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Global Warming vs.Climate Change

This needs to be discussed. Wikipedia’s job is to follow sources. However, this edit seems to be confusing people. I am proposing to remove the line where it says global warming is also referred to as climate change. On a Yahoo article that I commented on explaining that there’s a difference between climate change and global warming, someone came back at me quoting the Wikipedia article on global warming being referred to as climate change. This has never been the case and is just cussing more confusion, as Wikipedia is a website used by a lot of people. Our job as editors is to not only use reliable sources, but to also make sure Wikipedia is factually correct, which the opening statement of the article is factually incorrect.Dohvahkiin (talk) 23:23, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

I've reverted; you're going to need consensus before making such a major change to the lede. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 04:38, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Afraid it doesn't work that way. If you have no intention of even trying to build a consensus over problematic text then you have no business editing the article. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:09, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

It's been discussed a lot in the past, with unsatisfactory outcomes. So I've boldly included both:
Global warming is the observed century-scale rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system and its related effects, as part of climate change.
Global warming is a specific broad direction of change, particularly evident over the last century or so, climate change is the overarching topic. Note AR5 discusses paleo episodes of GW, and of course CC is the terminology adopted by bodies studying the whole field. Also preferred by Frank Luntz, but that's another can of worms. . . dave souza, talk 07:21, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Best decision there. They are related in a sense. Also: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-difference-between-global-warming-and-climate-change https://climate.nasa.gov/resources/global-warming/ https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-difference-between-global-warming-and-climate-change-1?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products These major sources all state that global warming is just one part of climate change, and that the two are often confused.Dohvahkiin (talk) 08:26, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
I think that works okay, thanks. Dmcq (talk) 09:42, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
dave souza: couldn't "as part of climate change" be misinterpreted as global warming being a result of climate change? And isn't this better handled by the text I'd already added to the end of the paragraph? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 09:52, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
How about 'causing an ongoing climate change'? Dmcq (talk) 10:20, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Since the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, it's best to show both right at the start. A "part of climate change" doesn't imply "a result of climate change", though clearly there are past instances when some form of climate change has led to global warming, as in the start of interglacials. Don't see it as a problem. Per NASA "What's in a name", "Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect." USGS "Although people tend to use these terms interchangeably, global warming is just one aspect of climate change. “Global warming” refers to the rise in global temperatures due mainly to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. “Climate change” refers to the increasing changes in the measures of climate over a long period of time – including precipitation, temperature, and wind patterns."[1] NOAA Climate.gov "Global warming refers only to the Earth’s rising surface temperature, while climate change includes warming and the “side effects” of warming—like melting glaciers, heavier rainstorms, or more frequent drought."[2] . . dave souza, talk 10:32, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
dave souza: I'm not convinced—a prime objective of editors here is to ensure the text is unambiguous and not open to "creative interpretation". "as part of climate change" opens it up in spades. What about something like "which can contribute to or result from climate change"? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:00, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Don't think that follows, and the suggested wording looks both clumsy and too specific. From the sources above, we could consider "and is an aspect of climate change" or "which is included in the broader topic of climate change". . . dave souza, talk 05:07, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
dave souza: then how about:

Within the topic of climate change, global warming is the observed century-scale rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system and its related effects.

Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:02, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
How about this: “The terms “global warming” and “climate change” are often used interchangeably. However, the two are not the same.” Then, go on to describe the definitions of the two.Dohvahkiin (talk) 10:41, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
No, MOS:FIRST – "If its subject is definable, then the first sentence should give a concise definition: where possible, one that puts the article in context for the nonspecialist. Similarly, if the title is a specialised term, provide the context as early as possible." Defining GW by what it's not just adds confusion, and while the term CC is used interchangeably informally at times, in science the meanings are distinct as NASA discusses. . . dave souza, talk
That’s my argument. I meant add it within the first paragraph, but it looks like there’s already something similar there.Dohvahkiin (talk) 13:16, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't have a strong view on this but surely "Should this article be titled 'global warming' or 'climate change'?" must be a FAQ so maybe someone should put the answer in the FAQ list above. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chidgk1 (talk • contribs) 12:53, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

