia so they can join us. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 16:48, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
For the past view months, I've been quite busy, thus restricting my time editing Wikipedia. Like Femkemilene, I'd like to see the most read articles brought up to GA status. I'll be spending most of my time on articles relating to climate change in Canada. Incorporating sources covering Indigenous perspectives and impacts, in line with Wikimedia Canada goals, is also very important in expanding the quality of these articles. Government and corporate responses to climate change, especially following natural disasters is another area I'm playing around with, as the current coverage on enwiki is quite lackluster. Daylen (talk) 09:47, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
I would like to create a page for climate services. Other than that, I've been editing climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and gender and climate change. KevinShore19 (talk) 15:42, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
Gnome here. Assessment is now down to 4 from 240. Not too certain about assessing importance or B class, so there's a lot left for someone more knowledgeable to look through. Have added to 2019 Midwestern U.S. floods, Ecological grief, Individual action on climate change; would like to see a DYK on methane emissions and California dairy (please feel free to use the linked material as I won't get to it anytime soon). My available bandwidth these days is gnoming random factoids on climate impacts, renewable energy, and climate mitigation from the popular press, and fixing bare urls. Oliveleaf4 (talk) 03:13, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
[Tell your story here]
[Tell your story here]
Popular pages
I've replaced the 'Showcase' tab with 'Popular pages' on the top of the page. The first was a pain updating, while the table of 1000 most read articles are updated by a bot. Please have a look if you like editing popular pages with low assessment ratings. Our top 3 most-viewed article for January were all C articles (with number 4 being promoted to GA status yesterday!), so we've got our work cut out for us. Femke Nijsse (talk) 15:20, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
A reminder that on Feb 21 and 22, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine will be hosting an editathon focusing on climate change, with experts on 1) negative emissions methods and 2) attribution of extreme weather events. Please give the new editors a warm welcome. If you have questions for the experts on either of these subjects, please drop a note on the talk page of the relevant article or on this project talk page, and ping me. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 19:18, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
I was recently asked by a journalist whether our articles are edited by people who seem to be from the fossil fuel industry, defending fossil fuels. Can any of you think of good examples of editing that show a clear pro-polluter POV? Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 23:00, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
I haven't seen that POV. Anti-climate, sure, but not pro-fossil fuel. I do most of my CC-related edits on explicitly climate-related pages (e.g. 'Climate Change in Virgina') Jlevi (talk) 14:49, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
Clayoquot, sure! If you look on the Talk:Judith Curry page, you can see one or two users who have tried to push climate-skeptic positions and skeptic articles onto the page (though I will say that they have made some excellent contributions outside of the climate side of WP--this looks like an individual with an opinion). I hesitate to name specific editors, but some of them make their positions obvious on their talk pages and have edited other climate-related pages in a similar manner.
One of the involved users also had a series of persistent additions over on Burt Rutan.
Other than that, not much. I watch a wide collection of climate-related pages, and most have nothing other than occasional IP-address vandalism. Jlevi (talk) 02:21, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
I think most recently anti-climate POV editors haven't really been active. The Greta Thunberg page has some anti-climate POV pushback against some of the pro-Thunberg POV editors, but apart from that not much recently.
In many pages the anti-climate POV was inserted about ten years ago, and the technical parts of it remain to this day. For instance, climate sensitivity was skewed towards anti-climate POV talking points over a year ago, as well as some aspects of climate change (general concept) a year ago. Non-English wikis are more vulnerable to this type of POV-pushers. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:49, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
That's a fairly loaded question, to be honest. There are editors who have described themselves as employed by the fossil fuel industry - I seem to remember one editor who was a former mining geologist. I've done consulting work for fossil fuel companies as recently as 2004, and more indirectly in 2006 or 2008. There are established editors who, in my opinion, are overly-sympathetic to the fossil fuel industry's point of view. And, of course, there's a fairly constant trickle of new editors showing up at places like Patrick Moore (consultant) to say the articles are biased. An influx might follow a news story or appearance on, say, Fox News, or might have no visible source.
I can't accuse someone of being a fossil fuel industry astroturfer without failing to AGF. More to the point, if I tried, I'd probably pick the wrong ones. It gets very difficult because climate change denial is a political position, so how do you separate the true believers from the industry apologists? Guettarda (talk) 15:00, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
Thus far, these are based mostly or entirely on quoted text from public domain reports of the U.S. EPA, so they could use some additional sources and rewriting before being ready for mainspace. Cheers! BD2412T00:07, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
There is an RfC on whether future Australian bushfire season article template start and end dates should use the official season or the beginning and end of significant fires. Please comment here --Pete (talk) 19:27, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
Perhaps you could merge it in as a complete chunk and then let me know and then I could check if anything was worth keeping and put that in the right place and delete the rest? Chidgk1 (talk) 17:24, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
1. Please take a peek at the contents under Category:Climate_change. Note there is a haphazard collection of sub-categories and article links. Only partially organized and thought through. For one thing, it isn't maximally useful to the reader due to the random mixture of things. I'm not expert in bot tools, but I think tuning this all up will produce better navigation aids etc.
