Talk:Climate change/Archive 79

This is an archive of past discussions about Climate change. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 75

←

Archive 77

→

Preliminary discussion concerning possible Requested Move of "Global warming"

In parallel with the Move Request from "Climate change" to "Climate change (general concept)" and changing the "CC" article to a redirect to the present article "Global warming" (October 30, 2019 closing diff), various suggestions were made to move the present article, which describes current warming of Earth's climate system.

Both colloquially (popularly) and in Reliable Sources, this subject matter is widely referred to both as GW and as CC, raising the issue as to what this destination article should be titled. I open this section in hopes that, eventually, a formal Move Request proceeds with sound reasoning and with all reasonable viewpoints fairly considered. To start things, I list the following proposals that I have noticed so far. Please add to the table, make procedural suggestions below, and discuss your reasoned preferences below, to achieve consensus. —RCraig09 (talk) 22:59, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Subsection: Table to help gauge consensus

Editors:

Add your account name only (no comments or conditions) to the appropriate table box(es). Use a line break ''<br>'' to avoid wraparound.
You may of course amend your entries later.
Do not feel the need to express on each proposed name!

Proposed article name	Strong support	Mild support	Mild oppose	Strong oppose	Neutral or Undecided
Global warming (no change)	J. Johnson	Chidgk1 Tdslk	Femkemilene Mu301	RCraig09 Efbrazil EMsmile NAEG
Global warming and climate change	RCraig09 Red Slash François Robere NAEG J. Johnson	Efbrazil Chidgk1	Femkemilene Tdslk	Mu301 EMsmile
Anthropogenic global warming and climate change		J. Johnson RCraig09		Femkemilene Efbrazil Mu301 EMsmile NAEG Tdslk
Human-caused global warming and climate change		Chidgk1 RCraig09		Femkemilene Efbrazil J. Johnson Mu301 NAEG Tdslk
Climate change (global warming)	Efbrazil	Chidgk1		Femkemilene J. Johnson Mu301 NAEG Tdslk RCraig09
Global warming (climate change)		Chidgk1		Femkemilene Efbrazil J. Johnson Mu301 NAEG Tdslk RCraig09
Climate change	Efbrazil Femkemilene Mu301 EMsmile Chidgk1 RCraig09 LeviBailey Gabaix	Tdslk	Red Slash	J. Johnson NAEG
Global climate change		Femkemilene	Tdslk Mu301	Efbrazil J. Johnson NAEG
Modern climate change		Femkemilene	Efbrazil J. Johnson Tdslk	Mu301 NAEG
Anthropogenic climate change (or) Human-caused climate change (or) Climate change (anthropogenic) (or) Climate change (human-caused)	RCraig09			Mu301 Femkemilene	NAEG
___
___

Subsection: Reasoning table (Editors: please add to this table)

Be BRIEF and CONCISE! Add others' fair arguments, pro and con, not only your own. Cite policy whenever possible.

Use a line break "<br>" to minimize wraparound, and a hyphen "-" to denote a newline.

Proposed article name	Policy "FOR" Be CONCISE!	Policy "AGAINST" Be CONCISE!
Global warming (no change)	-WP:NATURAL (searches and int. links) -WP:Concise -WP:PRECISE (Not the fault of the title that editors have exceed the scope.) -WP:COMMONNAME of specific topic. - Does not preclude separate CC article.	-RS usage of "GW" less than half "CC" and waning -Not WP:PRECISE because too restrictive -Not WP:NEUTRAL as it disregards all other CC aspects.
Global warming and climate change	-"GW", "CC" individually fit WP:COMMONNAMEs ↳Google searches "GW" and "CC" lead here ↳Internal searches "GW" and "CC" lead here -Refutes "they changed the name" myth -WP:NPOV because it doesn't pick sides -WP:RECOGNIZABILITY focuses on nonspecialists -Suggests GW→CC causation^{under some definitions} -Consistent precedent: Deforestation and climate change -Consistent precedent: Climate change and agriculture	-Not WP:CONCISE -Title as a whole not WP:COMMONNAME -Title as a whole not WP:NATURAL -WP:AND should be avoided if possible -Implies terms are distinct, instead of CC superset of GW -Positions "GW" first despite: ↳"GW" not being WP:precise ↳"GW" usage less than half that of "CC"
Fork into separate Global warming and climate change articles	-WP:Concise -WP:PRECISION -WP:NATURAL -WP:COMMONNAME -WP:SIZE -WP:SUMMARYSTYLE -Distinguishes distinct topics. -"GW", "CC" individually fit WP:COMMONNAMEs. -Distinguishes causes from effects. -Doesn't try to make CC cover EVERYTHING! -Gives CC more space to cover CC subtopics. -Doesn't suppress important aspects of GW. -Doesn't explode the ITR article w/ out-of-scope content. -Doesn't penalize readers that don't "synonymize". -Educates other readers that these are distinct topics.	-Practically inextricable WP:OVERLAP of substantive GW and CC content: ↳ LOOP: Causes -->(GW-->CC) -->effects -->(feedback) -->Causes ... ↳ Observation: causes of GW ~same as causes of CC ↳ Observation: effects of GW ~same as effects of CC ↳ Conclusion: can't choose which article gets causes/effects content ↳ GW considered part of CC by some definitions -Re WP:PRECISE: this article's substantive content (entire loop, above) matches what laymen (=most WP readers) seek -Public (=WP readers) use two terms ~interchangeably -"Educate readers" re inextricably intertwined terms in one place, not two -GW minutiae proper in Instrumental temperature record (now ~50kytes) -CC concepts already in CC (general concept)
Anthropogenic global warming and climate change Human-caused global warming and climate change	-Describes subject matter WP:PRECISION -Shows GW→CC causation^{under some definitions}	-Not WP:CONCISE -Not WP:COMMONNAME -WP:AND should be avoided if possible -Anthropogenic too difficult for lay audience. -Not WP:NATURAL
Climate change (global warming)	-Disambiguates vs "CC(GenCon)" -Correctly places "Climate change" as primary title	-Incorrectly insinuates GW=CC -Doesn't follow WP:PARENDIS
Global warming (climate change)		-Incorrectly insinuates GW=CC -Doesn't follow WP:PARENDIS
Climate change	-WP:CONCISE -RS usage of "CC" > double "GW", growing -WP:NATURAL (searches & int. links) -"CC"^{narrow definition} is PRECISE scientific usage - Preferred by GW deniers.	-"CC" also has broad definition: WP:PRECISION issue ↳Not as descriptive/informative as "global warming" -Possibly not WP:NEUTRAL - sidelines warming, human factor -"CC"^{broad definition} is too broad: WP:PRECISE & WP:SIZE issues, not scientific usage.
Global climate change
Modern climate change
Anthropogenic climate change (or) Human-caused climate change (or) Climate change (anthropogenic) (or) Climate change (human-caused)	-Describes subject matter WP:PRECISION -RS usage of "CC" double "GW" and growing "ACC" does fit WP:COMMONNAME -Disambiguates vs "CC(GenCon)"	-Not WP:COMMONNAME -Doesn't follow WP:PARENDIS Anthropogenic too difficult for lay audience.
___
___

Sub-sub-section: comments about "Reasoning table"

For discussion relating to the table itself; not to present substantive arguments

I don't think this table is going to work, per the WP:TPG. There isn't any way to sign, and it invites edit warring when multiple people try to write WP:OTHERSOPINION at the same time. That exercise is about a single editor trying to understand and restate others opinions. By definition, it is a solo (single-editor) exercise. But the idea is great. Would you consider moving it to your user space and leaving a pointer diff here, kind of like I did during the climate change RM? (Userspace table and pointer diff). There may be other ways to organize this, but just multi editing a summary table seems like a recipe for problems. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:45, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Greetings @NewsAndEventsGuy: The "Concise^(snicker) opinions on specific article names" section, below, is already ~~~8500~~ 10,100 words long and ~~over twelve~~ about fourteen screenfuls on a desktop! Newly arriving editors will simply not read that Wall of Words—it's Yuge and getting Yuger!!!. This table will "work" since it distills essential arguments, pro and con, reducing unnecessary verbiage below from new people who might not find an existing thread buried in the 8500+ words. Purposely, there is no place for signed arguments: that's what the first table is for! It's definitely not a solo-editor exercise, as any editor can, and hopefully will, modify it. As an aside, I think that the "Neutral" column in the first chart does not aid decision-makers' cogitations, and I suggest it be removed as it may worsen wraparound on smaller screens. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:41, 8 November 2019 (UTC) updated RCraig09 (talk) 18:56, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

A few paragraphs of substantive discussion that don't belong here have been moved below, to "Subsection: Concise opinions on specific article names". (diff) (link to new location) —RCraig09 (talk) 00:59, 10 November 2019 (UTC) and RCraig09 (talk) 17:05, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

I have not previously engaged with this table because it looks like a boondoggle: "work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value." I appreciate the attempt, and even welcome it as a valiant try, but it has some serious deficiencies. A fundamental deficiency is that "BRIEF and CONCISE!" citations of policies provides no scope for actual reasoning – "the drawing of inferences or conclusions from known or assumed facts; use of reason; [or] the proofs or reasons resulting from this." (YDMV.) This table has only tags that (mostly) only point to a policy which someone thinks provides a basis for an argument. There is no argument, no reasoning, just these tag lines which apparently are supposed to be self-evident. They provide no basis for building consensus by (per WP:Consensus#Consensus-building) considering "the quality of the arguments, the history of how they came about, the objections of those who disagree," in addition to policies.

Another deficiency: the underlying issues are not identified. (E.g.: is the problem that a title is not consonant with an article's content? Or is it the content that is not consonant with the title? Two different formulations of a problem, which suggest two different solutions.) Also: the options proposed are stated without regard to whatever the driving problem is, or to any factors that might affect their suitability, or to alternatives.

I may make some additions, but I still think this is a boondoggle. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:41, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

The Reasoning table concentrates the major applicable policies/guidelines developed in the ~THIRTY desktop-screenfuls of discussion in the Preliminary Discussion (begun 30 Oct 2019) and the ~NINETEEN desktop-screenfuls of discussion in the Second Discussion (begun 2 Dec 2019). —RCraig09 (talk) 07:23, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

"[C]oncentrates the major applicable policies/guidelines ..."? This page is not the place to concentrate policies, etc., but perhaps you meant something like "succinct links to policy-based arguments developed elsewhere". Which would be fine with me (as a meaningful statement), except that we have neither such linkage in the table, nor developed arguments to link to. To be clear: by developed I mean with objections addressed, loose-ends tied down, key premises identified, etc. For all the verbiage that you seem to think counts for something, we have not resolved these arguments that this table supposedly "concentrates". ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 01:26, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Subsection: When to proceed

~~(A) I don't understand the structure above, if you meant to make subsections they aren't subsections and if you meant to just use bold I don't understand the purpose of the bold text.~~ (struck after some reformatting of OP) (B) Please consider withdrawing for a little bit. In these difficult waters, I think we'll have the best community and strongest consensus if we use the walking path instead of the railroad. A lot of people probably haven't yet realized the change took place, much less had a chance to consider formal undo efforts. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:20, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

~~(A) I didn't plan a particular "structure".~~ (B) Some opposed the CC-->CC(GenCon) move out of concern for what would happen to "GW"! These changes—including any (hypothetical) "undo efforts"—are interrelated and should be thoughtfully and comprehensively coordinated. This Preliminary Discussion is the opposite of railroading, and helps concerned editors "realize the change took place". Notably, if we had all "withdrawn a bit" on the necessary issue of how to redirect "CC" after the move, then the CC Move Closer would not have made the CC-->GW redirect and we would not have come this far. —RCraig09 (talk) 00:08, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

I have some ideas to add to the list. The previous discussion has left me exhausted however and I would like to postpone this discussion at least until we have fixed all the internal links that now incorrectly point here. I think that is a matter of some urgency at least, which might need a small army of volunteers not elsewhere distracted. Would that work for you? Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:49, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
- I don't see harm in opening a discussion on this now. If you're worried about backlash, I think this discussion would be a productive place to direct any backlash, instead of having it go into the already completed move. All the "climate change" links now point here and "climate change" is the modern term for "global warming", so the need for a rename that includes "climate change" in the title is obvious. Efbrazil (talk) 19:04, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

With subsiding numbers of posts or new ideas on this topic, are we ready for a formal Move Request now? Related: It's been a month since the 30 Oct creation of Climate change (general concept), without specific objection or alternative proposals since that date. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:31, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Move to which title? I don't see that a strong consensus has settled on a single target name. --mikeu ^talk 19:45, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

There is a strong consensus to move away from Global warming. True, there are two favorite destinations, not one, but that's what a formal move request might (hopefully) resolve. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:03, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Negative: there is not "strong consensus to move away from Global warming". The current lull in discussion is partly because we're all busy with other work (and NAEG is taking a wikibreak). I have been quiet because I am doing research on the terms (and being laggard on writing anything). But so far we do not have well-developed, factual and/or policy-based arguments, and various points are yet to be resolved. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:53, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

"When to proceed" is more recently under discussion below, at #Proposal to reevaluate in one or two years. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:16, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Subsection: How to proceed

Any comments on how to conduct any prospective Move Request

I've started this section because several possible article names have already been suggested, and we should at least narrow the choice(s) down before any formal Move Request. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:47, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

To launch the formal RM proposal we should close this "preliminary" thread and all of its subsections using {{Archive top}} and {{Archive bottom}} NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 11:03, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Before we launch a formal RM proposal, we have to find a way to decide whether it's going to be GW+CC or CC or decide to put both options on the table. I think it's quite clear that those are the only two options with wide support now. Femke Nijsse (talk) 11:57, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I think the next step is to start a new round of discussion on just the top contenders. Personally, I found this discussion to be chaotic, disorganized, confusing, and most difficult to follow. (To be fair - I also found the discussion thought provoking and nescessary. I just found the procedure to be hapzard.) I'd like to make a suggestion for formatting and discussion flow for the next round that I've found useful on other projects:

Have a list of questions with yes/no answers. ie. 1) should this page move to Title One, 2) or should... Title Two

Beneath each question have statements by individual contributors about the topic, under their own headings, not to exceed 700 words. Threaded and long-form discussions should take place under a general heading beneath contributor headings. Statements may contain links to other discussions or longer statements on another page.

A participant can collapse a prior statement within their own section and replace it with a new one if they change their mind later.

--mikeu ^talk 22:27, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

I agree that a round with the top two contenders is now the way to go. I think it is best to only consider climate change and global warming and climate change, as these have way more support than the other names and way fewer people strongly against. This should solely focus on which one should be brought forward for a formal renaming proposal. I suspect all content-related arguments have been brought forward between the contesters for a new name, with only some small clarifications and summaries needed.

Once we have a rough consensus, OR a few (one of two might be enough) weeks of clear disagreement about the best title (but continuing rough consensus that new title might be desirable), we propose one of the two.

I like your proposal of a maximum word count. Seven hundred is quite a lot, and I think that we'd benefit from a smaller word count (400?) as one of the means to restrict vocal people like me. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:26, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Subsection: Concise opinions on specific article names

Suggested format: ● Your preferred article name: concise reasoning.

Climate change (global warming)

The term global warming was renamed to climate change back in the George W Bush administration in US government communications, and the change has stuck. It's the IPCC after all, not the IPGWCC or whatever. The parenthesis in the proposed title will make it clear what the scope is and will clearly differentiate the article from Climate change (general concept). The rename from "global warming" to "climate change" was partly made to clarify that "global warming" had more effects than just temperature increase, but the terms are used to refer to the same phenomena and we should not introduce confusion by implying they are different concepts (using "and") when somebody is looking up information on wikipedia. Efbrazil (talk) 19:04, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

GW Bush admin. shift is discussed at Frank Luntz#Global warming . . dave souza, talk 11:40, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Just getting the facts straight: climate change was already the preferred term before this one adviser to Bush tried to push it. See https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.htm. It was always the most popular term in scientific writing. US English btw lags behind on other variants in uptake CC vs GW (see Google trends). Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:21, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

As the source says; re 'global warming' vs. 'climate change', "In reality, the two terms mean different things ...... Both of the terms in question are used frequently in the scientific literature, because they refer to two different physical phenomena." . . . dave souza, talk 11:40, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, that's a good source. A key point that the article skips though is that from 1988 NASA testimony about global warming to congress to the defeat of Al Gore in 2000, there was a preference for using the term global warming in US public debate. Even in the 2006 Al Gore film an inconvenient truth, the term "global warming" is used 24 times and "climate change" is not used once. Since that time, there's been a steady trend towards climate change as the term, partly because of its use in the scientific community. The graph in your article captures some of that transition. I think this article has the most depth on the issue that I've seen: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/01/29/debunking-the-claim-they-changed-global-warming-to-climate-change-because-its-cooling/ Efbrazil (talk) 20:31, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

@Efbrazil, I disagree with your (apparent) premise that GW and CC are the same concept. Properly defined, they are different. Per the newly-organized second paragraph (this diff), the concepts are are different concepts, even though readers arrive at this article from two directions (readers 'using both "GW" and "CC"). The "and" in "GW and CC" contrasts these two different concepts. —RCraig09 (talk) 03:47, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

@RCraig09, I'm really fine with that point of view. I think the key thing is having the first two words of the article title be "climate change" since that's what I think the article title will inevitably be- the tack on terms will get stripped in time. Climate change is both the more popular term now and, in proper terms, the scope of the article is climate change since it includes desertification and ocean acidification and so on. The reason I slightly prefer "climate change (global warming)" is it disambiguates nicely from "climate change (general concept)" and it makes it clear that climate change is the scope of the article, demoting global warming to a scoping clarifier. Efbrazil (talk) 17:37, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

@Efbrazil: I agree, and "CC" may eventually supplant "GW" in the literature but^{as noted below a few minutes ago} I favor "GW & CC" because^{to oversimplify} GW is the cause and CC is the effect, and the concepts are inextricably linked. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:55, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Cause and effect — exactly. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:38, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Efbrazil: Your initial comment that GW has "more effects than just temperature increase" is incorrect. Global warming is the temperature increase (of the earth's climate system), of which all the other aspects of current climate change are the effects. The current GW is a specific, measurable phenomena, and the effect of (primarily) anthropomorphic emissions (mainly CO2 and methane). These are NOT "the same phenomena", regardless of how much these terms are muddled in the mass media. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:16, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

JJ, I didn't look up the DIFF but we just had this same back and forth a few days ago. The technical "global warming" is about Global surface temperature and does not include the whole climate system, for example, Ocean heat content (i.e., warming below the surface) is not included. See Dave's excellent collection of sources here for more. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:26, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

I don't see where "we just had this same back and forth a few days ago" (it is difficult to keep up with all this stuff), so perhaps you could provide a timestamp, so I could we what you are referring to. You seem to think that GW is equivalent to Global surface temperature, and your statement that GW "does not include the whole climate system ..." is a bit of a head-scratcher. Are you thinking that GW is properly restricted to Global surface temperature, and therefore should exclude ocean heat content? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:42, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

I asserted this on your own talk page oct 26 here. We never dove into sources though. Have you reviewed the sources in the Archive 75 link I provided? For one, see NASA, "Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature...." (bold added) [1] NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 00:31, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

NAEG: Our "back and forth a few days ago" on this was your two sentence assertion on my Talk page that "the technical narrow definition of GW does not include, for example, Ocean heat content", and that, "defined narrowly, GW is about rising mean Global surface temperature." An assertion of a technical narrow definition, which in no way amounts to a discussion on THIS page of the suitability of this term for this topic.