I've removed the recent edit making the distinction between global warming and climate change because

  1. The lede should not mention, nor rely on a single 2008 article for this matter
  2. Many sources use global warming to refer to all changes in the climate system due to global warming. Most prominently the IPCC. The lede should not state that that is incorrect, as it is widely used in that way in the scientific community.
  3. The current article is about the broad definition of global warming; including the consequences of temperature increase such as sea level rise. Adding the definition that global warming only talks about the temperature change confuses what the scope is of the article.
  4. The first sentence had a weird wikilink. The climate change article refers to climate change in general, not to climate change as a consequence of human actions. This article is not about all instances of global temperature increase over Earth's history.

This discussion has been held many a times before (search the archives!), and I prefer not to spend a lot of time on it. This is a far-reaching change, so please only edit the article after consensus emerges. I'm against changing the previous consensus. Femkemilene (talk) 07:50, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

Then why is there not something in the FAQ about the difference, and what the consensus is for the current title? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:52, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
Time for it to be revisited, anyway. It's contested, inadequately sourced, and sources as used are getting out of date and superseded by newer sources. Amusingly, an EPA source now informs us that "We are currently updating our website to reflect EPA's priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt." Looks like an update to the update is overdue. . . dave souza, talk 21:34, 14 October 2018 (UTC)
Can't say I find that EPA page terribly amusing. Bye bye science, we'll have teachings from Thomas Aquinas showing we don't have to worry about the environment, God will provide for us. Or perhaps it is being left to die with Pruitt's name left there forever. Dmcq (talk) 10:29, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Well, on a global encyclopedica, we're certainly not changing the definition to meet the current US government's priorities! My understanding of the logic has always been that, in terms of energy in the system, there are only two directions a global climate can change in: more energy or less, and this is referred to scientifically as global warming or cooling. Other changes of course follow in terms of storms, ice, rainfall, jet streams and everything else, but global climates either warm or cool. I'm sure that the best references will confirm this, but right now I don't have links to current ones to hand. --Nigelj (talk) 21:53, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Glad to agree that we go with established definitions, and ignore changes made under the current US Agenda of its Back to Basics (campaign) which became the subject of ridicule when a succession of Conservative politicians were caught up in scandals – no, that couldn't happen in the US. The quote above came up when I was looking out sources, conveniently one of the best on this subject is an EPA page with a pop-up on "Climate Change vs. Global Warming" giving their definition; it's "historical material reflecting the EPA website as it existed on January 19, 2017. This website is no longer updated". . . The definition stands up well for our purposes, though no longer in use in the US. I'll give more detail in a new section along with other sources . . dave souza, talk 10:12, 15 October 2018 (UTC)
Whether this article takes a narrower or broader view of "global warming", the reality that at least some authoritative sources distinguish it from "climate change" makes it notable enough that, at the very least, we need to explain it. Definitely a mention at the top of the lead (this distinction being a key element in defining the scope of topic), and likely some additional explanation in the first section following the lead.
@Femkemilene: I question your last edit that "removed the recent edit making the distinction between GW and CC. You say that the lead should not rely on a single article. Perhaps, but is this a single source unrepresentative of the scientific consensus? Or is it representative of a larger literature? How many sources need to be cited to establish the prevailing scientific opinion? Are there any sources that contest the quotation that you removed?
Re your third point (above): you seem to be saying that because the definition cited does not explicitly mention "and related effects" they are therefore excluded. I say it is a very abbreviated definition that lacks specific scoping, and the ambiguity can go either way. Which (I agree) can lead to confusion, but a better fix is to get a better, fuller definition. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:37, 15 October 2018 (UTC)
I agree we should put something in the FAQ about this, whatever decision we make.
I don't deny that some good sources make the distinction between climate change and global warming. So far, I'm not convinced that we should choose sides. If we want to include a statement I'd go for something in the spirit of: sometimes global warming and climate change are used interchangeably and sometimes global warming specifically refers to X and climate change to Y.
You're of course right that some single sources are representative of the larger literature, and that my rule 'don't rely on single source' is flawed in that sense.
I am not convinced that a 2008 NASA article is the best source to determine this though. The use of climate change/global warming is quite fluid and changing. Right wing groups often prefer climate change (or equivalents in different languages) because it sounds less scary and those pushes or other changes in media/society have had effect on the discourse both in the public and the scientific spheres. The 2016 NASA article is probably a better source here, but still only one perspective. While I don't have time to find sources that explicitly contest the quotation, a lot of the sources quoted for this article use the terms interchangeably and I don't think we should be the one judging that incorrect.
Your reply to my third point shows I wasn't clear enough and the point didn't come across. My point was:
  • The Wikipedia article climate change is an article about general changes in the climate
  • We are now defining climate change in this context as the current greenhouse-gas driven climate change
  • These two definitions are both valid, but distinct. We should not have a wikilink to climate change when we actually mean the other definition.