2. Now please take a peak at WP:DIFFUSE, which is often used when a sprawling category is broken down as much as possible into subcategories.
POSSIBLE PROPOSAL
A. Well first of all, I called this a possible proposal because the first question is whether this is worth doing. Sure, it would be better, but would it be used enough to matter?
B. If yes let's think through a climate change sub category scheme from scratch... just ignore what's there now and imagine we were doing it with a blank slate.
C. Create our new and revised subcats and indicate that they are part of the revised scheme, to distinguish them from existing ones.
D. Mark Category:Climate change with {{category diffuse}} template. This will alert future editors to not just tag an article with category climate change, but rather put it into an appropriate sub-cat.
E. Audit articles under Category:Climate change to redistribute them to the new and revised subcategories. (At time of this audit users can also clean up legacy sub-category tags)
F. Finally, go through legacy sub-categories that did not "make the cut" for the new and revised scheme, and redistribute their contents until they can be deleted.
That's a lot of busy work. However, when Global warming passes FAR and gets featured there will be a big uptick in traffic and possible volunteers here. Is this worth pursuing?
I, personally, am done with trying to manage categories: Wikidata is a way more efficient tool for helping editors manage this kind of information, and most categories are kindof deadspace for readers, so in most situations you don't need both.
That being said, there are a number of pageviews to a few of the top level categories (for example, [8] or [9] -- so if you were to organize them, you would want to think about your reader vectors and what ideal paths you would want folks to travel -- but that probably is only something in the range of a few thousand readers a month effected. So, totally up to you, Sadads (talk) 16:32, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Climate change pageview stats
Hey all, wanted to follow up on the YoY pageview analysis that I did earlier in the year. In light of the Pandemic, it appears that attention in the English speaking world has significantly fallen off Climate Change topics generally. For the period of March 27-April 27 this year, we have see seen 7,354,733 pageviews. Last year there was a smidge over 8 million pageviews. It appears that last year the Green New Deal, Extinction Rebellion, and public attention on the issues related to climate change had a significant amount of attention this time last year. Sadads (talk) 20:20, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
Fixed with Special:Diff/956937617. The bot looks for section 1, which was broken with that closing noinclude tag on the same line as the section title. I can try to get better error handling in place so that it will skip pages with problems like this. But anyway, it's running now. My guess it will get to Climate change within the next 12 hours. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 04:07, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
Popular pages
I looked at the Popular Pages tab today, and found a jumbled list. "Effects of global warming" is 39th. Al Gore and Van Jones are in the top 5. Before I propose we try to retag articles to get different lists for different categories (e.g., science, policy, low carbon energy, people) I anticipate the first question anyone would ask is "What would be involved"? So by asking what would be involved now, I don't mean to imply we have made any such agreement. I'm just collecting info so we have an informed discussion. Could we make the Popular pages page into something with collapsed lists of popular pages by category? How would we go about doing that, assuming the group likes this idea? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:25, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
@NewsAndEventsGuy: So the popular pages is more of a "data insights" kind of page, less of a something we control -- remember its generated via bot based on pageviews -- so reflects the relative popularity by our audience. Also, remember, you can see the full list of articles by pageview in the links I added to the Hot Articles section. There is not much to be done on that front, as far as I can tell. Unless we do a massive purge of articles -- but the ones you mention like Al Gore, seem very appropriate.
If your question is "are we missing other topics that could be communicating climate change information?" Most certainly yes -- about a month or two ago, I did some serious reconfiguration of the article Seaweed farming and linking it with the findlink tool and other strategic additions to articles, and it appears to have made the pageviews to the article more consistently higher. When I first arrived at the page, it didn't have the climate change tag either.