I grant that "global warming" has been "defined" – technically and narrowly – in terms of "Global Mean Surface Temperature" (GMST) (see the IPCC reports). That definition of what is being measured is primarily surface temperatures because historically that was the only measurement instrumentrally accessible. As it turns out, the oceans store a lot of the heat in the climate system, and measurement of the Earth's temperature is incomplete (and even erratic) without accounting for "ocean heat content".

Yes, I have reviewed most of Dave's sources. And if you would review a little deeper into the NOAA Climate.gov page you cite you will see where Kennedy and Lindsey say that regardless of whether you use "global warming" in a technically narrow or popularly broad sense, "you’re essentially talking about the same basic phenomenon: the build up of excess heat energy in the Earth system." Note: excess heat energy in the Earth system. I also grant that NOAA (and even the IPCC) haven't really explained that in any public statements. (Perhaps due to the difficulty of explaining the difference between "heat" and "temperature"? I presume everyone here understands the difference between a form of energy, and its measurement, yes?) The IPCC (AR5 WG1 Ch1, p129) does refer to surface temperature as an indicator of climate change.

This distinction between "heat" and "temperature" is a crucial point in two respects: (1) greenhouse gases do not capture (retain) temperature, they capture heat. and (2) temperature – particularly mean surface temperature – is not always a complete measure of warming. A case in point: the "hiatus" a few years back, where the deniers claimed (correctly) that measurements of temperatures were not increasing as predicted. As it turns out, warming, in the sense of heat, did continue to increase, but was being diverted into (!) the deep ocean.

The concept that "global warming" is more than just surface temperature is a powerful explicator in many CC issues. Even if we don't want to say as much as that, it is a valuable aid in understanding some of these issues. I think we should at least avoid any formulation that perpetuates misunderstandings. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:56, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Climate change as this is BY FAR the most universally used term, conforms to WP:CONCISE, and is consistent with many, many other WP articles/categories that already have "climate change" (not "global warming") in their titles (such as Climate change denial). The content here can be distinguished with the separate broader topic covered at climate change (general concept) by hatnotes in both articles. UnitedStatesian (talk) 19:41, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

I'd be happy with this as well, I just didn't want to overreach. Efbrazil (talk) 19:57, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Though you are correct that "CC" is definitely gaining favor (even in popular use), as Femke notes above^{(19:21, 31 Oct)} the U.S. is slow to adopt; more importantly, since "GW" and "CC" are not properly interchangeable,^{(see my above 03:47 1 Nov post)} to eliminate "GW" altogether would obscure this still-important distinction from readers. Maybe when use of "GW" effectively disappears, the article name can change. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:07, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes to "still-important distinction", but I strongly disagree about "when use of "GW" effectively disappears...." As I have stated before, global warming identifies a specific phenomena which is not "going away", and the "effective disappearance" of the term in favor of the blander, less "alarmistic", and broader "climate change" is politically contrived.

Back in the "Climate change" move discussion I suggested (21:30, 28 Oct.) that the ulterior purpose of the move was to "have "climate change" entirely supplant "global warming"." RCraig09 stated he couldn't conceive how that result could possibly come about, but here we are: a suggestion that this article be renamed "Climate change". ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:40, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

JJ, when you accuse folks of this alleged '"ulterior motive" you're talking about an RM in which I was the original proposer. Please provide a diff showing where I have ever - even just once - suggested renaming this article as you accuse me of trying to do. If you can't find one, please explain why you accuse me of this? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 01:56, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

@JJ In my Oct 28 post that you cite, I was referring to the concepts of GW and CC, not to the title of this GW article. In the above Table I mildly oppose re-titling to "CC" but if, ~ten years from now, "GW" is ~never used by sources or searched for by readers, then a rename excluding "GW" will be appropriate; the content will still be here to explain the critical concept of "GW-->CC" causation. Note that, substantively, GW is merely an intermediate step: GHGs --> GW --> CC; I'm not seeing why you're "defending" GW since its substantive content is not at risk. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:47, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

@J. Johnson, your arguments here seem to contradict the position you take in the voting table. If your position is that global warming as a term should be limited to temperature only, then the content of this article is clearly out of step with that since only a small section of the article is dealing with temperature change specifically, and most of the article deals with other impacts and issues that clearly fit the scope of the term "climate change". Do you want to see two different articles, where the current article content becomes "climate change" but there is also a second, newer article covering "global warming"? Do you want to see no changes at all, meaning there should be no article on "climate change" at all? Your position here is confusing and an outlier in comparison with other views, so I think it would be good if clarified what you want to see happen. Efbrazil (talk) 19:06, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

My apologies to all for lagging behind the pack (I'm having some acesss issues), and I will try to catch up real soon. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk)

NAEG: Diff. ("... we could improve the stub Global surface temperature with the addition of sections #Global warming and #Global cooling.") ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 01:36, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

RCraig09: It's not the substantive content of this article that I am concerned about, but its reframing as merely "climate change". As to whether that would be appropriate in ten years is immaterial, as (please note which section we are in) this is being proposed here and NOW.

I also object to basing the choice of terminology on Google searches, but I will address that elsewhere. I most certainly agree that GW is an effect of GHG, but I would not describe it as "merely an intermediate step". It is the connection from GHG to CC. Of course, what we really mean is anthropogenic greenhouse gases (and do we have any data on how often people google for that?), which is the original cause of all these current and coming CC problems. Warming – more precisely, the increased heating of the Earth's climate system – is what pulls the pollyanish "climate change happens and nobody's really responsible for it" back to "why is this happening?" ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 01:41, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

EfBrazil: No, it is not my position that GW refers only to "temperature change". (Presumably and more precisely, "Global Mean Surface Temperature".) That is NAEG's position (based on the NOAA www.climate.gov site, but also the definition used by the IPCC). My position is that GW is (1) the increase in heat added to the Earth's climate system, and (2) not an effect or some kind of variety of "climate change" but the main cause of most of these CC effects. It is (as I just replied to RCraig09) the connection between anthropogenic GWG and CC.

There could be separate articles for GW and CC (which might be more correct scientifically), but with the popular media's confounding of these terms it may be best that both terms end up at the same location. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 01:46, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Not really, JJ, at least not the part in your first paragraph. First, it isn't "my position". It is my understanding of the position presented by RSs. You have declared how you construct these things within your own mind, but that's not really that helpful. Instead, please share citations to whatever you read and tell us what you think their position is. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 11:35, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Well, excuse me, of course by "yours" I meant "the position which you endorse as backing the end you want", and I had thought you would understand that. And please note that you have gone off the rails here: I was clarifying who has which position, without arguing the positions themselves. As to what I read: that's a LOT, much of it not particularly useful, and I haven't yet organized a bibliography. As to the underlying issue please note I have already cited (just above, at 00:56, 7 Nov.) where the IPCC refers to surface temperature as an indicator of climate change. And I referred you the statement further in the source you cited (at www.climate.gov) where it mentions "build up of excess heat energy in the Earth system." I will of course provide more sources, when I have evaluated them.

As to what I think your position is: I have provided a diff. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:24, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

P.S. I think everyone here might be interested in some comments by an atmospheric scientist at https://hannahlab.org/global-warming-vs-climate-change/. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:49, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Interesting. FYI: I've been compiling a reading list of sources that analyze popular usage and perceptions of the terms at User:Mu301/Climate change. ~~I honestly don't have an opinion (yet) about what, if anything, in those works is relevant to our discussion here.~~ --mikeu ^talk 23:11, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Global warming (climate change)

the linked article covers global warming and its climatic effects, hence the influence of GW on CC, and GW as the dominant factor in CC since around 1900. Since both terms redirect to the article, both should appear in the title and in bold in the lead paragraph: the opening sentence should cover their relationship, and the relationship to natural CC. . . dave souza, talk 11:46, 1 November 2019 (UTC) (modified 11:56, 1 November 2019 (UTC)}

Given the guidelines distaste for parentheses (i.e. adding a disambiguating term in parentheses after the ambiguous name: Wikipedia's standard disambiguation technique when none of the other solutions lead to an optimal article title), how to you value this title compared to GW and CC? You are using CC in the technical IPCC definition here, instead of the primary (per closer's notes) UNFCCC definition, right? Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:47, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Global warming and climate change

I prefer this variant over Global warming (climate change) because parenthetical disambig further confuses matters by adding weight to synonymous lay aspect of these terms. I believe we do better if our one article gives equal weight to both the technical distinction and the lay treatment as synonyms. That way can explain how the technical meaning of the terms interrelate, and that the public treats them as synonyms, and then with the obfuscating confusion about terms out of the way we can present the substance of the issue. So I agree with Dave that both should be in the name, but I also think they should be on equal footing joined by the conjunction "and". No doubt someone who is not a regular climate editor will object because it isn't "CONCISE". Speaking as a topic veteran, this change would solve a lot of problems. These four things are all true

(A) Sources exist to support a narrow technical distinction between "climate change" and "global warming"

(B) In the vernacular they have the same PRIMARYTOPIC-(by use) and are often treated as synonyms

(C) Some sources even state both (A) and (B). For example, in one of the past times we debated all this, I cited the 2018 AP Style book

The terms global warming and climate change can be used interchangeably. Climate change is more accurate scientifically to describe the various effects of greenhouse gases on the world because it includes extreme weather, storms and changes in rainfall patterns, ocean acidification and sea level. But global warming as a term is more common and understandable to the public." (Source. (bold added)

(D) We've spent way too much time engaged in either/or debate. (Partial list)

* Talk:Climate_change/Archive_1#Merge_with_global_warming_article (2004)

Continued in Talk:Global_warming/Archive_74#Requested_move_3_June_2018 (2018)

Plus more recent ones, and some debates at other articles' archives if memory serves

..... ok, I admit it. When I said "these four things are all true, this last one is subjective. But go ahead and read them all, then ask yourself, Is NAEG blowing smoke?

SOLUTION

(1) Stop having an either/or argument
(2) Instead use both in the title
(3) Modify the lead so there is a simple explanation of (A) and (B) (i.e., at the same time there is a technical distinction and frequent use as synonyms by non-scientists)

FERVENT PRAYER

If we implement that change, the perennial terminology arguments will finally be put to rest.

NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:42, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Can go along with that, whichever works best for the eventual first sentence of the lead, while keeping the sequence GW + CC. . . dave souza, talk 13:18, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Why lead with "Global warming"? Why not "Climate change and global warming" instead of the other way around? Climate change is the term that both appropriately describes the article (since a lot of it is about the effects of global warming) and is the term that is most used in popular discourse, education, and the scientific community. I mean, my preference would be simply having "Climate change" on it's own, but I think it's OK if "global warming" is tacked on if that helps with consensus. Efbrazil (talk) 17:18, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Which of these sounds more natural to you?

Engine repair and carburator rebuild versus Carburator rebuild and engine repair

Meal prep and cooking versus Cooking and meal prep

Education and arithmetic versus Arithmetic and education

The usual convention is to start with the part and follow with the whole. As for adding parenthetical disambig, we just agreed there is strong PRIMARYTOPIC-(by use). Disambig isn't necessary. But making sense of the paradox of two true mutually exclusive definitions very much is needed. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 18:02, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

I favor "GW & CC" because^{to oversimplify} GW is the cause and CC is the effect. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:50, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

(supplemental) Another point is the rest of the world seems to do it that way more ofte too. I was unhappy with the precision of my google searches, so I'm not posting links here, but I poked around in Google, and Google Books, and even the Library of Congress. Looking only at the main title, there seems to be more with the phrase GW & CC than the other way around. I never did figure out how to limit the searches to the exact phrases and main title only, so if someone else is better at that, maybe share some search urls? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 19:55, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Do you see the problem with leading with "global warming" in the renamed title? It makes it sound like that's the primary topic of the article, which causes lots of problems- 1. global warming is associated with alarmist messaging like "an inconvenient truth" (which used the term exclusively). 2. it's dated and not used in the public debate anymore 3. it's verbose and not needed for qualifying what "climate change" means in the first place, like you said. 4. having both terms with "and" will tend to make the focus of the article the terminology distinction instead of the topic itself. It would be as if we had the wikipedia article on "Evolution" called something like "Darwinism and evolution". Darwinism is a loaded term, antiquated, verbose, confusing, and unnecessary. You would expect that article to talk all about how darwinism came about and led to theories of evolution, instead of just being about the phenomena itself. If we agree that disambig isn't necessary, would you be in support of a straight rename to "Climate change"? I think that's inevitably where this article ends up, so maybe we should bite the bullet and do it now. Efbrazil (talk) 19:51, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Opposed to "climate change". Read the MOS about the WP:FIRSTSENTENCE (especially the sub paragraph WP:BOLDSYN). If it were "climate change", the first sentence would likely start off Climate change, also known as global warming is...blah blah blah... That would be a misrepresentation because it would invalidate the scientific definition of the terms as though that did not exist, and it would exclusively use the lay popular meaning of the terms. We aren't in the business of picking sides or leading terminology trends. The sources abundantly make clear that (A) one way they are used they are different and (B) the other way they are used they're the same. We can easily use both, and give a simple explanation of both ways they are used, and then get on with the (Beyond) Meat of the story. BTW, people in my town use "global warming" all the time. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:04, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

If the title of the article were simply "Climate change" then the topic would not start off with Climate change, also known as global warming. It would instead start off talking about climate change and how it is driven by greenhouse gas emissions. At some point global temperature would be discussed and the term global warming would be introduced. The point here is to be concise and accurate. Efbrazil (talk) 20:29, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

@Efbrazil, since this is only a friendly preliminary thread, I'll just observe that sources don't agree with you. They say the two are frequently used interchangeably, and on that basis I'd press to keep both in the title and the first sentence. But this is only the preliminary thread so I'm not going to keep repeating and repeating the same argument now. Hopefully not then either. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:47, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

@Efbrazil: I think cause-and-effect (GW-->CC), and continued^{though evolving} use of both terms, trump formal considerations such as non-verbosity. To respond to your 19:51 comment: 1. "GW" isn't in fact alarmist; 2. "GW" is declining but far from absent; 3. GW should qualify CC, because recent CC is being mainly caused by GW; 4. the "and" links the two cause-and-effect terms that, collectively, are indeed the topic itself (substantive article content). —RCraig09 (talk) 20:58, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

@NewsAndEventsGuy @RCraig09 I completely agree that "global warming" is both a synonym and a subset of climate change, depending on context. What I don't agree with is not having an article on "climate change". We must not lose the forest for the trees- we will be successful only when people can look up "climate change" and see an article entitled "climate change" on Wikipedia. I hope you also see that as a necessary goal. By the numbers on Google "climate change" is already used more than twice as often as "global warming", and the trend is continuing. See here: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=climate%20change,global%20warming . See below for another proposal that attempts to address these concerns. Efbrazil (talk) 21:33, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

@Efbrazil: I disagree with your premise that readers look for "an article entitled climate change". When people search a term, what they seek is the substantive content of the term; how Wikipedia names articles is not readers' concern. The substantive content is here, regardless of the article's name. People arrive here after seeking the substance of "GW" and after seeking the substance of "CC" as they understand it. Don't confuse naming (which is formal) with content (which is substance). I can tell you're arguing in good faith, but I think you don't appreciate that in this article naming inquiry we're talking about formal labeling; it's article content that deals with the substance readers seek. —RCraig09 (talk) 01:14, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

I have three (related) objections to this title. I still think I consider it to be a slight improvement over the current title, but I'm not entirely sure. The first objection is the length: WP:TITLECRITERIA's conciseness criterion is quite clear that IF it is possible to denote the article name in a concise manner, that should be done. I think we have more concise titles at our disposal that are entirely clear. The second objection is specific to the word AND, about which the Article title guideline says: Sometimes two or more closely related or complementary concepts are most sensibly covered by a single article. Where possible, use a title covering all cases. My final objection is that since global warming is the main aspect of climate change, including it is unnessesary
The major reason I consider this a (possible) improvement over the previous title is that it's a step towards modernization with climate change being (in the) name of a very large majority of major RSs about this subject. Femke Nijsse (talk) 17:44, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
The simplest, most straightforward option. It's a single subject known to the lay reader by two short names - so use both. François Robere (talk) 13:24, 6 November 2019 (UTC)
If we use this title Global warming and climate change here is some draft first lead paragraph text

Modern-day global warming is causing climate change throughout the world. Because the Earth now has a positive energy balance, Earth's overall climate system is warming up, causing long-term changes in a wide variety of meteorological variables. Collectively, scientists call this climate change. Of all the meteorological variables, one of the most familiar is probably global surface temperature (GST), which is rising. Scientists call the rising GST global warming. Despite these distinct technical meanings, to the lay public the terms global warming and climate change are often used as synonyms to describe the warming of earth's climate system and its many diverse effects.

Technically we do not have to have any WP:LEADCITE and I left them out for the time being, for simplicity.

NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 01:48, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Break where we go into "GW-CC" causation

I'm strongly against saying that global warming is causing climate change, as it's mostly wrong. Global warming is (the most substantative) part of climate change. As RCraig09 showed, there are very few sources, most of them non-scientific/non-popsci, that refer to climate change as being caused by global warming. Which comes to the basic question again: As GW is part of CC, why mention it in the title? I'm not aware of any other title on Wikipedia that does this. Further comments on lede that don't bear on article titling: I would like to do something like this: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/climate-and-climate-change/climate-change/index, which omits technical and difficult terms like the Earth's energy budget, meteorological, variable, scientist, the (uncommon?) abbreviation for global surface temperature (normally we use GMST) and lay (yes, lay is a difficult term, especially for nonnative speakers that often don't have a direct translation for that word into their language). Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:53, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Why is it mostly wrong? In Earth's energy budget we see incoming solar energy first being converted to long wave radiation at earth's surface, which (I assume) warms that surface first. The build up of Ocean heat content does not begin at depth. It is a surface warming thing first. Only then do the extra BTUs make their way through the water column. Increased atmospheric vapor content does not happen from the stratosphere. It starts with surface warming driving increased evaporation. I've always understood that the conversion of insolation to infrared radiation at earth's survace was the first domino in the chain of dominoes. Without human activities messingup the energy budget, the chain of dominoes (the climate for most of history) remained stable. THe push of the human finger is knocking down the whole chain. But the first dominoe to fall is surface warming, i.e, increase GST, i.e. "global warming". It then knocks over all the others "causing" them to fall as well. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 11:14, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

It's mostly wrong because global warming is the main aspect of climate change. An (awkward) sentence like: "global warming causes many of the other changes in climate", would be correct. While you're right that many other changes are a result of surface warming, there are a few aspects of climate change that are not caused by global warming: (a) decreasing stratospheric temperatures, (b) increasing acidification (if you consider that part of the climate), (c) changes to do with regional differences in warming, such as possible changes in the jet stream. But most importantly you can't say A causes B, when A is a part of B. Even if we were to think it's true, let's follow the sources, which do not typically explain it like this. Femke Nijsse (talk) 11:25, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Ah yes, I see your point. My text did accidentally imply GW was not in itself part of CC. Good catch. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 11:28, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

@NewsAndEventsGuy: By the voting, the preferred choice (narrowly) among everyone is a simple rename to "climate change". I think that's pretty clearly what the article is covering, is clearly the most succinct choice, and is also where things will ultimately end up. I was surprised to see you oppose it without reason NAEG. Could you explain? Efbrazil (talk) 17:26, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Replying to Efbrazil's question above the outdent...