In conclusion: I'm not against adding some clarification, as long as it is done in a logically coherent way and we don't chose sides. Femkemilene (talk) 21:04, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

After all that discussion, I don't understand this talk about 'choosing sides.' It's ordinary English. Climates can change and that's climate change. At the moment planet Earth's climate is changing, by the whole thing warming. That's global warming. We have climate change: there's global warming. I don't see how you can choose sides about that. --Nigelj (talk) 22:23, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
F: It seems we largely agree, especially about having something in the FAQ, and the inadequacy of the current source. But I would touch on several points.
Like you said, there seems to be an effort by the deniers to blend these two concepts together ("and climate is always changing, so no big deal!"). So our explication of these terms from the scientific perspective needs augmentation with an explanation of how they get bent in political usage.
I would not view this as "choosing sides". Some scientific sources go one way (for various reasons), others go the other way, but I don't believe there is any controversy about it; "correct" depends on which concept one is using. This is not two differing definitions of a single concept; it is two different conceptions, each with its own definition. The main thing for us to understand (and be clear about) which concept is the topic here.
The article currently states that it is about "the observed century-scale rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system and its related effects ...." I think that is nearly equivalent to your "greenhouse-gas driven climate change", so perhaps good enough.
Where you object to the link to Climate change is (I believe) where the lead sentence continues on with "as a part of climate change." Please note: I don't believe this confounds the two concepts (however they get defined). It places "global warming" (and its effects) within the broader context of "climate change". It's like saying "the Earth is part of the Solar System". Saying (and linking to) to "climate change" is not equating it with "global warming"; it is showing the relationship between the two. If that is not clear then perhaps we should try to tweak the wording. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:06, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
good to see this annimated debate about this very sticky point! Maybe some of the people who commented here would like to also comment here on the talk page of climate change where we had a related conversation. And yes, this has come up time and time again, and I think it will only go away once there is finally a global consensus to use the term "climate change" for our current woes, rather than global warming, which has that connotation that it's limited to temperature. I think the UN has already moved in the right direction otherwise they wouldn't call it "climate change" in these panels: UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change! EMsmile (talk) 04:35, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Femkemilene: "Right wing groups often prefer climate change ... The 2016 NASA article is ... still only one perspective."—Under no circumstances do we give equal weight to political groups as to scientific ones in a science article. At best, we note the political angle, possibly even somewhere in the lead, but nowhere where the article defines the subject. Everyone here should give WP:FALSEBALANCE a thorough reading. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:18, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
When I meant choosing sides, I meant choosing between two scientifically acceptable definitions, instead of between climate contrarians/science. Sorry for confusion. I'm not on either side, in the scientific literature we use the term climate change more than global warming, in some quality media this might be reversed. I'm against noting the political angle in the lede as I feel not that relevant, we've got too much in the lede, and some of distinction climate change/global warming is US specific.
Tweaking the wording of the first sentence could indeed solve the problem. I agree that now it is already showing the relationship between the two, but how I read it, it gives the relationship between climate change (all changes in climate as consequence GHGs) and global warming (one change in climate as consequence GHGs), but links to climate change (all changes in climate whatsoever). Femkemilene (talk) 07:15, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Why should the term "climate change" (the accepted term for the broader topic) not link to the article of the same name? Where else would you link "climate change"? To global warming?? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:46, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't see that. If we identify your three definitions as A, B and C:
A. CC: all changes in climate as consequence GHGs
B. GW: one change in climate as consequence GHGs
C. CC: all changes in climate whatsoever
The lead says "Global warming[B] is the observed century-scale rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system and its related effects, as part of climate change.[C]"
And later: "a 2008 NASA article defines global warming as "the increase in Earth's average surface temperature due to rising levels of greenhouse gases",[B] and climate change as "a long-term change in the Earth's climate, or of a region on Earth".[C]"
I don't see A anywhere, and I don't think A is notable enough for inclusion, as it is about the effects of GW, i.e. the effects of the current CC. Maybe this all relates to some kind of gaslighting thing currently going on in US politics, that I dont know about, but I dont see that we need to redefine any scientific terms here. --Nigelj (talk) 07:43, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
I gree with Femkemilene that some of those debates over the terms is very much US specific. It could be that in other countries the pendulum has already swung to using the term "climate change" more and more. E.g. in the German media, you see "Klimawandel" (= climate change) everywhere but "globale Erderwärmung" (global warming) much less frequently. And this has nothing to do with right wing and left wing. Climate change is just more intuitive to encompass more than warming, i.g. also droughts, hurricanes and floods (I know in the article we speak also of "warming and its related effects" but still it is counter-intuitive that global warming also includes everything else, not just the temperature. - By the way, doesn't the first sentence where it says "and its related effects" contradict the NASA definition that you quote 3 sentences later? If so, I think we should point out that there are conflicting definitions in use. Also, don't forget to look at the lead of the article climate change and see if you agree withe the wording about global warming used there.EMsmile (talk) 12:48, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
My two cents worth. I see the increase in "greenhouse" gases, caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, as driving global warming, which in turn is driving other climate changes. I seem to remember some scientists switching to talking about "climate change" to try to get around the "global warming"-deniers, but the latter just morphed into "climate change"-deniers. I'll try to stuff my non-neutral point-of-view back into the bottle. - Donald Albury 13:20, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Hi Donald, my tuppenceworth is that you're repeating a common claim which isn't quite right; see the NASA source written by Eric Conway, which notes that the term global warming originated with "a 1975 Science article by geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory: "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?' " – the 1979 Charney Report used 'climate change' and GW, a few years before denial really got going. More soon! . . dave souza, talk 17:22, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
I think "greenhouse warming" and "greenhouse effect" are older terms. I remember reading about the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere and its contribution to the greenhouse effect years ago, maybe in the late 1950s. Unfortunately, even if I could remember just where I read it, it was a science fact article in a science fiction magazine, which I suspect many editors would feel did not qualify as a reliable source. But, that doesn't matter, I now see that the history of discussion about greenhouse warming is covered in History of climate change science. - Donald Albury 18:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, accepting that article without checking its sources, Foote published an 1856 note about "an increased temperature" but for the global warming article I think we can accept Conway as a source for global warming – maybe worth seeing what Weart says, but think it's the same. . . dave souza, talk 19:17, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Thank you, Dave. It seems to me there is enough material for an article on this topic. Though I think we be quite clear that this is not a matter of "the correct term", but whether one takes a broader or narrower focus. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:33, 17 October 2018

(UTC)

2 months later... FYI, the 2018 AP Style Guide has an entry on this issue. The first full paragraph reads, "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. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:40, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Paleoclimate proxy records of climate change over thousands to millions of years