If your question is more "how do we make the other articles about climate change" more prominent in Wikipedia? That is definitely a strategic question, and worth engaging in -- we know that biographies and "by geography" articles are broadly rising to the top of other major crisis, like COVID 19 coverage, and appear quite prominent when people look on google-- so for me there is a strategy there of trying to connecting biographies and geographic articles to the more science- or policy-centered articles about climate change. Imagine if the article about every major City in the United States connected in the lead and Climate sections to discussions of climate change -- the relative awareness and connection with readers would go up significantly. Also, both the Climate change in Africa and Climate_change_in_the_Middle_East_and_North_Africa articles, once created, rocketed quite high on the list -- so we know there is an appetite for more of these broad overviews about regions and issues -- though they are hard to write. I tried to capture some of them in the Wikipedia:WikiProject Climate change/Small_to_medium_tasks page, but more would be awesome. Sadads (talk) 13:17, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for reminding me of hot articles section on the main page. During my months long wikibreak I had forgotten about that, and a popular pages tab appeared in the project bar. My questions right now are
A are these both generated by bots based on category templates?
B Assume A=Yes, do the bots look to the same category template or different ones?
C What are we trying to comunicate with the "hot articles" list?
D What are we trying to communicate with the "popular pages" list?
E Given the similarity between "hot" and "popular" why do we present these lists in different ways and places, instead of side by side in one place?
E: Hot articles is more for editors to check in quickly on the WikiProject Homepage for what is "actively being worked on" to find other work (i.e. if a bunch of new editors have shown up in the project), while popular articles is less of a "I am going to act on this today" kind of thing -- hence why the popular articles is hidden away. Sadads (talk) 16:27, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Thanks..I'm not sure I agree the purpose of "popular articles is less of a "I am going to act on this today" kind of thing" but since you see it as not that.... what do you think the purpose of "popular article" might be? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 16:58, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Popular articles, because it runs after the end of a month instead of daily is kindof a temperature check at the end of each month: more of a "where has attention been" while the hot articles are more like "What is happening now", -- both serve kindof different ways of evaluating attention and with different communities being monitored (readers vs editors). They each serve different functions in my mind -- Hot articles reflects the community on the wikis now, while popular articles is more of a prioritization tool that can be digested slower over time to improve the experience of readers, Sadads (talk) 18:13, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Meetup page for September edit-a-thon? (SDG 13 and others)
I am looking for a WikiProject under which I can set up a meetup page for an online edit-a-thon in September for all the SDGs. Currently, I have temporarily put information about it here in Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_loves_Sustainable_Development_Goals#Global_Goals_Week_online_edit-a-thon_on_SDG_topics_in_September_2020 but I want to move it to be below a WikiProject. Would it be OK by you if I connected it to this WikiProject? The Meetup page will look similar to this one: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Sanitation_Wikipedia/2 (just an example for a previous edit-a-thon that I ran under WikiProject Sanitation). You might wonder why under WikiProject Climate change and not e.g. WikiProject Sanitation or WikiProject United Nations? Well climate change is a big one and it's the really important SDG 13, and this WikiProject is more active than others. It was also suggested to me in the Facebook group "Wikimedians for Sustainable Development Collaboration Group" as an idea. - And of course I would hope that many of the members of WikiProject Climate change could join us in September to work on SDG 13 and related articles. So far I have these ones on my list for improvement during the edit-a-thon for SDG 13 (the edit-a-thon will focus on improving existing articles, not on creating new ones, except an article on SDG 13):
Woot Woot! Very exciting, also User:Gnom and I are working on a list of potential high impact Wikipedia articles for translation for Climate Cardinals -- maybe we can add some more of those articles to this list as well? We have identified about 30 articles that would be really useful for translation, but could use some improvements to their leads (which are the easiest part to translate) by more experienced Wikimedians. Sadads (talk) 11:45, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Hi Femke Nijsse, NewsAndEventsGuy, Sadads, thanks for your supportive replies! So I will go ahead and dock this edit-a-thon onto this WikiProject by creating a Meetup page in the next few days. Like I mentioned, the week-long online edit-a-thon in September is for all 17 SDGs but the SDG 13 on climate change is so important that it's justified to use this WikiProject to dock onto. And it's so refreshing to see a WikiProject that is active and not dormant! I have added sustainable energy to my list - I already had it in the list but for SDG 7. Quite a few terms apply to several SDGs which is fine (many of them are interdependent). Sustainable energy only has 1400 daily views so not so many as of yet. That list for translation by Climate Cardinals is interesting. Do you consider the daily view rates when you decide what to work on? I think daily view rates are an important consideration. In general I only get motivated to work on articles when I know they have at least 500 views per day. Mind you, sometimes an article is important but as yet incomplete and not well interlinked and that could cause low view rates. So it can be a "chicken and the egg" thing. By the way, when I reviewed the view rates of about 200 articles that have a relevance for the SDGs I noticed that almost all of them had dropping view rates since about 6-12 months. I wonder if this is a general trend for Wikipedia (which would be sad) or if it's just these kinds of SDG-related topics or if it has something to do with Covid (perhaps people having less time for Wikipedia viewing). If this has already been discussed elsewhere please point me in the right direction. EMsmile (talk) 02:36, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes, I consider view rates in two ways - the obvious (working on high traffic articles like global warming and also by following my frustration, where something I think should be widely read and is not. Thus, by tracking view rates, I can guage the return on my invested efforts. I haven't been very active lately but I used to use this approach for feedback. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:40, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
I have now set up the meetup page for the edit-a-thon in September, see here (work in progress). I have also set up a general meetup page for Wikiproject Climate change (I hope I did it correctly). It looks like this: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Climate_change . Could this possibly be linked from the project's front page under a heading of "events"? EMsmile (talk) 05:42, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
@EMsmile: So the data that Gnom and I are collecting is based on a mix of Top importance articles + Popular articles, plus a new method that I am helping the WMF experiment with in my day job at [10] (I have a not as well maintained set of this data based on Climate Change) . One of the problems with pageviews is that it reflects the audience we have now, which if you look at my analysis further up: has been in significant decline for climate change because of the Global attention on COVID, and also reflects the biases of our communities: for that readership data maps against the gender gap.