A. We'll leave behind a substantial slice of the US audience over 30 years old. If we were reporting on Poodle breeds I wouldn't care. On this issue its really important to keep everyone on the same page
B. As JJ has pointed out, the word choice matters 2011 study, 2017 study so the best way to overcome that bias (either our own or our readers) is to use both terms
C. To help neutralize the "they changed the name" myth. [2]
D. Staring into my crystal ball, I predict that a real RFC on a RM will be unwieldy and using both terms will be attractive to some, and will be grudgingly acceptable to enough others to be a happy middle place
E. To avoid too much change at once. We only just moved the former climate change and there is already another RM at Climate change (general concept). I believe "change shock minimization" is desirable, and we should let at least a year of stable editing happen while these top level changes perk down through sub articles. A further refinement of the name here won't upset any of that.
F. (reserved for whatever I forgot or haven't thought of yet!)

Thanks for asking, and that's why I want to use both terms in the form Global warming and climate change and do not want to use just Climate change. As a side note, these are all part of my reasons for not just using "global warming" either, though in that case I have additional reasons which I have been talking about off and on since at least my 2014 rename proposal. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:28, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Don't have that much time, so I hope you can forgive the bluntness. A) Let's fight the WP:Systemic bias in favour of the US public on Wikipedia. I can accept that these people still use GW, but how do we know that they're unfamiliar with CC? And how many young people in Europe laugh when they see it's still called GW? For some, it might be as archaic as 'inadvertent climate modification' B & C) WP:TITLECHANGES states: remember that the choice of title is not dependent on whether a name is "right" in a moral or political sense.. I also think that myth was tied to the GMST slowdown and has lost its relevance within the denial machine. D & E: tactical voting? With E, I agree that it's desirable to wait a bit before dust has settled before starting a RM. But I do think we should go for the optimum title directly and not some in between compromise if at all possible. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:23, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

@RCraig09: I've made CC&GW and GW&CC redirects to GW. Can we remove this 'pro' from GW&CC now? All the (natural?) proposed titles will lead to this article, so adding that to the table will make is unnecessary full. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:02, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

That only solves in-wiki searching. For Google and other offwiki search engines my guess is that having both in the title is more likely to reach more readers searching for this article. In addition, once in awhile offline versions of Wikipedia are distributed, and I don't trust the redirects will work correctly under those conditions NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:12, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I see where you're coming from, but I don't think we're here to compete with other sources on Google. I do wonder with our renaming effort whether Google will adjust its search results soon (one other reason for me to postpone a discussion untill we fixed all the internal links, which I suspect are used by Google to determine the importance of the article). If you're worried about redirects not working, surely you'd want to choose either of the two common names for this topic: global warming or climate change?

@Femke: I'm not sure we're communicating on this issue. I've just clarified my language: "GW" searches and "CC" searches lead here. Your new redirects are good to have, but those other terms aren't as likely to be searched as "GW", or as likely to be searched as "CC". I see this search destination as important, especially since it's only one line. Thanks for all your work. —RCraig09 (talk) 22:39, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I think I now understand what NEAG means by it (I assume you two are on the same wavelength on this?) and have specified that further in the table. Being findable by a search engine for both terms, while not one of our WP:CRITERIA, is indeed one of the unique advantages of this title. I've removed the link for naturalness. Upon closer reading, that criterion really about the entire title: The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English.. Readers are not looking for the compound typically for for either GW or CC. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:43, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Femke: GW isn't an "aspect" of CC, it is the primary driver of CC effects. (I grant ocean acidification is an exception.) Your rejection that "A" can be causative of "B" arises from semantic confusion of just what "part of" means. You could as validly extend the definition of "climate change" to include greenhouse gases, and then by the same "part of" logic claim that GHG are not causative, which is patently false.

GW "is part of CC" only if CC is defined broadly. Even if the definition is broad enough to fully subsume GW it is still differentiated as being a cause rather than an effect. Blurring this distinction obscures matters of causation (and responsibility), and tends to reduce the "climate crisis" issue to "shit happens, get over it". ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 01:53, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for chiming in. All sources about climate change (without further specification) I find on Google's top 10 are clear: CC (referring to current climate change) is caused by us emitting GHG. That GW is a part/aspect instead of cause of (current) climate change is supported by a majority of these RSs as well^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6] As RCraig09 showed, it's only a small minority of sources, and I've not found one that meets our RSs standards, that say that CC is caused by GW.^[7] Of the three examples I gave of GHG impacting climate directly, the two others were stronger (cooling stratosphere, regional changes), as ocean acidification is only seen to be part of CC by some sources. The Met Office's view (among more sources) that ocean acidification is climate change's evil twin is more correct. You say that GW is part of CC only if CC is defined broadly. I've never never found any definition of climate or climate change that disregards temperature as one of the main variables. In the technical/general/broad definition of climate change (general concept), I would say that GW is a part of an (the current) instance of climate change (general concept), with that instance being caused by us. I recognize that there is a small group in the world still clamming on unto the specific climate change myth that what we see is natural, but for me the point has come to put the interests of the majority above this small group, and go for the name that scientists regard as most accurate ánd people use most. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:44, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

The "causation"/"causality" issue seems to be between:

(#1) Humans --> GHGs --> GW --> CC --> SLR/OA/GR/ASID/EW/etc . . . . (CC may include some of SLR/OA/GR/ASID/EW.)

versus:

(#2) Humans --> GHGs --> (GW ∈ CC) --> SLR/OA/GR/ASID/EW/etc . . . . (CC may include some of SLR/OA/GR/ASID/EW.)

where --> is "causes", and "∈" means "is a subset of" and " SLR/OA/GR/ASID/EW" are effects of CC.

@Femkemilene:, as I understand it, your are saying RSs favor #2, even though #1 emphasizes that GW is the cause of the rest of CC. Is my understanding correct? —RCraig09 (talk) 19:48, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Separately: "Climate change (human-caused)" (or similar) avoids the "GW ∈ CC" altogether! —RCraig09 (talk) 20:01, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, #2 is how almost all sources describe it (from the subset that makes it explicit). With the caveat that some sources also note some climatic changes that don't go via surface temparture increase alone: lapse rate, acidification (which I don't consider part of CC) and decreasing stratospheric temperatures. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:19, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

That's a good (and workable) illustration of the issue, but there is a deeper issue in different conceptions of just what "GW" is. I'm working on an explanation, but need to know how much explanation is needed. In particular: does everyone present understand the difference between temperature and heat? I'm going to ping you all on this; please give me a "yes" or "no". If there are any page lurkers too shy to speak up please consider sending me an e-mail. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 01:49, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

@RCraig09? Yes, Ja, Si, Oui: I understand, but I don't understand why you're asking. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:53, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
@Femkemilene? Yep. You stated previously that difference between a form of energy, and its measurement. This is not entirely correct. Temperature and heat are both physical quantities with different units: Kelvin (unit) and Joule. To raise the temperature of water by one degree you need a factor of a 1000 more heat than to raise the temperature of air by one degree: ${\Delta T}={\frac {\Delta Q}{C_{V}}}.$ , where Q stands for heat and C_V stands for the heat capacity. Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:27, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, a good point, but most people don't understand that a measurement of temperature is not a measurement of heat, which is key to what I will be going into RSN. :-) ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:55, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

@NewsAndEventsGuy? I decline to participate in the condescending pop-quiz. If you have something to say, please just say it. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:26, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

It's not a pop-quiz, it's to find out what our backgrounds are, and how much I might have to explain what I will be saying. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:51, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

@Efbrazil?
@François Robere? Irrelevant. You're going into a level of detail that doesn't matter. It's a general purpose encyclopedia, not a physics book. Titles should be accurate and representative enough, and reflect readers' expectations. Global warming may "just" be a subset of climate change, but it's also a standalone title and an important search term, and that's what matters. François Robere (talk) 10:50, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
@Dave souza?
@Chidgk1? Yes but I am not following this discussion because if I don't edit the climate change articles about the country where I live nobody else is likely to. Excellent lurker pic of my home country is distracting me though.
@EMsmileyes - Well, I think I know what the difference is but if you ask me like that I wonder if there is more to it than I am aware of. ;-) My next step would be to look up the two Wikipedia articles: on heat and on temperature. :-) EMsmile (talk) 03:37, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
@Mu301 and Mikeu? I tend to agree that it is a bit condescending. I would expect that most participants here have more than the average understanding of the two. I decline to participate in this irrelevant and distracting digression. --mikeu ^talk 14:13, 12 November 2019 (UTC) (updated) --mikeu ^talk 22:11, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
And lurkers?

Femke: You misunderstand. I am not claiming that anthropogenic GWGs are not ultimately the cause of GW/CC. (Of course they are!) But I do claim that most CC effects (such as rising sea level) don't happen just because there is some CO2 in the atmosphere, but via the intermediate step of increased temperatures (or heat), as RCraig09 has illustrated.

I am a bit disappointed you complain about sources not meeting RS standards, yet in your own sources just provided none are from the peer-reviewed climate science literature, one (#3) is an unattributed excerpt from Romm's book (#6) where he quotes a Climate.gov (NASA) webpage. Also, in your count of which term scientists seemingly favor I think your are not recognizing that many sources use these terms in distinctly different ways. I'll try to illustrate this with some examples tomorrow. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 01:51, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

As I've said many times before, I agree that surface warming is an intermediate step. Calling an intermediate step a cause is where the problem lies for me. We have had differences in opinion about what constitues a good reliable source, where I put vetted official websites from NASA, NOAA, Met Office that try to explain things to a lay audience (almost) very high for definitions and introductory knowledge. I have not been able to find good peer-reviewed articles after searching for a while, but agree that this would be a good addition. The fact that a lot of research has been done on the differentiated response to GW or CC makes it difficult to find physical scientists saying anything about it. Mu301's overview is a better attempt: User:Mu301/Climate change. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:24, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Just wanted to observe that the cause is neither surface warming nor greenhouse gases. The original cause is human choices. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:26, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Indeed! Though that could be taken back further ("In the beginning ..."). Why certain choices were made is (or at least is for me) an intriguing topic, but gets beyond the scope of this topic (however it is framed). ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:05, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

As this might influence our wording of the first paragraph, I'm going to do some observing as well. I agree with you, but I've not seen it phrased like that. The closest phrasing that is quite common in RSs is that human emissions (not choices) are "The Cause". Femke Nijsse (talk) 13:00, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

This may be one of those SKYISBLUE things, and related to the past culture of science-speak. IPCC WG1 says its' unequivocal that most of the warming is due to human activities. I suppose one could argue that they didn't say optional activities. Meanwhile "Choice" appears 487 times in IPCC AR5 WG3 full report on mitigation. In 2011, the National Research Council in the US published a then-required report bearing the title "American's Climate Choices". But we're drifting 'way off from the discourse on heat vs temperature which to me has no obvious connection to the original discussion of article title. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:03, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

@RCraig09 and NewsAndEventsGuy: you seem to be interested in how easy people can find the article via a search engine. I've been noticing that a 'global warming' search for me mostly gives pages named 'climate change', but that might be because Google knows more about me than me and prefers European searches. Just did one of these 'unbiased' Google searches for a random loc in the US and UK. It seems that Google is using CC as a synonym for GW (twoway), so that the Wikipedia page is actually showing up already for both searches for a 'typical' user. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:27, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, my thinking is that lay readers who search (internally or through Google) for "GW", and lay readers who search for "CC", should both be immediately reassured they have reached the intended destination; this reassurance is more easily accomplished in the title than in the lead. Scientifically, I know "GW" is waning, and "CC" is dominant and scientifically more correct, but on the other hand, substantively, GW is the cause of the effects of CC even though RSs consider GW a subset of CC. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:57, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

@Femke, good but not enough though. Incidentally DuckDuckGo behaves similarly.

Alas, we can't assume a real noob, particularly in the US, will necessarily click on the search engine hit for our article after searching for the other term. If BOTH terms are in the title, this particular problem is completely vaporized

A new thought... think about longterm article maintenance. A large (total?) percentage of participants in this thread seem to agree we should explain both the narrow technical meaning and the lay speech synonymity of these terms. If we ever decide to stop doing that, we can have a discussion and decide to stop doing that. But over the longterm, the next crop of editors (or some like me with rapidly aging braincells) may lose track of this current objective. By having both terms in the title we won't need to remember it! If we later decide we have outgrown this approach we always have an intentional discussion about leaving that article text and compound title behind. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:41, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Discussion moved here from immediately after "Reasoning chart"

@RCraig09:: I've deleted and modified the statement about -Internal searches "GW" and "CC" lead here a few times. I really don't understand why this would be unique for that specific title. Could you elaborate? Nobody is suggesting that we would do it differently for any other title, right? Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:31, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Assuming the most likely >>>wp:commonname<<< searches to find this subject matter are "GW" and "CC": the title "GW & CC" is the only destination title that captures what each searcher is searching for, instantly assuring both searchers they have arrived at their intended destination. The "Policy Against" column notes that the title as a whole does not fulfill WP:COMMONNAME; both sides are presented. —RCraig09 (talk) 21:23, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

{{citation needed}} External and internal searches will land on whichever title we settle on. We can create numerous redirects that will steer traffic to the chosen name. No title has an advantage in this sense. The search engines will figure it all out, that's what they do. (The discussion about which search phrase is historically or more recently popular is an entirely different question.) I agree with Femke Nijsse on the point above. I find the arguments by RCraig09 to be unpersuasive. That's just not how search works. --mikeu ^talk 21:44, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

My point, more an observation than an argument, was not about searching per se. I understand we can steer people here. My point is about the human factor: whether most humans who do arrive here, immediately see what they expect. You are correct: it is "an entirely different question". —RCraig09 (talk) 22:12, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

In short: the entry relates to avoiding WP:SURPRISE. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:46, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

First, why are we turning the table section into a discussion section? Second, @Mu301 we all agree (I think) that a search engine will produce our article whether the user searches Bing or DuckDuckGo or Google and whether they input "climate change" or instead input "global warming". So then our article (whatever its called) appears. Hooray! But wait.... we are assuming the searcher will realize the (whatever our article is called title) is the one they want even though they input the other term. No search engine can connect the dots in the users mind. I'll admit that most searchers will probably figure it out. But can you admit that some noobs who look up "global warming" might not know enough to click on a Wikipedia article called "climate change"? Yet another thought.... For 17.5 years we have taught readers that our article "climate change" was about the general concept. So take someone who learned that, is not a regular, does not know about this overhaul, and they want to refer back to our article. So they go to their search engine and input "global warming". If we simply rename this to "climate change", that reader is going to see the right article but it will be called "climate change". And they may say to their self, "Dammit I know Wikipedia's climate change article is about the generic climate change, where's the damn global warming article?" In short, yes we all agree (I think) the search engines will return our article, whether its "climate change" or "global warming and climate change". But we can't be certain users will click the "climate change" only hit if they input "global warming". NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:39, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

@RCraig09: I think that bolding both in the first paragraph, like we do in all other articles with multiple names, makes it perfectly clear for everybody they landed on the right page.

@NEAG: I very much doubt a substantial percentage of people will remember what we named our articles before. People will see a snippet of the page on Google, including the bolding that we apply to the page (both GW and CC bolded). I find arguments like this rather unconvincing and would very much like to stick to Wikipedia's policies with regards to article naming. If we look at the discussion at climate change (general concept), where there was a very strong policy reason to move away from the old title, substantial opposition came from two WP:CRITERIA that weren't met well: naturalness and possibly precision. Here we have the second-most WP:COMMONNAME that works okayish with most policies, which makes that we have to have a very clear case based on policy. Fixing internal links and waiting some time for readers to notice this change before proposing the RM may mitigate these concerns further. Please halp? Femke Nijsse (talk) 13:59, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

@NEAG: I changed my vote on "global warming and climate change" to modest support. I hope you will also revisit the chart and reconsider your votes. You are strongly opposed to all the options except what you prefer. There are good arguments for several titles in there, and strong arguments against leaving the title as-is. I think the most constructive bar to use in considering your vote is how that relates to leaving the article title as-is, vs comparing the title to your preferred choice. Do you think it would be helpful to redo the chart as a "ranked choice voting" chart? Other thoughts on getting to consensus? Efbrazil (talk) 17:25, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

NewsAndEventsGuy, Maybe you missed Efbrazil's question, but as I respect your opinion and experience here, I would also like to know what you think of climate change only with respect to global warming. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:47, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. I am happy with either climate change or global warming and climate change. Since I have started an indefinite wikibreak, I'd give greater weight to the opinion of folks doing the work. Thanks everyone! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:26, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

References

^ "What is the difference between global warming and climate change?". www.usgs.gov. Retrieved 2019-11-09.
^ "What's the difference between global warming and climate change? | NOAA Climate.gov". www.climate.gov. Retrieved 2019-11-09.
^ "Is there a difference between global warming and climate change?". The Years Project. Retrieved 2019-11-09.
^ "What's the Difference between Global Warming and Climate Change?". Climate Reality. 2016-10-26. Retrieved 2019-11-09.
^ Benjamin, Daniel; Por, Han-Hui; Budescu, David (2017-08-01). "Climate Change Versus Global Warming: Who Is Susceptible to the Framing of Climate Change?". Environment and Behavior. 49 (7): 745–770. doi:10.1177/0013916516664382. ISSN 0013-9165.
^ Romm, Joseph (2016). Climate Change: What everybody needs to know. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 20. ISBN 9780190250171.
^ For instance, we cannot cite other encyclopedias: Rafferty, John. "What's the Difference Between Global Warming and Climate Change?". Encyclopedia Brittannica.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

Climate change

with Global warming as a section in that article: Don't you think wikipedia needs an article on "Climate change"? We have one, but we're calling it Global warming. Global warming technically means surface temperature changes only, so we can create a section named Global warming underneath the "Observed temperature changes" section of this article. The redirect for the search term Global warming would go to that new section. The content of the section would be about global surface temperatures, and a subsection of that section could be about the historical use of the term (for instance in "an inconvenient truth"). Since the redirect target for Global warming would exist in the context of all of Climate change, the redirect will also work for people that are interested in the larger issues of Climate change and not the limited issue of just surface temperature. Win-win idea, right? Efbrazil (talk) 21:19, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