Isn´t it to strong to talk about millions of years - I do not see this in the reference. Jirka Dl (talk) 10:54, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Are you talking about the sentence in lead paragraph 1, where the source is the IPCC AR4 WG1 SPM? (Next time, please be specific and include the source here, with the template for Template:Reflist-talk). It speeds up discussion and prevents misunderstanding. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:16, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
Yes, exactly, I am talking about the first paragraph.Jirka Dl (talk) 14:00, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
Since the first paragraph overall is under discussion, can we "put this on the back burner" for now? If you want to study the thinking the led up to this phrase, the first paragraph was overhauled in 2014. I was the chief consensus-builder at the time. A phrase from IPCC AR4 WG1 SPM was added. The source used the words something like "tens to millenia of years". People had issue with the verbatim phrase. You can see the evolution of discussion in archvies 70 and 71 I think. I am not sure what I think, and I still think its premature to get to focussed on this now, though it should be revisited when the overall paragraph discussion resolves. But if you want to look at the history leading up to the present, that should get you started. Also, as you may know, anytime someone says "But the SPM doesn't actually say that" the thing to do is to go from the SPM (30-ish) pages, and look at the more in depth technical summary (hundreds of pages) and then full report (> 1000 pages). USually the IPCC did say the thing, but maybe not in great detail in the SPM. Not sure if that's true here, but credibility flows to they who do sweat-work... but maybe not just yet since it might be premature? Your mileage may vary. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:10, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
See the #IPCC subsection above for excerpts from the various statements, and links to the full statements. The SPM states "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia." That's tens to thousands of years, but Chapter 5. discusses the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum around 55.5 million years ago. My understanding is that it's in some ways the best precedent for current warming as ice age > interglacial warming was much slower, it would take close reading of the IPCC report to check that. . . dave souza, talk 05:23, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

Warmest Arctic climate since the end of the previous interglacial

See here. Count Iblis (talk) 12:40, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

PyCCS

I suggest that the follwing sentence be added in the end of the introduction: "Technologies like pyrogenic carbon capture and storage are increasingly discussed as a means to remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and, thus, evaluated as to whether they could help to reverse global warming."[1] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Flugscham (talk • contribs) 17:57, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Constanze Werner et al. (2018): Biogeochemical potential of biomass pyrolysis systems for limiting global warming to 1.5° C. Environmental Research Letters, 13(4), 044036. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aabb0e

scientific consensus

Collapse as [{WP:SOAP]] and WP:FORUM. Click show to read anyway

While it is true that the majority of scientists agree that climate change is a thing, there is a VERY wide variety of opinions about the extent of climate change etc. that should be noted. 180.190.182.168 (talk) 11:04, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

There ain't a total consensus about evolution either but there's no need to bend over backwards giving contrarian views when the vast majority are in consensus. Consensus does not mean 100%. Dmcq (talk) 11:12, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
I'm not saying we totally recreate the article, or even another section. I just think that as it is, the article implies that all scientists who believe in global warming also believe that it is a very extreme problem. Just a little note saying that the consensus is not totally unified. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 180.190.182.168 (talk) 11:21, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
Covered in part "Scientific discussion" + broader explained in page Scientific opinion on climate changeJirka Dl (talk) 11:26, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

I see the word "consensus" is now gone from the main article - and with good reason. Science is not a majority voting process. One could argue that since most religious followers believe in God, that it it is "settled" that there is a God. This does not prove the existence of God. Proof remains in the evidence, and there will be skepticism in Climate Change as long as the science lacks merit. I could write a novel on why Climate Change fails the scientific method. I'll start with just two that can cause scientific error: 1)the distribution of sensors to measure global temperature is not uniform across the Earth. 2) Yesterday's (much less 100 years ago) temperature at any given location is unverifiable. I can cite many more but for brevity I end here. 2600:6C48:7006:200:B056:6066:1296:EF0B (talk) 01:40, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Rewrite of the "effects" paragraph of the summary (the 3rd paragraph)