High pageview current articles doesn't always = high impact in terms of reach or potential. I suspect this is especially true for the climate change content, where there are a lot of different topics where we aren't dominant in Google searches yet because of competing content on the web, poor SEO and poor interlinking within Wikipedia. Improving the context and interlinking of these articles into other high traffic articles, and identifying topics that may be smaller but related, seems important as well. I don't want that to be a reason why we don't work on the high pageview articles, but importance =/= pageviews -- and so it is important that we are also making editorial judgements that improve the visibility of these other topics as well. Sadads (talk) 13:49, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
As for general pageview trends, we were quite up YoY during the initial COVID situation, but it appears we are back into a pageview area similar to the normal Norther Hemisphere summer slump. I suspect that climate pageviews were way up end of last calendar year, beginning of this one because of the protests and a consistent thread of conversations about Greta, etc. Going into Crystal ball zone -- alot of EnWiki's traffic is driven by US pop culture stuff, so if the Biden campaign wins, I suspect there will be a lot of attention on the Energy transition and Just transition if we are looking for popularity -- but again I don't think that is necessarily the stuff that we need to "solve" in terms of impact -- pop culture topics tend to get improvements because of the sudden attention in the news, for me its those mid-range pageview topics (800-3000 a month) that ought to be more visible, where we can probably make a lot more speedy impact because those articles are more relevant to local/actionable information (i.e. Climate change in South Africa). Sadads (talk) 14:00, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
Climate Justice task force
Dear all,
you may notice I started a new tab for a new Climate justice focus area (I also added a tab for the existing Africa task force). This task force page is bare now but I intend to build it out in advance of a project/event @Sadads: and I are working on. Feel free to add any and all info/ideas! -- phoebe / (talk to me) 22:03, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
Adding a section called "events"?
I am just wondering how you would all feel about adding a section header called "events" on the project page? It could have as sub-headings: "past events" and "future events". Under "past events" we could e.g. link to the presentations and videos from the sessions at Wikimania Stockholm 2019. Under "future events" I would like the mention the upcoming online edit-a-thon for all SDGs (SDG 13 being of relevance to this project), i.e. this one: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Climate_change/Online_edit-a-thon_SDGs_September_2020EMsmile (talk) 05:36, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Under past events one could also list this one: African Climate Change edit-a-thon, Aug 2019 (in person) - it was perhaps not strictly speaking under this WikiProject although it should have been and can serve as a good model for future online edit-a-thons on climate change topics. EMsmile (talk) 05:39, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
@Phoebe: I know that we have the task-force/event hybradization going on for a lot of these -- how do you think its best to organize those, Sadads (talk) 14:43, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
I like the idea of an events page / section - we can move the events from the task force pages but have a section linking back to the main events page? -- phoebe / (talk to me) 21:46, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
@Chidgk1: I am not sure I see value in an additional process -- that would require the very small group of us who are active, to actively maintain another bureaucracy -- I am not sure if I am quite invested in that. The other option for improving articles might be putting something through Wikipedia:Peer review -- doesn't have quite the same "quality indicator" kind of impact, but could be a good way to get feedback from us and FA article reviewers, Sadads (talk) 15:30, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
I agree that I don't really want the A class as an extra layer of bureaucracy. The review doesn't lead to any corrections, you may want to consider asking for a mentor, as getting an article featured is quite difficult. You can find a list of people that might be interested here: Wikipedia:Mentoring for FAC. As a small note, featured article reviews are for articles that are already featured, but need some checking. You would go for the featured article candidate process. I think it's really cool that you're trying to get a new featured article for this project. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:55, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
I've just created a short new article on clean fuel but as it's not my area of expertise I wanted to check with you guys if I am on the right track with this. Previously, the term "clean fuel" redirected to "biofuel" which was wrong. I am a bit confused if clean fuel solely focuses on lower indoor air pollution or if it refers also to lower CO2 emissions. Perhaps there is already a long article on it but under a different name? The term "clean fuel" is used in the terminology for SDG 7, that's how I came across it. EMsmile (talk) 08:24, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
Hi all,
Bringing this here because it's rather complicated.