@Efbrazil, those are specific details for an idea based on reasoning you've already put forward.... namely, you want to really hammer on the technical usage of these terms to create this argument while just ignoring the equally valid "They mean the same thing" useage by a lot of lay public. However you package that reasoning into a details about execution I'm probably going to oppose the idea, and I oppose this one for reasons previously stated. Moving on to a new aspect, just a few minutes ago (21:33 1 November 2019) you said "We will be successful only when people can look up "climate change" and see an article entitled "climate change" on Wikipedia" QUESTION - How are you measuring "success"? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:05, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

@NewsAndEventsGuy: @Efbrazil: @Dave souza: @UnitedStatesian: I urge all of you to enter your username into the Table above, to solidly clarify our basic positions. You can change later, of course. —RCraig09 (talk) 01:21, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

Pinging and red seems redundant (and hard to read). I'm not in any big rush, personally, and would like to wait to hear what latecomers ideas might be. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:30, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

@RCraig09 I added this to the chart in the hopes of winning you over to the idea of a "Climate change" article. @NewsAndEventsGuy I am not wanting to "hammer on the technical usage of these terms". I originally proposed "Climate change (global warming)" and still like that, but people complained that that was not technically correct because the terms mean different things. I'm trying to satisfy those that want to see the terms meaning the same thing and those that want a clear technical definition separated out. That differs from the proposal by UnitedStatesian. Regarding what is "success". Success means that people looking up "Climate change" will find an article entitled "Climate change" because it's concise, it's technically what the article is covering, and it's the preferred terminology by more than 2:1 among the public (and entirely in the scientific / educational community). I added this proposal to the end of the chart and put my name in the chart. Efbrazil (talk) 17:12, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

A "CC" article would a tolerable result, but it subverts^{by your own "2:1" estimate} expectations of one-third of the public which is WP's main audience, and obscures the critical cause-and-effect GW-->CC relationship. You may not have seen my 01:14, 2 Nov post, above (please read); readers seek substantive content, not article titles per se. P.S. With respect, I will "comment out" your nearly-duplicative entry in the Table, because the Table's purpose is to concisely simplify editors' positions on article naming. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:16, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

Climate change with Global warming as a redirect to it. ~~Global warming is a superset that includes climate change~~ Climate change is a superset that includes global warming, sea level rise, ocean acidification, etc. The article includes both topics but the more generic phrase should be the title. Climate change is now the accepted term for what was once more commonly called global warming. This is seen in authoritative sources that journalists rely on[3], the style guides of news organizations[4], scientific societies[5], and the United Nations~~[6]~~[7]. The public might use the terms interchangeable but that is not how subject experts use the term. The article clarifies this point early on. --mikeu ^talk 23:10, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

mikeu: Excellent refs! (though the United Nations link is a repeat of the CarbonBrief/BBC link). I think you may have mis-written your second sentence: did you in fact mean CC is the superset containing GW? (Actually, I think GW causes CC is most correct, so that both terms should be in the title ("GW and CC") for as long as numerous readers, and some sources, still search for both terms GW and for CC.) —RCraig09 (talk) 05:10, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

Indeed excellent refs. @RCraig09, thanks for driving this, but.. I think you're view that global warming causes climate change is, in essense, incorrect. The most important (reported on) aspect of climate is temperature. Strictly speaking, climate change is only about the state of the atmosphere, so climate change = (temperature rise (global warming) + precipitation change + wind pattern change}. More loosely speaking it also includes other changes in the climate system, such as sea level rise. Ocean acidification is not part of climate change, but is an environmental issue with the same cause. To see whether it's a common misconception, I Googled global warming causes climate change. Even explicitly looking for sources that might say that global warming causes climate change, I came up with no results. Mu301's description is correct: global warming is (the most important) subset of climate change. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:41, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, @Femki, for your (as always) thoughtful response. I think there is some vagueness in trying to distinguish GW from CC, and distinguishing each from their effects. Yes, temperature is part of climate, but GW's 1°C temperature increase per se is barely noticeable compared to its effects. Symbolically:

GHGs --> GW --> CC --> SLR/OA/GR/ASID/EW/etc . . . . (CC may include some of SLR/OA/GR/ASID/EW.)

Even if (as you seem to say) CC includes GW, then modern GW is still the necessary precursor to the rest of CC and SLR/OA/GR/ASID/EW effects. My own scholar.google.com search for "global warming causes climate change" (with quotes) turned up only 56 results (google.com search ~4200 results), so some have a similar interpretation, leading me to favor a "GW & CC" title for now (2019). —RCraig09 (talk) 16:24, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

To elaborate on my reasoning: all of those references use the standalone phrase "climate change" in the title or header as the subject of the page. Additional terms like anthropogenic or mention of global warming are relagated to mentions or clarifications lower down after declaring the title of the topic at top. My opinion is that we should follow this practice. Yes, there is confusion amongst the public about the difference between global warming and climate change that experts endeavor to correct[8] but they don't include top level topic pages about global warming[9] even if they do discuss study of the phenomenon[10]. I've seen no refs similar to the ones that I've given that use clunky combination titles like CC&GW or other varients listed above, which I strongly object to. It is simply "climate change" and the rest of the words and phrases are concepts to be elaborated further along in the body of the work. (work meaning the refs above or this WP article which should be like a mirror of the RSs we include in our footnotes) Thanks for pointing out the typos. I ~~struck~~ and corrected above. --mikeu ^talk 17:10, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

Well said, mikeu. I agree with your reasoning. EMsmile (talk) 02:00, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Climate change is a superset that includes global warming, ice ages, holocene decline in temperatures, and regional climate changes such as the little ice age and the medieval warm period as well as more local climate changes. Global warming or heating is a subset, and generally refers to an aspect of climate change since the industrial revolution. . . dave souza, talk 09:54, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Slight correction - whereas climate change (the general concept) is the superset, among ordinary people "climate change" = "global warming" = "climate change" = "global warming". And we all know ordinary people are talking about the present. I think, Dave, you compared the technical definition of climate change to the lay persons definition of global warming. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:02, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

As said in another place, Metro is for lay persons, the lay person on the Clapham omnibus or any other form of public transport in the UK, and when they publish Hamill, Jasper (29 October 2019). "Climate change caused mass extinction apocalypse and killed 75% of life on Earth". Metro. Retrieved 29 October 2019. they expect their lay readers to have heard of climate changes before the industrial revolution. . . dave souza, talk 20:13, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

It's not a "superset", it's the same thing. Sea level rise, ocean acidification etc. are all caused by global warming. François Robere (talk) 13:36, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

@François Robere: please show the sources in which you say ocean acidification is "caused" by "global warming". I've seen them described as "evil twins" (example [11]) but never as one causing the other. Rather, in sources I've read the two have the same cause (increasing atmospheric CO2). If you burn your dinner, you're hunger is left unsatisfied and your house is full of smoke. They share a common causation, but does the smokey house make you hungry? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:33, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

I'll clarify: All of these effects are part of the same cluster of phenomena and follow the same trends, which means "global warming" (or "global heating"), "climate change" and "rise in greenhouse gasses levels in the atmosphere" are practically synonymous. Article titles aren't granular enough to address these differences - that should be done in article bodies. François Robere (talk) 15:16, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Many of the numerous comments throughout this discussion page are important considerations for the substance of this article. This thread, however, is not about the content of the article it is about the title. The suggestions of including all of these nuanced ideas and concepts in the name of the page are misguided and a distraction from the task that we are considering. The phrase "climate change" has overtaken "global warming" as the de facto[12][13][14] catch all term for the subject of this article. A meta-analysis of RS coverage of the ideas described here tracks both CC and GW mentions in the news but the title of the project is Media and Climate Change Observatory[15] (emphasis added) indicating a clear preference for CC as the definitive descriptive term for the idea. If you disagree with this common sense interpretation of the title suggestion I am more than willing to provide copious references that support[16][17][18][19][20][21] this assertion despite my feeling that continuing the debate is futile. I honestly don't understand why there is reluctance to accept the obvious observation that "climate change" is the canonical term for the concept described in the article. --mikeu ^talk 17:09, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

But not exclusively for the particular concept: it is also th canonical term for all climate change, including earlier non-warming changes – usage is context dependent. Note the UN source also mentions global warming, relating to the recent SR on the topic . . . dave souza, talk 20:13, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Of course it is not exclusively used in this sense but it is "often" and "in particular" "especially, in current use" referring to contemporary global warming. This is the most common interpretation unless someone is writing about an obscure topic like ~30,000 year old sea turtles - a subject that rarely makes the front page above the fold. A wide circulation news magazine that has devoted entire issues[22] to the title hardly needs to clarify that it is not about an ancient apocalypse. There are no significant efforts to survey public attitudes about the general concept.[23] Reliable sources overwhelming use the simple two word phrase specifically for recent. I don't understand your last statement, SR? --mikeu ^talk 00:23, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Thank you @Mu301 for your thoroughness in convincing me how far "CC" has overtaken "GW" in sources^{(330M hits for "CC" vs 78 for "GW" in today's Google search)}, especially (as @Femke notes) outside the U.S. and in proper technical sources. As another option: to distinguish the content of this article from Climate change (general concept), are you open to my proposal ("Anthropogenic CC") in the next sub-sub-section? —RCraig09 (talk) 17:39, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

No. Lengthy explanatory article titles are contrary to WP:CONCISE, WP:COMMONNAME, WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, especially WP:NAMINGCRITERIA, and just plain WP:COMMONSENSE. It is an attempt to cram MOS:LEAD material into a page name. I've given a lengthy list of highly notable references that refrain from doing this. We should emulate these examples. Note: I'm currently a resident of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations but I used to reside in the Commonwealth of Massachusets. It would be absurd to use those phrases is any context except the title of a court case. --mikeu ^talk 18:02, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

@Mikeu: reply given in following section: RCraig09 (talk) 23:40, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

re "climate change" comment by NAEG reasons I do not want to use just "climate change" can be found in the section for Global warming and climate change. With thanks to Efbrazil who reminded me I hadn't addressed this point, my reasoning is in this specific diff. BTW there are 5 criteria to be used for deciding an article WP:TITLE. I have yet to study those five points and craft pro/con arguments accordingly, so there will probably be more to say later.NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:56, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Hmmm, one of today's news headlines is: "Billionaire Buys 'Climate Change' on Google". Okay, he's just buying placement of ads in search results for that and similar search terms. Probably shouldn't affect us. :-) ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:56, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Anthropogenic climate change (or) Human-caused climate change (or) Climate change (human-caused) etc.

- This title best describes the content (subject matter) of this article (why did I not see it earlier?). A bare-bones "Climate change" title gives the incorrect impression that the content of this article is about as broad as Climate change (general concept)—which it is not.
- Separately: As a Yank I'm still seeing much use of the term "GW",^{(6 "CC" and 4 "GW" uses in this Nov 5 WashPost article)} but I acknowledge that "GW" is being supplanted by "CC" as many editors correctly describe above.
- By implication: If "GW"—the most direct cause of CC's effects and the cause of CC itself by some definitions—is eliminated from this article's title, then the essence of this subject matter—that humans, if not GW, have caused recent climate change—should be reflected in the title. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:26, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

The word anthropogenic is a more difficult synonym for human-caused and is a big no-go for me. I'm also opposed to human-caused. In the previous renaming discussion, the closer determined that there was overly clear consensus that climate change's WP:PRIMARYTOPIC is human-caused climate change. Therefore, the WP:CONCISE redirect or title will nót give the impression that it's about climatic changes in general. That's why so many of our RSs use climate change without any further specification in the title. I think I agree with mikeu that we'd be putting article content into the title if we insist on spelling out the human-causedness. If we want a further specification, I prefer modern as it is a bit more concise, and doesn't specify the article's content but only the topic. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:29, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

The WP:PRIMARYTOPIC argument is an artefact of common usage: most articles about CC cover post-industrial revolution changes, and in that context most change is related to GW, but not all CC is GW and so equating the two is misleading. It's a way of causing confusion: readers are being led to expect that the medieval warm period changes were not climate change, for example, or ice age glaciation wasn't climate change. That's reasonably well clarified if we refer here to modern climate change, not sure how well that covers continuing expected warming. . . . dave souza, talk 20:28, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Which is why I favor Global warming and climate change, with lead text that explains both the technical distinction and lay synonymity.NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:10, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The fact that most articles are about current GW & CC means that we should follow those sources, right? Past global warming (f.i. PETM) and other past climate change is always described in sources with some extra context (past tense in title, climatic change, explicitly stating past global warming). I don't think that using the common terminology is confusing. If lay people want to read about current climate change, we don't have to put front and center that within the scientific community, we sometimes (in my experience rarely) use climate change in the broader definition. We should put front and center the on-topic distinction between current climate change and current global warming. I'm not in favour of explaining four definitions in the first paragraphs of the lede (current global warming, difference with current climate change, different with past global warming, difference with past climate change), when instead we should be talking about all the different things about what is happening now (causes, physical effects, effects on life, what we can do, what we're doing). I think putting the scientific definitions of global warmings and climatic changes in the lede will lead high school students to stop reading, and fit better in the terminology section. Femke Nijsse (talk) 22:16, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

First: Thanks to all for thoughtful consideration!

Two considerations conflict: ● Issue 1: Scientific source usage, and ● Issue 2: popular usage (including popular press and non-scientist WP readers searching). . . . . . . . Ours is a unique situation and simple policy/guideline rules don't lead to clean results. I see that, especially internationally and scientifically, "CC" is well on the way to supplanting "GW" (Issue 1, above). However, outside sources don't have to consider how the substantive subject matter of WP articles inter-relates ("Issue 2", above), especially to distinguish "CC" from "CC(GenCon)" which, misleadingly, seem equally broad (incoming readers won't appreciate wiki-concepts like WP:primarytopic-ness). Bottomline, I think we should distinguish this article's substantive subject matter in the title (not the lead) so readers instantly understand which subject matter they have reached. Conciseness is a formal consideration, not substantive, and I think 1-3 extra words are warranted in our unique situation: either "GW &..." or "Human-caused..." though I think "Modern..." is vague. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:40, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

I disagree that scientific and popular usage conflict of the word climate change. Sure, many sources copy IPCC's technical/general definition into their glossaries (which in its latest report, is explicitly stated as a definition only used FOR that report), but they use climate change like anybody else. Furthermore, in choosing an article name, we should be considering the general public, not the expert audience. As such, our desire to want to distinguish from the general definition is, in my eyes, somewhat moot. As many outside sources (NASA) also study past climate change, they do have to consider how to distinguish CC from CC(GenCon), and they often go for the distinction in title 'CC' and 'past CC'. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:53, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Agreed: focus on general public & popular press for article name. The public and popular press (U.S. more than other countries, as I understand it) still regularly use "GW".^{(6 "CC" and 4 "GW" uses in this Nov 5 WashPost article)} which is why also favor "GW&CC". Conciseness is a formal WP goal, but, here, "Human-caused CC" (or new suggestion "CC (human-caused)") best describes this substantive subject matter and, further, neatly disambiguates it from "CC(GenCon)". P.S. I'm ~"OK" with a bare "CC", but it sounds comparably broad to "CC(GenCon)". —RCraig09 (talk) 18:16, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your creativity. Unfortunately, climate change (human-caused) suffers from many above objections of previous names PLUS one extra big one.

It's not concise
It used parentheses (if a good natural title exists, avoid: from WP:PARENDIS: {{tq: Wikipedia's standard disambiguation technique when none of the other solutions lead to an optimal article title.}} (emphasis mine)
It uses an adjective in these parentheses. Our WP:Disambiguation guidelines states: rarely, an adjective describing the topic can be used, as in Vector (spatial), but it is usually better to rephrase such a title to avoid parentheses (for instance, Vector (spatial) was renamed to Euclidean vector).. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:32, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

@Femke, I think this section's proposals are as precise as possible while still capturing the substantive scope of the subject matter... and also disambiguating. Your second and third observations are WP formal guidelines, which don't deal cleanly with the substance of this subject's unique situation. But please add to the "Reasoning" chart, above. You are uniquely qualified to appreciate both the substance and WP formal guidelines. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:58, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

In our discussion on climate change (general concept) we determied that climate change's primary topic is very very clearly our current climate change. This is the bar against which "substantative scope" is typically measured, not making it air-tight. I think it's somewhat bad form to delete the precision argument from the table because you disagree. There is so much literal support for them in our sources, for instance in the sources that Mu301 collected (CC preferred because more accurate is what many sources state). I'm not deleting any arguments I find weak, only arguments I consider off-topic or nonsensical. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:11, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

@Femkemilene: I have reverted my earlier edit. It wasn't that I disagreed; it's just that "CC" is ambiguous, even in scientific sources. —RCraig09 (talk) 13:43, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

I understand, but that disadvantage is also mentioned. Many scientific sources explicitly state climate change is the more accurate term for current warming compared to GW. Therefore both sides must be mentioned in the table. Femke Nijsse (talk) 13:47, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

@Femkemilene: I've been meaning to ask: which scientific sources (preferably peer-reviewed) explicitly state that? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:46, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

A collection of two-and-a-half papers that explicitly state this:

natural scientists have advocated shifting from talking about global warming to talking about climate change, because the latter is more technically accurate^[1]

The terminology showed changes in use over time with global warming starting as the more well-known term, and then its use decreased over time. At the same time, the more definitive term climate change had less exposure early on; however, with the increase of press exposure, the public became increasingly aware of the term and its more accurate definition.^[2]

(and partially) “Global climate change” has become a more fitting moniker than“global warming” because it more accurately describes the range of possible predicted changes,^[3]

References

^ Villar, Ana; Krosnick, Jon A. (2011-03-01). "Global warming vs. climate change, taxes vs. prices: Does word choice matter?". Climatic Change. 105 (1): 1–12. doi:10.1007/s10584-010-9882-x. ISSN 1573-1480.
^ Lineman, Maurice; Do, Yuno; Kim, Ji Yoon; Joo, Gea-Jae (2015-09-29). "Talking about Climate Change and Global Warming". PLOS ONE. 10 (9): e0138996. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0138996. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 4587979. PMID 26418127.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: PMC format (link) CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
^ Wilson, Kris M. (2000-01-01). "Drought, debate, and uncertainty: measuring reporters' knowledge and ignorance about climate change". Public Understanding of Science. 9 (1): 1–13. doi:10.1088/0963-6625/9/1/301. ISSN 0963-6625.

As I said earlier in the following section: The "scientific literature" you referred to is not the science of climate, but of communication. Your first source [Villar & Krosnick 2011] was a survey of how the public perceives these terms, the second [Lineman et al. 2015] assessed public "knowledge and awareness of these terms", and the third [Wilson 2000] analyzed reporter's "understanding of climate change". What I would like to see is how climate scientists use these terms. And not relative usage, but what they are referring to. The papers you cite here do not do that.

Saying that CC – or any term – is "more accurate" is meaningful only by reference to what it is supposed to be referring to. If you extend the scope and intended meaning of CC wide enough then it covers EVERYTHING, including all of these alternative titles. And then it really needs to be a disambiguation page. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:00, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Those three papers are indeed about the public/reporters usage of the term, but comment on physical scientists' use of the term. These papers were clearly about human-caused climate change, so that's what that statement was about. There is really no ambiguity there.