Goals of the rewrite:

  • Improved readability and organization
  • Better capturing impacts as scientifically understood
  • Greater accuracy and better focus

Here's the current paragraph:

Future climate change and associated impacts will differ from region to region.[1][2] Ongoing and anticipated effects include rising sea levels, changing precipitation, and expansion of deserts in the subtropics.[3] Future warming is expected to be greater over land than over the oceans and greatest in the Arctic, with the continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice. Other likely changes include more frequent extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, wildfires, heavy rainfall with floods, and heavy snowfall;[4] ocean acidification; and massive extinctions of species due to shifting temperature regimes. Effects significant to humans include the threat to food security from decreasing crop yields and the abandonment of populated areas due to rising sea levels.[5][6] Because the climate system has a large "inertia" and greenhouse gases will remain in the atmosphere for a long time, many of these effects will persist for not only decades or centuries, but tens of thousands of years.[7]

Here's the rewrite:

Future climate change effects include rising sea levels, ocean acidification, regional changes to precipitation, and expansion of deserts in the subtropics.[8][9][3] Future surface temperature increases are expected to be greater over land than over the oceans and greatest in the Arctic, with the continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice. Regional precipitation effects include more frequent extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, wildfires, heavy rainfall with floods, and heavy snowfall.[10] Effects directly significant to humans include the threat to food security from decreasing crop yields and the abandonment of populated areas due to rising sea levels.[11][12] Environmental impacts include the extinction or relocation of ecosystems as they adapt to climate change, with coral reefs[13], mountain ecosystems, and arctic ecosystems most immediately threatened.[14] Because the climate system has a large "inertia" and greenhouse gases will remain in the atmosphere for a long time, most of these changes and their effects will continue to get worse for many centuries after greenhouse gas emissions are stopped.[15]

Here are the changes in detail by sentence number in the new paragraph:

  1. ("Future climate change..") is a merge of the first 2 sentences in the old paragraph. I wanted effects enumerated in the lead and thought the effects already clearly differ by region. I also added ocean acidification because it is a key idea that does not fit under the umbrella of other ideas. Previously acidification had been strangely grouped with precipitation changes.
  2. ("Future surface temperature increases...") I changed to say "surface temperature" instead of "warming", because if you measure "warming" by energy absorbed then the ocean is actually "warming" much faster than the land, it's just temps that are increasing faster on land. Otherwise unchanged.
  3. ("Regional precipitation effects include...") is now focused on precipitation instead of being a grab bag as in the old paragraph ("other effects"). The old "massive extinctions of species due to shifting temperature regimes" is moved to be its own sentence later on to be more precise and readable.
  4. ("Effects directly significant to humans...") I added "directly significant" but otherwise left unchanged. Ecosystem changes are very significant to some of us humans.
  5. ("Environmental impacts include...") is now its own sentence and made to be more precise, featuring coral reefs, arctic ecosystems, and mountain ecosystems as the most threatened according to the EPA (see reference).
  6. ("Because the climate system...") previously could be interpreted as saying the "effects" wouldn't change, just persist. So for instance, a reader could say an "effect" is a sea level increase of 1 meter and that will stop when CO2 emissions stop, but of course sea level rise will continue to get worse. Reworded to try and capture that changes will continue and effects will get much worse. Also removed the long wording on time frame- I think many centuries captures the idea well enough. Saying tens of thousands of years gets increasingly fuzzy as environmental feedback effects kick in and it sounds both hyperbolic and irrelevant- is the key idea of conclusion that we are supposed to be focused on changes 10s of thousands of years from now?