I propose we get rid of Individual and political action on climate change (which has a whopping average 57 page views/day) on the grounds that it is duplicative of existing articles, is wildly incomplete, and has a confusing title. We can merge it in with articles about its component parts as follows:
everything under political action be added into climate movement
information about international political frameworks already exists in many places
individual actions (diet etc) be combined into Individual action on climate change (and then clean up the individual action article, also adding a section about individual participation in protests)
It appears that every current tropical storm (most recently Hurricane Delta) is being talkpage-tagged with the project banner. I propose we take individual storms out of this project's scope (and thus remove the banner), for three reasons 1) the link between climate change and any individual storm is tangential at best, 2) recentism: shouldn't we then banner every storm since 1970 (or thereabouts) for consistency?; and 3) the current tagging clogs notification pages, watchlists and categories and thus distracts the project from working on much more obviously relevant content (such as biographies of climate scientists, etc.). Thoughts? UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:53, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
UnitedStatesian, my reason for tagging a small subset of tropical storms is that climate change was a significant part of their media coverage and they are exemplars of how storms are chaning under global warming (rapid intensification, high intensity). I've noticed an underreporting of climate change on articles about tropical storms, even when climate scientists do put out statements about the storms having a connection to climate change in large numbers. The science of individual event attribution is also growing, and there are plans to have event attribution of tropical cyclones be part of operational meteorology, so I would disagree that the link tangential.
In short: most tropical cyclones should not be tagged I believe, only those which reliable sources link to climate change in large numbers. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:30, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
The problem is that every tropical cyclone worldwide that makes a significant landfall will generate media, that talks about climate change especially this year when we have had an above-average season in the Atlantic. However, as I understand it the amounts of vertical windshear over the basins is also increasing, which is why we are not seeing an increase in tropical cyclones. As a result, I wonder if it isn't better to keep the stuff about Climate Change out of individual tropical cyclone articles, unless there is something more substantial then Delta's rapid intensification is consistent with climate change projections.Jason Rees (talk) 19:48, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
there is a difference between generating a bit of media attention, and many major climate scientists commenting on the link in reliable news outlets like the New York Times. In the first case, I think climate change shouldn't be mentioned. In the second case, it seems like a grave omission not to mention it. You're right that the frequency of tropical cyclones doesn't seem to be increasing much, but I don't see how that is relevant here... There is good documented evidence (not only projections) on rainfall intensification, windspeed intensification, and a higher occurrence of rapid intensification.
An analogy: when some notable person dies who had been threatened and reliable sources mention this in great numbers, we will add it as well, even though most people die of natural deaths. We add it before a court case has taken place (before formal event attribution has occurred). I don't see why tropical cyclones are any different. When research was less certain as it is now (say five years ago), adding this link would arguably have amounted to speculation, but we are past that. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:09, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
Done The draft was reviewed and moved live, with redirects from the two predecessor organizations. 16912 Rhiannon (Talk · COI) 22:28, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:ExxonMobil climate change controversy#RfC: Context of Natuna gas field on the impact of climate expertise on ExxonMobil operational planning. Should the following, bolded for clarity, be added to ExxonMobil climate change controversy?
I've gone over it and given it a light polish. Not much to report there: some minor grammar and/or punctuation tweaks, mostly on prepositions and so on; one or two shuffles of sentences for clarity or ease of reading. I've made more specific the thickness of ice caps and added conversion between km and miles for the non-metric enabled folks. Also changed one statement: plants can't fix nitrogen, that's naturally done by micro-organisms in the soil, which is why we're over-using fertilisers. And I picked up one other thing. In the section "Components of the climate system", is it worth mentioning that evaporation at the surface increases the proportion of salt in that layer of water, therefore increasing the density of the water, which helps with circulation? I think it's a fairly minor effect, so it may not be that significant.
.jpg)
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Rice University supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2013 Q1 term. Further details are available on the course page.