While we were discussing a name change for climate change (general concept) I analyzed the first 100 papers that came up when typing climate change in Google Scholar (and Web). Only one of them used it to refer to climatic change not caused by humans. As such, a disambiguation page would be against policy per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT. If you don't agree with that decision, the closer is the one you should be discussing it with. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:29, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Information with Google Tests to establish COMMONNAMES

The policy on wikipedia titles gives us some leeway to nót go for the most common title. It states: When there are multiple names for a subject, all of which are fairly common, and the most common has problems, it is perfectly reasonable to choose one of the others. Above, we have identified problems with all names below. In a few days time, I'd like to summarize very concisely all of the identified problems and connect all of them to one of the WP:CRITERIA for title names, if possible.

Proposed article name	Google Trend^[1]	Ngram (books)^[2]	Google results	News^[3]	News old^[4]	Scholar^[5]
Global warming	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%
Global warming and climate change plus reverse	3.3%	2.2%	2.48%	~0%		11 %
Climate change	175%	190%	243%	260%	35%	314%
Human-caused climate change	?	?	0.05%	?	?	1.15%
Anthropogenic climate change	?	?	?

Conclusion: more reliable sources (Google scholar, and Books) have a bigger preference for CC over GW than less reliable sources (News, Google searches). The combination global warming and climate change is mostly single-digit. Whether this is fairly common, is up for discussion.

Correction: "more reliable sources" do NOT "have a bigger preference for CC over GW" as a term, as the comparison does not necessarily reflect a preference of terms. More likely it reflects a choice of subjects, which have different names. The physics and reality of global warming is established; science is moving on to study the current and forthcoming changes in climate.

Buried in a note: The Google Trend and News data is only for the last twelve months. If a longer period is used, such as the last 15 years, CC never exceeds a third of peak GW usage. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:43, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

I was trying to find out the same values for "anthropogenic climate change", and found that at least Google Trends has a number of parameters (e.g. geographical scope, and time period). Can you clarify what you used? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 18:13, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Specified further in notes. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:19, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! Either I can't operate it, or ACC comes in below the rounding down bar on trends. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:38, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Many of the question marks are indeed because Google Trends doesn't show results when it's below a certain threshold. The passive^[6] Google Tests (Scholar, Results), do capture smaller percentages. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:47, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Both the string "global warming" and "climate change" would direct a reader to an article titled "Global warming and climate change", so we might as well capture both leading terms. François Robere (talk) 18:53, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

@Femkemilene: I plan to add a separate chart with "Pro" and "Con" columns, to summarize concise arguments for each proposal. Would that help? —RCraig09 (talk) 18:57, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, if you want to do it, be my guest. I do think it's extremely important to link arguments to actual policy and to either leave out arguments that cannot be linked to any criterion, or make them small. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:05, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

I'll leave the "reasoning" column mostly blank, to start. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:07, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

@F, could you please add the search url to the notes? Maybe pipe the link to not clutter up the screen. The metric I'd most like to see is not in this table but is probably impossible to code into a url. I would most like to know the count limited only to sources which explain the technical distinction as well as the lay speech synonimity of these terms. It's a good bet the hit rate for the both-term searches would go up substantially. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:12, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, don't have the motivation/time to redo all of the tests. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:31, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

I don't know the exact url used for the table above, but here are some links that I found useful if you'd like to try modifying the search terms or date range. I used an arbitrarily longer range of time than above based on the length of each dataset.

Google Books Ngram (1980 - 2008)
Google News Search Trends (2008 - now)
Google Web Search Trends (2004 - now)
ICE CaPs (2004 - now, showing total "CC" .OR. "GW" for comparison to above. More at [24])

--mikeu ^talk 19:59, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

I find this use of "Google Tests" quite dubious. In the first place, please note the nutshell summary at WP:Search_engine_test (a.k.a WP:Google): "Measuring is easy. What's hard is knowing what it is you're measuring and what your measurement can mean." See also (under Neutrality): Google is specifically not a source of neutral titles – only of popular ones. Neutrality is mandatory on Wikipedia (including deciding what things are called) even if not elsewhere, and specifically, neutrality trumps popularity."

Very definitely, we do not know what all those Google hits are measuring. In particular, we have no context of how those terms are being used, or how the authors may have qualified them. (As an illustration: suppose a debate on which of two terms is more meaningful. Side "A" might use term "B" a lot [and vice-a-versa] to describe their argument against, and a mere count of the use of the terms in the debate would be meaningless, saying nothing about how either term should be used or what it means.) Nor do such counts informs of what people are using for search terms, let alone the precise topic they are looking for.

Hit counts are crude statistics that carry no information on how those terms are used, or defined. Which goes to my second point: WP:COMMONNAMES presumes multiple names for a (singular) topic. The case here is not at all a simple case of whether a certain common object should be called a "bucket" or a "pail". When I looked at a sample of scholarly papers since 2015 that used both "global warming" and "climate change" I found that in many cases those terms were being used differently, to refer to related but different concepts.

Perhaps most illustrative for our purposes is the following from Hulme (2009)^[7]:

In the English language, the terms most often used to describe the physical transformation of global climate through human modification of the atmosphere have varied over time. The 'greenhouse effect' or 'enhanced greenhouse effect' were terms widely used in the early scientific framing of the issue in the 1980s and early 1990s (see Chapter 2: The Discovery of Climate Change). These have subsequently been largely replaced by either the more generic term 'climate change' or the more evocative expression 'global warming'.

The proposed "Global warming and climate change" formulation reflects that both terms are in common use (even as synonyms, though that is not correct). If these terms are to be ranked, then the compound term should be considered a superset that covers both individual cases. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk)

A bit of an intimidating wall of text for the early Saturday morning. I explicitly stated that I was using using the GoogleTest to determine the WP:COMMONNAME, not to cover the other goals for the best title, yet you still claim my use of the GoogleTest to be dubious because it doesn't tell anything about neutrality. The second reason you give is that the GoogleTests doesn't show us how the terms are being used. Remember that I spent hours working myself through hundreds of links in Scholar and normal search to tally how climate change was being used when WP:PRIMARYTOPIC of climate change was being determined. Please regard this part of the evidence in light of that as well. The one percent of pages about climate change in other contexts is negligible for this test.

There has been a change in the use of climate change versus global warming over the last 10 years (as clear from these tests and commented on in scientific literature). While I don't disagree entirely with your source, it's ten years old, completely before that shift took place. With the climate movement using terms like climate crisis, climate emergency and not things like global warming crisis or warming crisis, it's quite likely there has been a shift in evocativeness of the term climate change. I still very much doubt whether these arguments fall under the neutrality heading instead of the morally or politically right part of the policy, which would mean we're not meant to take the argument into account at all.

That Google hit counts don't show us how the terms are being used is actually my primary point. Your claim that "climate change" is used consistently (the "one percent ... in other contexts") is not persuasive because (a) I don't know how expansively you defined the term, and (b) my point is not whether (under some broad definition) "climate change" is used consistently, but whether is used differently from "global warming". In the thirty or so articles I sampled from Google Scholar since 2015 that use both terms it appeared they were used for distinct and differing ways. (Unfortunately, as tested by an earlier examination of about 60 articles, it appears that in the primary literature most scientists don't define their terms, so there is little to no connection from distinct use to explicit definition.)

Please note: my claim is not that hit counts don't tell us anything about neutrality, only that they don't tell us anything about usage, and the intended meaning.

Your reference to "the "morally or politically right" part of the policy" would be to the "Considering changes" section (shortcut WP:TITLECHANGES) of WP:TITLE. The actual bit of policy there is about strongly discouraging changing a controversial title without consensus. The "moral or political" bit is an aside, that "the choice of title is not dependent on whether a name is "right"" in either sense. It does NOT "mean we're not meant to take the argument into account at all." Being "not dependent on" does not preclude consideration. However, the "political" argument is not relevant to my objection to relying on hit counts. (I will make that argument later.) Perhaps you missed (insufficient caffeination? :-]) the essence of what I quoted: ""Neutrality is mandatory on Wikipedia (including deciding what things are called) even if not elsewhere, and specifically, neutrality trumps popularity."" [Italicization added.] ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:47, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

P.S. (I forgot this). @Femkemilene: I have provided a reliable (and authoritative) source about previous usage. If there has been a notable change in use in the last 10 years "commented on in scientific literature" could you perhaps cite that literature? Thank you. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:10, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Of course I can give an example again :). From the list made by User:Mu301/Climate_change:

Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:09, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

The term 'global warming' is included to capture documents, particularly those in the early years of the dataset, that still used this term over 'climate change.^[8]

The terms “greenhouse effect” and “global warming” were commonly used from the 1980s but have been largely replaced, since the late 1990s, by “climate change”. More recently, terms such as “climate crisis” have entered use in parliament.^[9]

Femke, I am quite disappointed. The "scientific literature" you referred to is not the science of climate, but of communication, and the two references you provided here are about the use of these terms by politicians (in the Congressional Record, and in Parliament). Allow me to remind you that we generally go by expert opinion, not as used by shills, clowns, or ignorami, and certainly not popular opinion. (I allow we should make some accommodation for common terms [even when incorrect], but that is what redirects are for.)

The sources on Mu301's list appear to all be either surveys of usage by the public, politicians, or "news" sources, or studies of framing. I have not read all of them (nor am inclined to do so), but they don't seem to cover expert usage, and any change of usage "over the last ten years" by non-experts is not controlling.

But do look at Leiserowitz et al. 2014 ("what's in a Name", from the Project on Climate Change Communication). That starts off with: "This report provides results from three studies that collectively find that global warming and climate change are often not synonymous...". They also presented findings that 1) "Americans have historically used global warming as a search term much more frequently than climate change" (see also the graph), and 2) Americans say they hear "global warming" more often than "climate change" in public discourse, and use it more often in their own conversations.

As I (and others) have been saying: distinct terms used in distinct ways. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:16, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Here's another explicit statement from 2014: "Consequently, the trend toward increasing use of the term climate change over global warming by the scientific community is..."[25] --mikeu ^talk 16:10, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

mikeu: Your quote from the Guardian's guest commentary mischaracterizes the sense of the piece. Let's look at the lead paragraph (emphasis added):

In recent years, there has been debate over whether the public responds to the terms "global warming" and "climate change" similarly, seeing them as essentially equivalent or regarding them as separate phenomena. The former refers to the overall warming of the Earth's atmosphere, which most scientists attribute to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that stem from human actions such as burning fossil fuels. The latter refers to the changing climatic conditions and their effects that result from this warming -- including major changes in temperature, precipitation, or wind patterns that occur over several decades or longer.

Note the distinction between "overall warming of the Earth's atmosphere" by GHG, and "changing climatic conditions and their effects that result from this warming". Distinct topics, and any increasing usage of CC in the scientific community quite likely reflects the unequivocal acceptance of the "carbon dioxide theory", and now they are moving on to study the resulting effects of climatic change and how to mitigate them. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:24, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

As I've stated many times before, I agree that the two terms, while often used interchangeably, have slightly distinct meanings. I'm happy we now agree that CC's use in increasing in scientific literature and that this is because aspects of CC not captured in the word GW are more prominent. Those aspects are also covered in this article, and therefore we should reflect that in the title. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:37, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Reacting to a previous point. We showed that the US lags behind the rest in the world in changing terminology to CC, with the change happening as late as 2014 in that one country. Your 2014 Leiserowitch paper just confirms the old usage, but has been superceded by recent change: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=global%20warming,climate%20change. It uses the same techniques that we are using, but with old data. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:54, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

I don't think these are "slightly distinct" meanings. If we make allowance for misusage, or use of CC as a catch-all term, they are distinct. It seems you are still missing my main point: your numbers don't show what these terms were applied to (that is, their implied meaning). Your basic presumption seems to be that both terms (GW and CC) apply to a (largely) single topic, and the difference here is "just" terminological. I say there is an underlying difference in what is being referred to (i.e., they apply to different topics), and any change in usage in the scientific literature more likely reflects a change in research direction than in terminology.

Unfortunately I am not able to access Google Trends, so I can't get to that data. But I am a little concerned about one seeming trend. When I cited Hulme 2009 you said there was a change in usage starting just about then. When I cited Leiserowitz 2014 (which in some respects refutes your claim of a change starting ten years ago) you now claim a "change happening as late as 2014". And so I wonder: if I cite a source from 2016 will you then claim a change starting in 2017?

BTW: please remind me of your basis for claiming that U.S. usage lags. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:12, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

How come you don't have access to Google Trends? It's a completely free website, and not heavy on bandwidth either..?

Insofar they correspond to different topics, my perception is that GW is most often used in its broad meaning (temperature rise entire climate system), whereas climate change is most often/almost exclusively used in its limited meaning (heating + physical effects of that). The latter corresponds best to the content of this article, so we'd be correcting usage here.

As you can't access the wealth of information behind Google Trends, let me clarify it: in the US, the relative use of GW compared to CC peaked before 2007, with GW used 10x as much as CC. Around 2010 it was 2x, point of approx the same in 2014 and you're now using CC 3.5x as much as GW. Worldwide, GW was only used 3x as much as CC around 2007, and the cross-over point happened in 2013. Please assume good faith on my part. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:59, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

It's not your good faith I question but some of your methods and interpretations. Like where you say the cross-over point of GW use relative to CC happened in 2013. What I see of the Google Trends graph in Leiserowitiz is GW use dropping down to the same level as CC for about for two months, and then rising. Any cross-over is minute and inconsequential, and therefore use of that term is misleading. And your earlier statement that there has been "a change in use ... over the last 10 years" appears incorrect, as any change that has occurred more recently does not extend back 10 years.

I have no idea why my computer won't access Google Trends. Two different browsers display – just an empty page. My best guess is that Trends runs some process not normally used on most webpages, which then either fails, or times out, without any error indication. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:22, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

Four trends for global warming vs climate change use.
[Anchor: Four trends chart]

Hmm.. Some Googling shows you're not the only one with this problem. Apparently, people have been able to access it only if they changed device (so switching to phone for instance). Hope that works, but to prevent further delay in discussion, I've screenshotted some of the data as well. I hope you can now agree that cross-over has indeed taken place across Web searches and News searches and both in the US and the UK. The trend in relative use of the two terms (their ratio) does extent back to 2007. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:25, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Firefox has a very impressive debugger "facility" which shows all kinds of error messages, but I don't really want to dive down that rabbit hole. Google doesn't pay me enough to debug their code.

When you create these graphs, is there an option to add a tick mark (or line) for each year? Preferably at the beginning of each year? It would make them easier to parse.

Your cross-over is hardly (as you called it) a point, as both trend lines run pretty nearly even from roughly 2013 through 2018. With finer resolution I suspect you could find multiple "cross-overs", but with differences that are statistically insignificant. The dominance of CC over GW is only in the last (approx.) two years. And while you note the relative difference for the past month (I presume several decimal places have been knocked off, yes?), yet at the left end the red bar is still higher than the blue bar for each chart. You could object that that is old history, but I could as well object that extrapolation of a two year trend into the future amounts to prediction (see WP:NOTCRYSTALBALL).

But all that really misses my point, that these numbers are not entirely meaningful. E.g., even though these trends converge around 2013 (and arguably earlier), yet the survey by Leiserowitz et al. show that in 2014 Americans were 4 times more likely to say they hear GW more often than CC in public discourse, and twice as likely to personally use GW. I suspect this discrepancy is due to some peculiarity of search behavior, perhaps in how Google recommends search terms.

And: I still maintain that (at least in the climate science literature) GW and CC are used for different concepts. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:58, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately, no option to turn on ticks available.

I noticed I only gave you web search in my graphs. I now included news search as well, as this gives good supplementary information in my view. For news, the cross-over years are earlier for some reason. In this graph, CC has been significantly more used since 2015. I concur that waiting a bit longer might benefit this discussion, which is why I still prefer the review of this article to take place first. The current hightened attention for climate with the COP can show at least to me whether this trend has been concilidated.

I deem self-reported hearing and using quite unreliable. An example from a different field (study is relatively old and only US, can't find cite): after having been shown a movie in which women talked 15% of the time, participants had to rate the men/female speaking ratio. Their perception was that women and men talked equally long. A similar thing may be the case here. We know that in that period in the US, the term global warming was more emotion-inducing than climate change. In that sense, it would only be logical if people remembers hearing and using the term for often than they do in reality.

And: I still agree with you that the terms are used for slightly different concepts, with climate change being the broader description that fits the content of our article. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:34, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

[I finally got into Trends, using a box (not mine!) running an unmaintained copy of (!!) XP. And I see there aren't many options. So I downloaded the data (and scanned for lice), and spent the rest of the morning playing with software. Nothing presentable yet.]

Well, I deem Google hit-counts quite unreliable. If the methods used by Leiserowitiz et al. are defective than I would expect there would have been some comment. In that they were published in a presumably peer-reviewed journal their result has some authority.

I don't know whether "global warming" is (was?) in fact "more emotion-inducing than climate change", or not, but that is not the point here. (Villar & Krosnick, that you cited in the preceding section, seem to think it doesn't make that much difference.) Indeed, that is a bit of a strawman argument, as I don't recall anyone invoking "emotion-inducing" as a factor to consider here. As I just said in the preceding section, if you make the meaning broad enough then "climate change" covers everything, and it really ought to be a disambiguation page. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:47, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Google hit-counts are also used extensively in scientific literature for this purpose, so if you think peer-reviewed is the ultimate bar of reliability, you'd have to trust those as well :P.

It seems quite clear from all the sources we've cited that GW is the more polarized term of the two. Hulme (2009) describes more evocative expression 'global warming'. This agrees with V&K as well. The fact you call my argument a strawman means my point hasn't come across. I'm not claiming here you want GW because it's more emotion-inducing. I'm claiming there are grounds to explain the small discrepancy between the hard Google Trend data and the self-reported data in the previous study, and argue why hard data is more reliable here. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:49, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

I have never seen Google hit-counts used in the physical ("hard") sciences to determine either the science or scientific consensus. In the social sciences it seems they are used as weak proxies for what people are thinking. However (to paraphrase the summary at WP:GOOGLETEST), just because you count something doesn't mean you understand it.

I take your point to be that any numbers for GW usage should be discounted on because "it's more emotion-inducing", and therefore more memorable, and over-counted. But as the V&K article was (presumably) peer-reviewed certainly you have to trust their conclusion that (overall) GW and CC were considered equally "serious". Note that a recent study^[10] suggests that not only does the US public (mainly Republicans) distinguish these two terms, but also that the sensitivity to "GW" arises from the underlying issue (however labeled) of whether such an effect actually exists. See also the conclusion of Lineman et. al. that: "Thus having awareness or knowledge of a topic is strongly related to its public exposure in the media, and the emotional context of this relationship is dependent on the context in which the relationship was originally established." But even if there is a "more memorable" effect, I think that makes a term more significant than a less memorable term.

You previously argued: "We should not try to find the article name that gives readers what we believe is the most accurate emotion or reaction[emphasized]to the topic." Again, I don't recall that anyone has suggested that. But your concern re "more polarized", "more evocative expression", and "more emotion-inducing" suggests this is a consideration with you. Why? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:01, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Of course you've never seen physical scientists study terminology. Per definition. And we're not arguing Google Trends help us determine something about science, but about terminology. The question before us is what is the most used term for the TOPIC of human-caused changes in temperature, rainfall, wind, its consequences and its solutions". And of course we're not just counting, we're strolling over hundreds and hundreds of pages, sometimes citing lines, sometimes citing statistics (f.i. that 99% of pages that mention CC are about human-caused CC). To imply otherwise is a strawman arguement.

My arguments about disregarding emotion-inducing argumentation when determining neutrality were in direct response to your arguments, as I felt you were using that type of argumentation. If you disagree, let's drop it. I'm not going to go through our entire set of discussions here + in past to establish where this started. We're not getting any closer anymore, so I'm considering this discussion as finished. I'm very busy now, but I see no further obstacles to starting the move request soon(ish). Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:14, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

There seems to be some misunderstanding about the list that I compiled. My motivation was that I had been seeing a number of claims in this discussion about what readers "expect" or will be "surprised" by without an attribution of those expectations to independent sources. To me that just looks like an unconfirmed personal opinion. In compiling the list I was seeking a more object means of assessing current usage in RSs. (A similar motivation is why I looked at Google Trands and Ngram.) Also, I did not compile the list with an agenda to push a particular title that I prefered and then seek out only sources to support that choice. I followed the sources where the searching led me. FWIW, I initially leaned toward GW due to the early refs, but then noticed the recent shift. If we had this discussion about 10 years ago when the crossover point occured I probably would have flipped a coin and said it didn't matter.

The second list does indeed contain a wide variety of perspectives including science communication, public policy, journalism, and more. This is as it should be. Our consideration should take into account per WP:COMMONNAME: Although official, scientific, birth, original, or trademarked names are often used for article titles, the term or name most typically used in reliable sources is generally preferred. (emphasis added) I would argue that CC is now the most common terminology for the topic used by experts. (See the 2009 statement on climate change signed by 18 scientific societies.[26] CC is used 8 times, but GW does not even appear once in the statement.) But, we also need to consider common usage among all relevant sources that we might cite in the article. Our readers follow the news and listen to politicians debate these issues. The layperson's understanding of the meaning of these terms will be shaped more by exposure to that usage by non-experts. --mikeu ^talk 20:35, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

As I have said before: GW and CC are different concepts. It is not a matter of which term "is now the most common terminology for the topic", as these are different topics, despite their conflation by non-experts. See my new comment at the top of this section. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:05, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

References

^ Global, Past 12 months
^ Goes only up to 2009, using that year
^ Global, Past 12 months
^ Global, Using 2009
^ since 2015
^ With passive I mean not what people themself search, but a count of how much it is used
^ Hulme, Mike (2009). Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-521-72732-7.
^ Majdik, Zoltan P. (2019-07-03). "A Computational Approach to Assessing Rhetorical Effectiveness: Agentic Framing of Climate Change in the Congressional Record, 1994–2016". Technical Communication Quarterly. 28 (3): 207–222. doi:10.1080/10572252.2019.1601774. ISSN 1057-2252.
^ "Analysis: The UK politicians who talk the most about climate change". Carbon Brief. 2019-09-11. Retrieved 2019-12-02.
^ Schuldt, Jonathon P.; Enns, Peter K.; Cavaliere, Victoria (30 May 2017). "Does the label really matter? Evidence that the US public continues to doubt "global warming" more than "climate change"" (PDF). Climatic Change. doi:10.1007/s10584-017-1993-1. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

What falls under neutrality and what fall under "not politically right"?

Continuing from previous section, which veered from WP:COMMONNAME argumentation into neutrality argumentation. One of the cruxes of this discussion is how to evaluate the neutrality argument. I asked for some more clarification a few weeks ago, but alas no response. I completely concur that neutrality is extremely important and trumps popularity. My reading of the neutrality policy is that we follow reliable neutral sources' use of the term. If all major scientific institutions in their public communication use global warming AND climate change, and neither ever with inverted commas, as they would do for controversial titles, they have a very solid claim to be neutral. To me, arguments about what emotions our choice of title invokes for certain political groups falls into the category of Wikipedia:Advocacy, which is part of another important Wikipedia policy. We should not try to find the article name that gives readers what we believe is the most accurate emotion or reaction to the topic. In that context, I believe that the comment about "moral or political right" is not an aside, but a vital expression of the policy against advocacy. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:39, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Eunice Foote (1856) written out of history

Why is this skipped in the History of Global Warming section? It's in the main History of climate change science article, but that's not good enough. She was really the first person to experiment directly with CO2 and sunlight and specifically propose that a planet full of CO2 would be become much hotter.

The warming effects of visible light on different gases was examined in 1856 by Eunice Newton Foote, who described her experiments using glass tubes exposed to sunlight. The warming effect of the sun was greater for compressed air than for an evacuated tube, and greater for moist air than dry air. "Thirdly, the highest effect of the sun's rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas." (carbon dioxide) She continued: "An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if, as some suppose, at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action, as well as from increased weight, must have necessarily resulted." Her work was presented by Prof. Joseph Henry at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in August 1856 and described as a brief note written by then journalist David Ames Wells; her paper was published later that year in the American Journal of Science and Arts.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]

120.17.36.10 (talk) 22:01, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

References

^ Raymond P. Sorenson (2018). "Eunice Foote's Pioneering Research on CO2 and Climate Warming: Update*". AAPG. Retrieved 23 August 2019.
^ Foote, Eunice (November 1856). Circumstances affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays. Vol. 22. pp. 382–383. Retrieved 31 January 2016. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
^ "Climate Science Milestones Leading To 1965 PCAST Report". Science. 350 (6264): 1046. 27 November 2015. doi:10.1126/science.350.6264.1046.
^ Reed, Elizabeth Wagner (1992). "Eunice Newton Foote". American women in science before the civil war. Retrieved 31 January 2016.

Cleaning up language used with citations to, for example, IPCC Reports, to ensure objectivity, or, at the very least, accuracy

For a topic as controversial as this, it is essential objectivity be maintained to the point of being overly-cautious. As one example, the following sentence "Many regions have probably already seen increases in warm spells and heat waves, and it is virtually certain that these changes will continue over the 21st century" cites to the 2012 IPCC Report's "Summary for Policymakers," ("Report Summary") pages 9-13.

There are several blatant objectivity issues with such an assertion: 1. Most importantly, it is not even supported by the citation itself, as the Report Summary assigned "virtually certain" to the "frequency and magnitude of warm daily temperature extremes and cold daily temperature extremes," then clearly assigned "very likely" to the "length, frequency, and/or intensity of warm spells or heat spells (p.9)". 2. The heading of this contained the caveat "Models project (p.9)". 3. Moreover, at its outset, the Summary noted these conclusions arose from its own "assess[ment of] the scientific literature (p.2) 4. This passage in the Summary made no references to "regions" which had "already seen increases in warm spells in heat waves" (see generally pp. 9-13).

It is extremely inadvisable to parrot such an assessment without any of these necessary caveats to at least provide the illusion of objectivity that is presented in the reference itself, but if this is to be done, it should at least be done accurately. It certainly should not be done to reach an unrelated and unsupported conclusion, then connect this purported support to an assertion entirely absent.

There are further examples throughout the page where the sin of objectivity is first made by not including any of the caveats explicit in the reference, then, second, exponentially amplified by connecting it to, at best, both unrelated assertions, and an entirely subjective and unsupported magnification of what the cited reference could plausibly be read to suggest.

I can understand the first sin, but not the second. It gives the clear illusion of the page resulting from authors' ulterior, subjective motivations and conclusions which help nobody. Do better. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.59.35.225 (talk) 21:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment and welcome on Wikipedia! I'll have a look at it. A 2012 source probably overstates uncertainty compared to current knowledge, so I've been looking for a more up-to-date source but have not found a good secondary source yet. It is a shame the newest IPCC report isn't out yet. Over the last 12 months I've editing this article extensively (never checked this sentence), and found that uncertainty was mostly overstated and the article used to be biased in the opposite direction than you seem to suggest. As we're all just a bunch of volunteers, please remember to WP:Assume good faith of the editors here. An honest mistake is easily made. I welcome further comments! Femke Nijsse (talk) 21:00, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

The IPCC has many reports; the one you are referring to is often referred to as "SREX" ("Special Report on Extreme Weather", though that is not the exact name). The text you question appears to be a paraphrase of material from pages 6 and 11 of the SREX SPM ("Summary for Policymakers"), not "pp. 9–13" (Sec. D) as cited. However, that is a summary. It might be more appropriate to cite the text from the Executive Summary of Ch. 3 (pp. 111 and 112), or from deeper in the chapter (e.g.: "In many (but not all) regions with sufficient data there is medium confidence that the number of warm spells or heat waves has increased since the middle of the 20th century (Table 3-2)." [p. 135]), or the summary to section 3.3.1 (p. 141). Please feel free to revise the questioned sentence as you think appropriate, with the citation revised to show the proper page number. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:33, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Title

Hey, I have only taken a few environmental science classes, but I’m pretty sure the ‘formal’ term for this is “global climate change.” This is partially because, if the ice caps melt, scientist theorize that Europe will go through an ice age. MaddiPH (talk) 00:30, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

As one of those scientists: we won't have to worry about an ice age, even if ice cap melt would shut the Gulfstream down. At most it might cool slightly, or just about compensate the temperature rise due to global warming. We also don't typically use formal names for articles on Wikipedia, but instead the most common name. A recent proposal (Preliminary discussion concerning possible Requested Move of "Global warming") to consider 'global climate change' therefore didn't garner much support. Femke Nijsse (talk) 22:09, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

The ice caps melting implies a warming, which is the opposite of an ice-age.

Through the 1950s there was some question of whether other effects (such as aerosols) might counter the effects of CO2, but this was resolved in the 1970s. I believe the last time any reputable scientist suggested that we could be headed for an ice age the time frame was "in about a thousand years". It is now absolutely clear that is NOT the direction we are headed. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:58, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

"I believe the last time any reputable scientist suggested that we could be headed for an ice age the time frame was "in about a thousand years"." The main article on this topic is global cooling. Dimadick (talk) 17:03, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

@MaddiPH: Hope you are enjoying your environmental science classes. If you are interested in the subject there are lots of articles which need improvement discussed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Climate change/Small to medium tasks. Perhaps you might like to look at one about the country you live in.Chidgk1 (talk) 09:53, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Discussion of new-ish graphic "Human-caused global warming and climate change"

(Superseded) Scientists have determined the primary causes and the wide-ranging effects of global warming and resulting climate change. Some effects constitute feedback mechanisms that intensify climate change in the direction of climate tipping points.
Versions: 1, 2, 3
(all superseded).

Succeeding version (started 19 Jan) with vertical flow, color-coded blocks, and categorization of effects.

Versions: A, B, C, D, E,

F, G.

@RCraig09: I very much like the idea of the graphic (currently third in the article), but that means I need to pick it apart because that's how wikipedia works, right? So, here's a few thoughts: Efbrazil (talk) 22:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Efbrazil's eight comments of 22:23, 14 Jan have been moved to respective numbered sub-sections, immediately following

Background: I generated the diagram because I realize people find it easier to absorb images than text (even though the diagram has little boxes of text boxes of short text). I wanted to summarize the causes and effects in one place, so it's easier for laymen to see the scope expressed in thousands of sources. I chose what I thought were the most dominant issues found in references, and organized them. I also wanted to keep the overall "look and feel" of the diagram organized and uncrowded and visually balanced, as not to "turn off" lay readers. —23:09, 14 January 2020 (UTC) updated RCraig09 (talk) 15:31, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Critically, one goal is to portray, in one spot, and quickly and easily appreciated by viewers, the fact that GW and CC have few causes but many wide-ranging effects. This goal is achieved by looking at the ~~thumbnail-sized image with readable~~ labels (Causes, Effects, Feedback)~~; readers can quickly investigate details with a single tap on the thumbnail~~. I've long felt that people should see elements of "the big picture", all together in perspective. —20:16, 16 January 2020 (UTC) Strikethrough added RCraig09 (talk) 15:59, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

A clearly, distinctly stated goal is indeed critical to getting a clear, well-focused result. And showing that GW has many wide-ranging effects is certainly a laudable goal. I hope all the editors here appreciate that showing that is not the same as, nor requires, showing all of the causes and effects, and that we should not insist on any particular personal favorite. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:04, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Replying to Ebrazil's items, point by point:

1. Ocean acidification

1. Ocean acidification should be under "effects" and should clearly point towards the issue with coral reefs. Efbrazil (talk) 22:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Ocean acidification is considered the "ugly cousin" of GW/CC since occurs directly from the ocean's CO₂ absorption, and not "through" the "GW+CC" block. Therefore, in the context of this diagram, ocean acidification's effects are not really "effects of GW & CC". —RCraig09 (talk) 23:09, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
- Yeah- well said. I was thinking more in terms of the big "Effects" banner- shouldn't acidification be an "Effect"? But I see your point that effects are restricted to just CC / GW effects. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm sensing we agree: ocean acidification and GW/CC are both effects of CO2; this chart's "Effects" are about the effects of GW/CC. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:13, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps more precisely: ocean acidification is an effect of CO2 that is not mediated through warming. And if this chart is focused on warming, then, correct, acidification is not a related effect. But if the focus is on climate change, defined broadly such that it includes GW (what we have been arguing about above), then the situation is not so well-determined. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:16, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

2. Invasive species movement

2. I'd cut "Invasive species movement"- almost all of that issue is caused by people moving stuff around, not by greenhouse gases. Efbrazil (talk) 22:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Though there are other causes of invasive species movement, it is properly included here. But I'll reconsider. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:14, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
- Thanks, I think you really already captured the issue as it relates to climate change under "Disease carrier and pest propagation". I would definitely cut this item, so many others are more important. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I can see how invasive species movement is a less dominant concern than sea level rise or intensification of extreme weather events, but I was going based on what I read. If a more important effect rears its ugly head, I'm definitely open to modifying the chart. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:13, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

3. Desertification

3. I would talk about "desertification" as an effect, in particular how it will impact human migration and crops. Efbrazil (talk) 22:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

I do not want to complicate the diagram any further; maybe I'll add it to the "Habitat destruction" box. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:14, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

✔ Done (Version 2). —RCraig09 (talk) 20:36, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

- Better, thanks! It's the evil twin of sea level rise in terms of threatening mass migrations and farmland collapse, and would ideally be featured as a human impact as well, but I'll take what I can get. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)
  - References I've read, use the term "habitat loss" with respect to non-humans, but I see your point. May be an arrow from HabitatLossDesertification to HumanMigrationAndConflict? —RCraig09 (talk) 06:13, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

4. Water vapor

4. Water vapor increase is often categorized as a negative feedback, because more clouds are generated which reflect sunlight, but it's captured here as a positive feedback. I think I would just cut water vapor increase (or stuff it into the weather effects). Efbrazil (talk) 22:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

WRT point 4:Water vapour is probably the most significant positive feedback for global warming. Water vapour is a very strong greenhouse gas, and warmer air will generally contain more of it without leading to cloud creation. Clouds consist not of water vapour, but of liquid water droplets (or, for some high clouds, ice crystals). Moreover, while clouds are complex, they are probably not a negative feedback. They reflect back sunlight, but they also reflect back emissions from the Earth (which, overall, in a stable situation exactly balance the sunlight). Think, for example, about the difference in temperature between a cloudy and a clear night. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:27, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
I agree with Stephan Schulz. My understanding is that water vapor around our planet as a whole operates as a powerful greenhouse gas. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:21, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
- There's so many different feedbacks related to atmospheric moisture that it gets confusing to me. For instance, replacing the Amazon rainforest with a desert is considered a positive feedback even though it'll substantially reduce atmospheric moisture. Even clouds vary- high clouds intensify warming, low clouds reflect it. Anyhow, I'm fine leaving it as a positive feedback on balance, I don't know enough to say that it should be otherwise. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm going with the highest-level indications of sources, and trying to keep the graph as simple and clean as possible for our readers. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:13, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

"replacing the Amazon rainforest with a desert" would be a forcing, not a feedback. If that happens on its own, that would be a feedback. And it would reduce atmospheric water vapour only in a very local sense - remember that over 70% of the atmosphere is over water, and water vapour is dominated by evaporation from the ocean surface. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:06, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

5. Human migration and conflict

5. Human migration and conflict should probably be categorized as a feedback since it exacerbates our impacts. Efbrazil (talk) 22:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Human migration and conflict are responses to the effects of climate change; hence there is no direct arrow from "GW&CC" to "Human migration and conflict". Also, I haven't seen references single out migration & conflict as a cause of greenhouse gas increase or warming per se, so they're not truly feedbacks in any event. FYI: See Talk:Effects_of_global_warming#Social and economic effects/responses, where the difference between effect and response is discussed. I've got to say no to this one, sorry! —RCraig09 (talk) 23:21, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
- Yeah, I can see the connection is not direct enough. Clearly war and conflict and mass migration are not the path to carbon reduction and a sustainable future though. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

6. Categorizing "Effects"

6. I think I would try to split effects into "Ecosystem" and "Human" categories, then have the categories include sub headers that talk about "Habitat destruction" as the umbrella ecosystem impact and "Human migration and conflict" as the umbrella human impact. Habitat destruction is really the ecosystem evil twin of "Human migration and conflict"- it is both a first and second order effect of a lot of these little boxes. Efbrazil (talk) 22:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Even considering this suggestion gives me a headache, as the present diagram is the result of about twenty iterations over ten days. Categorizing might make the concepts more organized in an abstract sense; however this is a visual diagram intended for laymen to see cause and effect, a diagram in which clarity and simplicity are paramount. I'll think on it some more, but my initial impression is that the suggested categorization will add our archenemy (complexity) without adding content that's useful to lay readers. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:29, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
- Fair enough, I tried it and got a headache too. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Actually, JJohnson, below, indicates a vertical orientation of the chart that might conceivably enable categorization—though that will take many hours of thought and graphic twiddling. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:13, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Your suggested categorization is incorporated in the Jan 19 "vertical flow" diagram, below. —RCraig09 (talk) 05:48, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

7. Enlarging font

7. I would work to boost the smallest font size - most people look at wikipedia on smartphones, and I think the font size here is too small for powerpoints as well. Efbrazil (talk) 22:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

A noble goal, but ~~not practically realizable~~ no dramatic improvement is likely, given the number of blocks already in the diagram—and I kept the number of boxes to a minimum! I'll keep the issue in mind, though. 23:32, 14 January 2020 (UTC) updated RCraig09 (talk) 15:22, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
You could try to reduce the outer margins to get a bit more space. I wanted to make this same comment before. Femke Nijsse (talk) 13:21, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I can probably make slight improvements to the font size. I'll wait for further comments before uploading a Version 2. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:22, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Fonts enlarged in Version 3. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:13, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

A basic reality of graphics: any detail that cannot be resolved by the reader is pointless. If such detail is really necessary make it big enough to resolve, otherwise eliminate it. A good rule of thumb for text: at the scale presented it should be no smaller than the surrounding text. Alternately: it should be readable from the back of the auditorium.

There is also the aspect of efficient use of space. That diagram has a lot of empty space, and could be better organized. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:28, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

2020-01-16 Update: Version 2 is uploaded with less space between boxes, smaller margins, less empty space, and all fonts enlarged, including 25% enlargement for the smallest text. Per the "Critically:" paragraph above, it's now easy to see the labels for Causes, Effects, and Feedback, Fossil Fuel, GHG and GW & CC, especially to immediately and intuitively convey that GW & CC have few causes but many wide-ranging effects. A single click or tap takes readers to details. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:32, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Working now to further enlarge FF, GHG, GW and CC labels (Version 3). —RCraig09 (talk) 23:00, 17 January 2020 (UTC) Version 3 is done! —RCraig09 (talk) 06:13, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

8. White/transparent background

8. I'd have a white or transparent background so the graphic could easily be inserted into presentations without clashing. Efbrazil (talk) 22:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC) Efbrazil (talk) 22:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

A good idea. I'll investigate. I used Powerpoint --> PDF --> Photoshop --> PNG, so it may be non-trivial. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:38, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

If there is a final version, getting the background out is something I (or any recent Mac user ;-) can do easily. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:56, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I've just uploaded Version 2 which includes a transparent background and enlarged fonts (25% larger fonts for smallest text). FYI: Something bad happened somewhere, so Photoshop Elements could no longer read the PDF that Powerpoint output, so my new path was:

Powerpoint --> PDF --> ~~"Finder"~~ "Preview" (on MAC) --> PNG --> Photoshop (manual removal of background) --> PNG

Thanks for the offer of help, though, @Stephan. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:25, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

You are welcome. Just for your information: You can use Apple Preview both to convert PDF to PNG, and to remove the background in PNGs (with the "Instant alpha" magic wand and the delete key). I've never used Photoshop, but it's likely overkill. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:58, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

I didn't know Photoshop Element's "Magic Wand Tool" was also in Apple Preview as "Instant Alpha". Now I do! —RCraig09 (talk) 23:00, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

This can also be done directly from powerpoint without going through PDF first (custom output resolutions plus transparency). Let me know if you want details.Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I'll investigate, thanks. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:13, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

@Efbrazil: When viewing on my iPhone, or on Mac-desktop-Safari, the chart has a white background (good). However, when viewing on Mac-desktop Chrome, a first click shows the light-gray-checkerboard pattern, and a second click shows a black background (bad). I'm thinking that a solid white background would be best (especially in view of the colored areas), and I plan to stop making the overall background transparent if there are no objections. Let me know if that's a problem. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:43, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

FYI: I've streamlined to Powerpoint --> PNG, but use Apple Preview to manually transparent-ize. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:43, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

I think those different results come from how document characteristics are inherited in different environments. There are cases where a transparent background is useful, but for general all-around use I say stick with the white background. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:48, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

@RCraig09: I think solid white is a good idea- I've seen some of the same weirdness when using transparency myself. BTW, if you ever want transparency straight out of PPT without going through Apple Preview, select the content of the image, right click, and say save as image. You'll need a transparent box in the background to set the size of the image, but otherwise it's the same as saving an entire slide as PNG. Also, thanks again for your great work here incorporating all the feedback, the image is really in a good place now. Efbrazil (talk) 16:47, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

9-13: Further suggested outline wording tweaks These (9-13) are all fairly minor tweaks to wording. Take them or leave them. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC) Again, thanks for your good work here! Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

9. Ice sheets etc

Change "Melting of ice caps, glaciers, Greenland ice sheet" to "Melting of glaciers and ice sheets"- it's more precise and less wordy. There are only 2 ice sheets- greenland and antarctica, so why mention Greenland specifically and "ice caps" but not Antarctica? Arctic ice is ocean ice and won't contribute to sea level rise. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

True that; perceptive! I will change. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:52, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

10. Freshwater loss

I'm not sure "freshwater loss" should be part of "Sea level rise: coastal submersion, freshwater loss". Having freshwater loss following "sea level rise:" implies a connection I don't think you're trying to make. Loss of freshwater is better tied to lost glaciers or desertification / increased evaporation. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I was thinking of one reference that described how, with coastal submersion, salt water moves inland and upstream to thereby contaminate formerly-fresh water supplies (also low-lying waste-water treatment plants). Per your suggestion, freshwater loss is currently tied to glacial retreat in the diagram. Re desertification link: My initial interpretation is that desertification is one example of freshwater loss, rather than a cause of it in a sense requiring an additional arrow in the diagram, but it's a point worth pondering. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:52, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Marshland losses are tied to sea level rise, but in terms of people, sea level rise is mainly tied to flushing of waste. If you cut the invasive species bit, then perhaps you could break out "freshwater loss and desertification" as it's own item. It's primarily caused by increased evaporation and melting of glaciers, and it would be a cause of crop and infrastructure failure and human migration and conflict. Think about the American Southwest and Australia and places in Africa bordering the desert- sea level rise are not concerns, but desertification and fresh water losses are. Efbrazil (talk) 20:41, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I think I've correctly implemented your astute suggestion in the 19 January "vertical flow" chart, below. —RCraig09 (talk) 05:48, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

11. Coral bleaching, reef degradation, fishery decline

Change "Coral bleaching and reef degradation" to "Coral bleaching and fishery declines"- this better captures the wider effects of ocean warming and acidification. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I see your point: "coral bleaching" and "reef degradation" are closely intertwined, while "fishery declines" adds useful information. Maybe use-all-three is a good option. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:52, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

12. Acidification --> Coral bleaching etc.

I would also have an arrow from acidification pointing to the issue. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Along the lines discussed in Item 1, above: since this chart focuses on the effects of GW and CC (rather than about all possible sources of coral bleaching), the effects of acidification are not really pertinent to this particular chart. Parallel example: there are many other causes of "Habitat destruction" that aren't really pertinent here either. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:52, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

So long as acidification is on the diagram (which it should be, the IPCC covers it) then there's no reason to not show that acidification is a primary cause of coral bleaching and fishery losses. All I'm talking about here is adding a single little arrow from acidification box to the coral bleaching / fishery losses box. Efbrazil (talk) 20:35, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree that ocean acidification ("OA") is proper in the GW/CC diagram even though GW/CC really occurs in parallel with OA. However I'm still hesitant to draw an arrow from OA to coral/fishery because OA barely makes the 'relevance' cut in the first place (and, formally, the arrow would cut across other arrows to reach its destination and clutter the diagram and distract lay readers). —RCraig09 (talk) 05:48, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Indeed. If the goal of chart is to show that there are "many effects" (see above) it is not necessary to show them all (just "many"), and I would say that coral bleaching is not as notable as many of the other effects. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:21, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

13. "Atmospheric warming" --> "Increased evaporation"

Change "Atmospheric warming" to "Increased evaporation". Atmospheric warming is synonymous with global warming so having it called out is a bit weird. Increased evaporation is the key that leads to more atmospheric moisture. Efbrazil (talk) 02:15, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Actually atmospheric warming is only part of GW; surface sea temperatures are also involved in GW. Example: Collecting data for warming stripes diagrams (here), I learned that some datasets involve a choice between air temp immediately above sea ice versus sea temp immediately beneath the ice. Here I chose "atmospheric warming" because warmer air supports higher humidities (evaporation being the mechanism for higher humidity), and a warmer atmosphere is the direct-arrow cause of the "Water vapor increase" block in the diagram that is a significant positive feedback. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:52, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

14. Request for comments re shading (re overall background, and re groups of blocks)

This request is purely about form and presentation, not substantive content:

Removing the background (making it 'transparent') has left the presentation appear "sterile" to me, possibly having the same chilling effect on our generally non-scientist audience. Do you favor re-introducing a "friendlier, more pleasant" background like in Version 1? Please respond inline. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:06, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

What do you mean by "sterile"? As in "no color"? There can be problems with colored backgrounds (as previously noted); I don't see any problem with basic white. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:55, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

By sterile I meant something not visually appealing to non-sci/tech people; many of our readers will be age ~16 working on a theme paper. I think Version C (with colored regions) is both more appealing and easier to understand, and with a decrease from 4 to 3 columns of blocks. —RCraig09 (talk) 11:18, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I believe the appeal of a chart arises from a clean, clear, and elegant form, which can incorporate color. But relying on color for appeal is liking adding sugar: it works, but isn't an adequate substitute. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:37, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

I have implemented J. Johnson's idea of color-coding the individual blocks. Do you also favor putting lightly-shaded background areas behind respective groups of blocks (Causes, Effects on the Ecosystem, Effects on humans) to further set the groups apart from each other? One example is here. Please respond inline. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:06, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

No. A shaded background needs a bit of margin on both sides of the edge (just like an outline), and space is so tight here that every smidgin ought to applied to making the text bigger. If a colored box outline (with a slightly larger line width?) is not enough contrast then perhaps the background of the boxes could shaded (very lightly!). But that can also exacerbate legibility/accessibility problems, so generally best avoided unless there is a particular reason for doing so. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:30, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

The Version C colored regions, and reduction from 4 to 3 columns of blocks, instantly make the general concepts (cause, effect, feedback) much more apparent, at least to me. Particular colors can be modified if needed. —RCraig09 (talk) 11:18, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I think it would be better with colored boxes than colored shading. But it's not that big a deal; have it as you will. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:38, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

15. Modern colour scheme

Could you opt for a modern colour scheme? Powerpoint default options now are not as offensive and bright as the colours chosen in this graph, so I suspect that that should doable. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:21, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

The red, green and blue are actually from the ten "Standard colors" in my Powerpoint version 12.^{(2008, blush)} I don't know what a "modern" colour scheme is, but would be happy to comply if you @Femkemilene: were more specific (specific color palette or examples), keeping in mind our main audience is not scientists who are used to looking at "dry" charts.

P.S. The different major topics (Causes, Effects on the ecosystem, Effects on humanity) are distinguished from each other by color-coded blocks, and in the future (Item 14 above) possibly by area or overall background colors. —RCraig09 (talk) 21:47, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

I don't know what a "modern" color scheme is, either. But there are issues in displaying colors consistently across devices. Do give Web colors some study, especially "Web-safe colors" and "Safest web colors". ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:36, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

The most important thing we now see in any modern colour scheme is not using bright red, bright blue and bright green any more. Instead of your bright red, maroon is often used. Instead of bright blue, teal is used. Some examples can be found here: https://blog.graphiq.com/finding-the-right-color-palettes-for-data-visualizations-fcd4e707a283. A further important tenet is the minimalization of the amount of colours used. I like the fact that we have one colour for "Causes+feedbact", one for "effects on humans" and one for "effects on climate system (=ecosystem and physical climate system)". The brown in the title and arrows doesn't really have a function though and can be replaced by dark gray. Femke Nijsse (talk) 21:37, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Excellent guidance: the more specific, the better. —RCraig09 (talk) 21:54, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

My formative experience with scientific graphics (and popular scientific writing) is with Scientific American. Starting from 1948 they were notable for having lots of colored diagrams, but only in the primary ("strong") colors. (I think the "modern" color options came with advances in how finely spots of ink can be placed.) I also remember when "teal" was a new thing (circa 1980?), not found in the standard Crayola palette :-). Perhaps all this new stuff is a reaction to "grandpa's" color environment? Well, making people happier is not to be despised, but the most important consideration is still clarity of communication. Which is where we get into the problem that not all colors display the same on all devices, and therefore the topic of Web_colors#Web-safe_colors. Another consideration is that the connotations of long-established "colors" are well known, whereas they are more ambiguous for the newer colors. Likewise re perceptibility issues for color-blind readers. Which all is not to say that "modern" colors should not be used, but they need to be selected with as much care, or more, as more basic colors. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:06, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

16. Deep ocean

While not every little detail should be included, yet I think there should be a box for "Deep ocean" (as an alternate reservoir of heat). That is the essential explanation for the "hiatus" and other instances where surface temperature doesn't always track with GHGs. And while it can be argued (as I have) that "global warming" really includes both GMST and deep ocean warming, the strong association of "warming" with the surface temperature record, and the need to show how deep ocean warming fits in, warrants separate boxes. (In my chart I considered having "surface warming" and "deep ocean warming" as separate boxes within the dashed "warming" outline, but thought that might be too complicated.) ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:59, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I haven't researched this sub-topic, and am not sure where it would go in the diagram if it were included. If you could link a favorite source on this topic, that would help. —RCraig09 (talk) 11:28, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

"Deep ocean warming" could go just where I showed it: between GHE and "Global-scale Warming". Or it and surface-warming could be side-by-side boxes inside an enclosing (dashed-line) "Global-scale warming" box. Because surface temperatures actually don't always rise I think it is necessary show that somewhere, and having a separate diagram for that purpose, especially one some what discordant with this diagram, would tend to cause confusion.

I may take a look tonight for some explanatory text. We probably should have sources for each element, and a source for a similar diagram showing the overall situation, so it is not entirely OR. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:46, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Is Global_warming_hiatus#Effects_of_oceans what you are talking about? Or the El Niño–Southern Oscillation?

From your description, the Deep Ocean ("DO") phenomenon is not a "cause" of GW/CC but only an intermittent intervening mechanism, a subtlety of how surface measurements might be affected, and only some of the time. My understanding has been that GW definitions generally refer to surface temperatures (example ref: GW "is most commonly measured as the average increase in Earth’s global surface temperature.") Meanwhile, this chart's purpose is to show, as completely as possible in one view, the (few) causes and the (far-reaching) effects of GW/CC, and DO would add another block's height to the diagram. It sounds like a topic worth discussing in some WP article, and I'll keep thinking about it. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:47, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

(Supplemental) What you call D.O. seems to be a variability internal to the climate system, and not an external forcing (="cause") (see Global warming#Physical drivers of recent climate change and NCA4, § 3.2: ("...responses to the different specified climate forcing agents (natural and anthropogenic) and from internal (unforced) climate variability.") —RCraig09 (talk) 17:26, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Re WP:OR: I did not WP:SYNthesize any conclusions. References say Cause1-->GW/CC and Cause2-->GW/CC and GW/CC-->EffectA and GW/CC-->EffectB etc. I just graphically joined the instances of GW/CC. I cited four references to support the items involved. —RCraig09 (talk) 05:07, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Get a better grip. The chart is a "conclusion" of sorts, and of course you "synthesized" it – that is the nature of making graphics, and it is explicit when you described your source as "Own work". If it was someone else's work (and not suitably licensed) there would likely be a copyright issue. What I suggested is that we "probably should have sources for each element", so that the synthesis we need to do to assemble all these elements will be seen as solidly based. My point is about how to mitigate any objection of "synthesis".

One of your sources is NCA4, and I suspect figure 2.2 in chapter 2 is your main inspiration for this chart. You might note that it does include "Ocean heat uptake" (i.e., the deep ocean reservoir), right next to "Ocean acidification". If you define this chart's purpose tightly enough then, sure, deep ocean might be extraneous. But so would some of the other effects. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:54, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Alternate form ("vertical" flow)

In your chart the middlemost box is the key element, but there is a problem with calling it "Global warming and resultant Climate change". It has been extensively argued here that CC is the superset of all these topics, and that "GW" and "CC" are interchangeable. Having the whole as an element of itself leads to infinite regression. That box is more sensibly the warming of the climate system. (As evidenced, in part, by GMST rise.)

As a demonstration of a better way to organize essentially the same material (with the addition of the very important "Deep ocean warming") I offer a demo graphic. Key points: 1) The central theme – "Global-scale warming of Earth's climate" – is made more prominent and central. 2) Top-down flow. (More efficient when the elements tend to be horizontal, and can more readily accommodate additional "Effects" without disturbing the "Causes".) 3) The causes are distinguished by color from the effects, with sidebars to indicate grouping. 4) The title is simplified. (Could also be "Human-caused Climate Change: ..."; I haven't worked out what difference this might make.) 5) I also removed "feedbacks" from the title (don't think is especially useful), and changed the "feedback" connections to dashed lines.

I have also shown how "Effects" can be further distinguished between direct Climatic effects, and indirect Economic, Societal, etc. effects. This chart is not optimized for maximum space efficiency, and both charts could be more accurate. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:33, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Vertical orientation is actually a useful suggestion, but will take days of thinking and graphic experimentation to correctly capture sequences of causation (the various direct-->indirect effects now shown). I will think further on it.

Emphatically, I have heard no human being ever once argue that GW and CC are properly interchangeable, though it is virtually common knowledge that many laymen and journalists use them interchangeably.

To remove the most commonly used terms, "GW" and "CC", would eviscerate this entire focus of the chart; I cannot conceive of a valid reason for eliminating those terms from their position of emphasis in the title or central block. "GW and resultant CC" captures the relationship as succinctly as I know how.

Color-coding is actually a good suggestion.

Based on so many references I've read, "Feedback" is critical concerning acceleration toward tipping points that could spell worst-case planetary disaster.

I'll think seriously, over time, re vertical orientation and possible grouping/categorization. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:37, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm glad you like it. Keep in mind there are two distinct aspects to this: 1) what should be in the chart, and their relationships, and 2) and how that should be represented in the chart. The "what" is subject to interpretation, so it might warrant running up a table showing the elements, which can be linked back to reliable sources (for which I strongly recommend AR5). Also, multiple sources may need to be merged, and multiple elements summarized, so a broad input on how to balance all that would be good.

As to "how", I wonder if your "days of .. graphic experimentation" might be due in part to your arduous path of multiple processes. By contrast, I use a single graphics editor which produces the output file directly. If Powerpoint doesn't let you set the background (I would be amazed that it doesn't) or export directly into PNG format (ditto) then get another graphics editor. Which then sucks up time to learn, but look at it as an investment which you will eventually do anyway.

The interchangeability argument should be done elsewhere. But perhaps you will accept that, if GW and CC are not "properly" (or even otherwise) interchangeable then instead of reinforcing incorrect usage we should inform and educate our readers. But whether you accept that or not, you missed my point. Titles usually refer to the whole work, not one element. Having a block with the same name as the chart is confusing, and suggests that a part is equal to the whole. (Or that the chart, considered as a set, is an element of itself, which could be problem.)

"GW and resultant CC" is succinct, but applies to the entirety of what the chart describes, and has some ambiguity issues. What we have in the box is the warming itself. That is the nexus of all of this. I used a slightly expanded, more specific label instead of just "global warming" because GW is such a loaded, expanded, and misused term people will take it too generally. I considered "Global-scale Warming of Earth's surface", but that is inadequate, as it is really a matter of heat (energy) being added to the climate system.

I agree that feedbacks are critical (and some are even negative). But those are connections of effects to causes, and I don't think this aspect needs to be incorporated in the title. Though I think the dashed lines should be red to indicate that they are, in a sense, a cause.

Leaving out "GW" might eviscerate the chart, because that is the central nexus of the matter. But I have not suggested leaving that out. And I don't see how not saying "climate change" any where would "eviscerate" the focus of the chart.

Incidentally, I am now thinking "Climatic" could be removed from the title, as not all effects are, directly and strictly speaking, climatic. Also, yellow is a difficult color; orange or brown would probably work better. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:28, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Alrighty then! I've incorporated many of Efbrazil's suggestions (exceptions discussed above) and adopted J. Johnson's model orienting the flow vertically and color-coding blocks. The vertical orientation allows it to extend downward more than leftward in WP articles, allowing the fonts to be more easily read. The result is a diagram that shows the organization of causes and now-categorized effects, and in a glance better achieves the goal of conveying the (few) causes and (many wide-ranging) effects of GW & CC.

Thanks to all for helping me streamline the process: now Powerpoint --> scalable PDF --> yuge PNG. The new chart has no "title" at all, but has a dominant central block "GW and resultant CC" which accommodates both definitions of "CC" (in which GW either causes, or is a part of, CC). Misc: I'm thinking of enlarging the smallest fonts a bit, and making other suggested changes that seem appropriate. I think this graph should immediately replace the January 1 diagram having "horizontal" flow, but I'll wait a day or two. —RCraig09 (talk) 05:37, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, much improved. And enough for immediate replacement. (The original was a bit premature, and this one can be upgraded as needed.)

A few points. First, titles are important, as they both identify ("that chart") and give the reader a heads-up on what the chart is trying to illustrate. (Currently the apparent title is "Causes", which is obviously inadequate.) I favor "Global Warming: Causes and Effects", as (as I explained above) the warming (with causes and effects) is the central nexus of this whole topic. while "Climate Change", used broadly, could apply to all of this, used narrowly there is a problem in that some of the changes (effects) are not actually climatic.

The smallest text is still too small. For comparison with my demo chart I have added |upright=2.0, but this is likely to cause another problem: some editors object to such a large graphic. But text that can't be read is useless, so a position has to be worked out as to what size the display graphic should be, which will in turn impact how much text can be fitted in.

I'm out of time, so more comments later. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:13, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Continuing: The text in your small boxes is so small because the boxes themselves are smaller (relative to the width of the whole image). This is in part because you have four boxes across, whereas I have only three. (In top row I have four, and could do five, but they get a little more room because there's no horizontal lines and arrows that need to be accomodated.) With a little rearrangement you can fit all of your "Effects" boxes three across. If you put "Feedback" above the three feedback boxes, and color code the boxes themselves (perhaps red or orange), you won't need the outline, and can then gain a little more space. Using a colored (or shaded) background doesn't work as well (besides a possible "background" problem) because the edge of the outline needs a bit of margin on either side, just like an outline.

Having lines running through labels confuses comprehension (there's a bit of a mental pause trying to decide if the line is supposed to separate the text), and there is much to be said for having the labels justified left. The feedback lines can go up the right side if you flip the boxes left-to-right.

The main thing is (always! always! always!): make the smallest text big enough to read. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:55, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

Version B (20 Jan): Smallest fonts are increased in size to the extent possible; it's not useless as the thumbnail conveys the important fact that GW/CC has few causes and diverse effects, and a single click or tap shows details, which is why I favor a thumbnail over a yuge diagram that would be too dominant. Title has been added, including both commonly-used terms GW and CC. Misc sizing/color changes explained on Commons image page. —RCraig09 (talk) 05:55, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

That "single click" gives me an enlarged version of the image only, outside of the context of the article text, and lacking the caption, which makes it difficult to connect with text. So when I see a blurry, illegible thumbnail image I tend to skip past it, as I suspect most other readers also do. As this chart illustrates an important aspect of the GW/CC relationship I think it should be viewable in the article context. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:17, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the continued work here Craig! I like the vertical arrangement. Here's stuff that sticks out to me when looking at the new vertical graphic...--Efbrazil (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

"Effects on the ecosystem" --> "Effects on ecosystems"

Earth has many ecosystems. Also, the text isn't bold, while "feedback" and "effects on humans" are- make it bold to match.--Efbrazil (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Roger, wilco. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:38, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

If red means "Feedback" then why is the top box red?

I would just make everything above the feedback box Black / grey except for Ocean acidification. Also, please only use the light red font color for "Feedback"- not designery to have light red and dark red kind of randomly mixed up like that. Having it only on the background color means it's pointing out what the color means.--Efbrazil (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Actually red intends to mean "Causes" (will explicitly add) as well as "Feedback"—both worsening GW. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:38, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes that "red = causes" is meant. But: shading "Feedbacks" as red does imply "red = feedbacks", which confuses that what is actually being shaded are really effects ("that feed back"). Strictly speaking the feedbacks are a relation – that is, the connecting line.

Also: two different reds don't really work. One of those might be better as a dashed red line. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:58, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Actually, there is a paradox/conundrum that the three "Feedback" blocks are both effects and causes of GW/CC. I put them on a red background to portray their "cause" nature, and adjacent "Effects on ecosystems" to portray their "effects" nature. I'm continually thinking about ways to represent this, but a (suggested) dashed line is qualitatively different representation than colored area-backgrounds. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:53, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

It is as I have previously said: ALL of these can be considered "both causes and effects". Not a paradox at all: a phenomenon "B" can be caused by (ie., an effect of) phenomenon "A", as well as a cause of "C": A ⇒ B ⇒ C.

The nature of a "feedback" is a relationship where the link to the next "effect" in the chain of causality is not forward, but backward. As the link (relationship) is different, differentiating the line that indicates the link is warranted. If you don't like dashes, fine, use a different color (perhaps orange?). But don't use two very similar colors, as the distinction is unclear, and likely missed.

Your concept of this may be influenced by figure 2.2 in NCA4, which has a box labeled "Feedback processes". The included elements ("Clouds", "Land surface albedo", etc.) aren't really processes themselves, they are phenomena that affect – feedback to – other phenomena. The prominence of that box suggests it originally illustrated a discussion about the feedback processes [phenomena] themselves, not the whole domain of GW causes and effects. So it comes back to (as I mentioned just earlier): what is the specific purpose of the chart? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:42, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Bump the font under Agriculture and Extreme weather event intensification

Please use the the same font size you use for "(carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor, ...). When I click the image once I should be able to read everything.--Efbrazil (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I plan to just eliminate 'livestock, fertilizer' to simplify the 'Agriculture' box at top. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:38, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Or perhaps the specification of greenhouse gases ("carbon dioxide", etc.) could be taken out. Presumably that is explained in nearby text. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:14, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Don't switch fonts in a single line of text

"Fossil fuel combustion" should all be the same font size and color, only subheadings should be a smaller font size. Similarly, replace the mini italic "and" between Global warming "and" climate change with a "/" that's normal font size. General designer rule is one line of text needs to be consistent for readability unless clearly calling out something contextual like "this is a title".--Efbrazil (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Roger, wilco. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:38, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Related issue: while subtitles are often reduced in height to emphasize they are subtitles, it is usually only two points or so (e.g., 16 pt/14 pt). (Or perhaps 1/8th? It's been a few years.) Any way, "causes and effects" should be only slightly smaller than the main title. And capitalized. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:23, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

"Invasive species movement" --> "Ecosystem collapse (great barrier reef, arctic, ...)"

"Ecosystem collapse (great barrier reef, arctic, ...)" captures a key concern- that places like the great barrier reef will simply cease to exist and cannot be recovered. You could also cut the box entirely and shift everything up. Also, if subheadings are a different font size, you can eliminate the parenthesis around them. --Efbrazil (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree that 'invasive species movement' is a lesser offense. I plan to replace as you suggest. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:38, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

@RCraig09: Thanks for getting this in! Only quibble is it would be nice to have at least 2 ecosystem examples instead of just calling out the great barrier reef, plus I think the diagram is maybe a bit too reef-centric right now. Maybe "Arctic, reefs, rainforests, ..." would be more inclusive? --Efbrazil (talk) 17:24, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

This 'ecosystem collapse' issue has also been running as a silent subroutine in my brain. I remember your original suggestion included "arctic" but at the time I didn't readily find sources to support a claim of ecosystem collapse that was as dramatic as the Great Barrier Reef's decline (my personal perception, perhaps). Underlying this issue is the fact that ecosystem collapse is an extreme event which could make the chart look alarmist unless the claim is well supported. Looking for additional examples is on my to-do list, but if you know of a concise source re a comparable collapse, I'm definitely in favor of adding it since there is still a bit of space available in that box. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:50, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

I think it is very safe to talk about arctic ecosystem collapse- the ecosystem relies on sea ice. The Amazon has also been talked about as passing a point of no return since it generates its own moisture, but that collapse would be a combination of deforestation and climate change, not clearly one or the other. To be safe, you can isolate to reefs and the arctic. [From this article], referring to the IPCC: "The body of top international scientists said last year that the Arctic and coral reef systems were the ecosystems at greatest risk." Efbrazil (talk) 18:16, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Excellent reference. I'll include 'arctic' in the next version (will wait a few days, to include any other changes that develop...). —RCraig09 (talk) 22:56, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Add "Coastal city flooding" to Effects on humans

I think that's important enough to call out- right now a lot of effects on humans other than "Infrastructure and crop failure" are fairly abstract.--Efbrazil (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I plan to change to: "City flooding; crop failure". —RCraig09 (talk) 20:38, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

That is a consequence of sea-level rise, which is the more general concept. But as it seems most readers don't connect the somewhat abstract SLR with with the more tangible "flooding of cities" (etc.), yeah, let's go with the more tangible concept, so they will better grasp what is coming. Loss of cropland (on river deltas) is also major, but I suspect most en-readers will not connect with that nearly as well as with cities. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:43, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Cut "Direct harm to human health"

You already have "Direct physical harm to humans", which sounds very similar. I think it's a better abstraction to have "Disease carrier and pest propagation" point towards the same effects the "Extreme weather event intensification" has. Pests cause crop failure and direct harm to humans is already in there.--Efbrazil (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

A good point re wording. I plan to change to "Direct IMPACT on human health" and preserve "Direct physical HARM..." since disease's impact is so different from physical harm. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:38, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

@RCraig09: I don't think it's just wording. In general, I think dedicating 2 of the 5 boxes in the "Effects on humans" area to "disease carrier and propagation" and only 1 to the merged idea of coastal city flooding / desertification is the wrong emphasis. Ideally each box would be laying out the critical things people need to be conceptually concerned with. Direct harm is one thing, whether from hurricanes or tropical diseases. Flooding from sea level rise is another, and is clearly going to be the major issue in places like bangladesh, miami, and so on. Loss of agricultural land and expansion of deserts is a third.

Maybe this works better for the boxes in the "effects on humans" area?

Disease carrier and pest propagation (points to #2)
Direct physical harm to humans (from intense weather and #1)
Damage to crops, lost agricultural land (from intense weather and from "freshwater loss and desertification", points to #5)
Flooded coastal cities (from intense weather and sea level rise, points to #5)
Human migration and conflict (from #3 and #4)

--Efbrazil (talk) 18:01, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

These are thought-provoking suggestions. I'll cogitate about the substance, and I'll experiment with the graphical connections while trying to keep the diagram approachable-in-appearance for the lay reader (avoid crossed lines, etc). It's a more complex task than many may realize. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:25, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

"Approachable" is good to consider. But also: is the purpose to provide a comprehensive view of causes and effects? Or, simpler, to show just that there are many effects? The former is quite challenging; the latter needs only a few representative cases. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:15, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Efbrazil: Version G is born! You astutely noted what had bothered me for some time, that '(urban) flooding' and 'crop failure' shared a block, only for the purpose of saving space; now they're proud sovereign entities! I moved 'Coral bleaching...' to the right to make room for where 'Disease carrier...' belonged all along (in the green). I was able to re-arrange boxes to capture almost all the causal connections you listed on 27 Jan (without lines crossing), all at the cost of about a half-box-height. I strongly believe that 'health impacts...' and 'physical harm...' (biological versus material) are distinct and separately important, so both of those boxes remain with no added height to the diagram. I've put a title change in my mental background indefinitely since both "GW" and "CC" are still commonly used. I think we've arrived at a chart that now has the important concepts, and cleanly presented for our non-sci/techy readers. I'm confident that Version G is the absolute, definitive, ultimate, perfect, inclusive, final version... for at least a couple of days. —RCraig09 (talk) 03:50, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

@RCraig09: Excellent! I can understand all the choices you made, so I won't be asking for version H right now. The only thing that still makes my skin crawl is the title. Make version H when you're read to fix that. One thing that is fun is watching to see how these images are used on the Web- do a google reverse image search after a month or two, I think this one is good enough to get picked up. Efbrazil (talk) 22:07, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

:-) ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:02, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Arrow nitpicking

The arrows going to "Feedback" are shorter than the arrows going to "Effects on the ecosystem" for no reason. Also, don't have multiple arrows along a line (Effects on the ecosystem leading to Effects on humans).Efbrazil (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

If I understand what you mean by arrows... The in-line arrows on the "outside" lines are used (1) within Powerpoint to keep the lines distinguishably further from the boxes than Powerpoint's default distance, and (2) to visually confirm causality from one colored "area" to another. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:38, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Maybe better arrangement

Having one little green box on the left is weird and having "effects on humans" under it's content is also a bit weird. You could try moving "Coral bleaching..." to the right next to "Extreme weather..." and put the "Effects on humans" header in it's place, extending the blue box up on the left. That way headers are above their content and the boxes are more consistent. --Efbrazil (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Regrettably there are very many "Effects on ecosystems", necessitating the green extension under the red Feedback area. Moving "Coral bleaching ...: to the right half would enlarge the height of the entire diagram. The blue-rectanble-coloring draws together the bottom blocks with the "Effects on humans" sub-title. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:38, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

"Global Warming and Climate Change (causes and effects)" --> Climate Change Causes and Effects

@RCraig09: The current title is a real mouthful and minimizes the focus of the chart, which is causes and effects. I think someone coming in and seeing this chart will immediately be struck by the title "Global Warming and Climate Change (causes and effects)" and begin wondering about the differences between GW/CC and why you are calling them both out and what a union of the terms means. I realize we're struggling with naming here on Wikipedia, but no reason to let that confusion bleed into our graphics. It's the IPCC, no the IPGWACC, and thank god for that!

On the flip side, I think it's good to keep your subheading block called "Global Warming and Climate Change" unchanged. It works with the technical definitions of the terms and helps people understand you're talking about how GGE impact temperature and is inclusive of the term "Global Warming". Efbrazil (talk) 17:11, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

I understood this concern from the start. My original ambitious goal was to create a graphic that captures what readers would be concerned with when arriving at this article, namely, what is causing recent phenomena and what effects they will have on the environment and on humans. Since the graphic was intended mainly for this particular high-level article, I chose "GW & CC" as the main title, with causes and effects as subtitles to emphasize that the main subject (GW/CC) has few causes but wide-ranging effects. My sense is that breaking into title and subtitle makes the mouthful easier to swallow.

Separately: though "CC" increasingly predominates over "GW" even in worldwide (public) Google searches (see chart), the terms are used ~interchangeably by the press and the public (NASA source), and I'm inclined to wait before changing the title. Nothing's set in stone, of course. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:40, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

SROCC and SRCCL

@J. Johnson: The final versions are online :). If you update the overall citation, I'll update the page numbers? Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:55, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

My source has not informed me! Okay, thanks for the notice, and I'll put that onto the schedule. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:50, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

There may be a delay on this, as there seems to be problem with the report files. (Oh my.) I'm looking into the matter. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:57, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

Any luck? I'm using the new reports alot, so really grateful for what you've done here. Femke Nijsse (talk) 12:23, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Not yet, but, yes, I do need to get on that. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:04, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

The full citations for the SROCC and the SRCCL (at WP:IPCC_citations/SR) have been revised to be in accordance with the "FINAL" versions of those reports issued last December. All instances of the "DRAFT" versions in article space should be replaced, and the short-cites upgraded (i.e., remove the "DRAFT"). Upgrading should include verification of the content to the source, and adding the appropriate page number(s). As some of these documents have different versions available, I recommend adding section numbers in case there is a future problem with the pagination. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:50, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

[1] "What is the difference between global warming and climate change?". www.usgs.gov. Retrieved 2019-11-09.

[2] "What's the difference between global warming and climate change? | NOAA Climate.gov". www.climate.gov. Retrieved 2019-11-09.

[3] "Is there a difference between global warming and climate change?". The Years Project. Retrieved 2019-11-09.

[4] "What's the Difference between Global Warming and Climate Change?". Climate Reality. 2016-10-26. Retrieved 2019-11-09.

[5] Benjamin, Daniel; Por, Han-Hui; Budescu, David (2017-08-01). "Climate Change Versus Global Warming: Who Is Susceptible to the Framing of Climate Change?". Environment and Behavior. 49 (7): 745–770. doi:10.1177/0013916516664382. ISSN 0013-9165.

[6] Romm, Joseph (2016). Climate Change: What everybody needs to know. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 20. ISBN 9780190250171.

[7] For instance, we cannot cite other encyclopedias: Rafferty, John. "What's the Difference Between Global Warming and Climate Change?". Encyclopedia Brittannica.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

[8] Villar, Ana; Krosnick, Jon A. (2011-03-01). "Global warming vs. climate change, taxes vs. prices: Does word choice matter?". Climatic Change. 105 (1): 1–12. doi:10.1007/s10584-010-9882-x. ISSN 1573-1480.

[9] Lineman, Maurice; Do, Yuno; Kim, Ji Yoon; Joo, Gea-Jae (2015-09-29). "Talking about Climate Change and Global Warming". PLOS ONE. 10 (9): e0138996. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0138996. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 4587979. PMID 26418127.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: PMC format (link) CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)

[10] Wilson, Kris M. (2000-01-01). "Drought, debate, and uncertainty: measuring reporters' knowledge and ignorance about climate change". Public Understanding of Science. 9 (1): 1–13. doi:10.1088/0963-6625/9/1/301. ISSN 0963-6625.

[11] Global, Past 12 months

[12] Goes only up to 2009, using that year

[13] Global, Past 12 months

[14] Global, Using 2009

[15] since 2015

[16] With passive I mean not what people themself search, but a count of how much it is used

[17] Hulme, Mike (2009). Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-521-72732-7.

[18] Majdik, Zoltan P. (2019-07-03). "A Computational Approach to Assessing Rhetorical Effectiveness: Agentic Framing of Climate Change in the Congressional Record, 1994–2016". Technical Communication Quarterly. 28 (3): 207–222. doi:10.1080/10572252.2019.1601774. ISSN 1057-2252.

[19] "Analysis: The UK politicians who talk the most about climate change". Carbon Brief. 2019-09-11. Retrieved 2019-12-02.

[20] Schuldt, Jonathon P.; Enns, Peter K.; Cavaliere, Victoria (30 May 2017). "Does the label really matter? Evidence that the US public continues to doubt "global warming" more than "climate change"" (PDF). Climatic Change. doi:10.1007/s10584-017-1993-1. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

[21] Raymond P. Sorenson (2018). "Eunice Foote's Pioneering Research on CO2 and Climate Warming: Update*". AAPG. Retrieved 23 August 2019.

[22] Foote, Eunice (November 1856). Circumstances affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays. Vol. 22. pp. 382–383. Retrieved 31 January 2016. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)

[23] "Climate Science Milestones Leading To 1965 PCAST Report". Science. 350 (6264): 1046. 27 November 2015. doi:10.1126/science.350.6264.1046.

[24] Reed, Elizabeth Wagner (1992). "Eunice Newton Foote". American women in science before the civil war. Retrieved 31 January 2016.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[1]

[2]

[3]

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]