Anyhow, that's that. I committed the change as I thought it was important to get it out there and I'm reasonably confident in it, we'll see if anyone backs it out, hopefully with rationale since this took me a few hours. Thoughts on both the overall direction and any specific edits? --Efbrazil (talk) 22:33, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Nicely done way to propose this. Thanks. Should have time to think about soonish and of course I'm just one voice, I just wanted to appreciate the approach you have taken here. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:09, 5 February 2019 (UTC) You had a great start, but I am disappointed you didn't wait for some discussion here before "going live". For one thing, "worse" is a subjective judgment. To say that, we'd need some inline attribution like Dr Hansen says 'worse'. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:58, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Sorry if going live right away was too bold- I thought it was a marked enough improvement that it was better to make the change now than wait. That may have been hasty, my feelings won't be hurt if you think it is better to revert the change until we sort out more final wording here. The term "worse" I thought was safe, as we're going through a list of impacts that include abandoning cities and ecosystems going extinct and so forth. While I'm sure it would be easy to find a reference of someone saying the world will be worse because of climate change, I'm not sure that adds much. I tried to address your concern by stripping out the value judgment like this:
Because the climate system has a large "inertia" and greenhouse gases will remain in the atmosphere for a long time, climatic changes and their effects will continue to become more pronounced for many centuries even if further increases to greenhouse gases stop.--Efbrazil (talk) 01:30, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

refs for this section

References

  1. ^ Field, Christopher B.; Barros, Vicente R.; Mach, Katharine J.; Mastrandrea, Michael D.; et al. "IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability – Technical Summary" (PDF). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. pp. 44–46.
  2. ^ Solomon et al., Technical Summary, Section TS.5.3: Regional-Scale Projections, in IPCC AR4 WG1 2007.
  3. ^ a b Zeng, Ning; Yoon, Jinho (1 September 2009). "Expansion of the world's deserts due to vegetation-albedo feedback under global warming". Geophysical Research Letters. 36 (17): L17401. Bibcode:2009GeoRL..3617401Z. doi:10.1029/2009GL039699. ISSN 1944-8007.
  4. ^ On snowfall:
  5. ^ Battisti, David S.; Naylor, Rosamond L. (9 January 2009). "Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat". Science. 323 (5911): 240–44. doi:10.1126/science.1164363. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 19131626.
  6. ^ US NRC 2012, p. 26
  7. ^ Clark, Peter U. (8 February 2016). "Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change" (PDF). Nature Climate Change. 6 (4): 360–69. Bibcode:2016NatCC...6..360C. doi:10.1038/NCLIMATE2923.
  8. ^ Field, Christopher B.; Barros, Vicente R.; Mach, Katharine J.; Mastrandrea, Michael D.; et al. "IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability – Technical Summary" (PDF). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. pp. 44–46.
  9. ^ Solomon et al., Technical Summary, Section TS.5.3: Regional-Scale Projections, in IPCC AR4 WG1 2007.
  10. ^ On snowfall:
  11. ^ Battisti, David S.; Naylor, Rosamond L. (9 January 2009). "Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat". Science. 323 (5911): 240–44. doi:10.1126/science.1164363. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 19131626.
  12. ^ US NRC 2012, p. 26
  13. ^ Knowlton, Nancy (2001-05-08). "The future of coral reefs". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 98 (10): 5419–5425. doi:10.1073/pnas.091092998. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 33228. PMID 11344288.
  14. ^ EPA (19 January 2017). "Climate Impacts on Ecosystems".
  15. ^ Clark, Peter U. (8 February 2016). "Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change" (PDF). Nature Climate Change. 6 (4): 360–69. Bibcode:2016NatCC...6..360C. doi:10.1038/NCLIMATE2923.

Updated some graphics, looking for feedback

I'm working on updating the graphics for this page for a few reasons:

  • Much data in the graphics was old, predating the fifth IPCC report that was released in 2014.
  • I'm looking to add graphics that help with clarity. For instance, the second graphic shown in the summary previous to my last edit was the RPC input graphs used to create IPCC models, which is really getting into the weeds early on I thought. I moved that down to the modeling area and created a graphic to highlight recorded warming in the last 50 years.
  • Some graphics have text that's illegible on mobile or until clicked on if in desktop view. Where possible graphics should be digestible without clicking or pinch zooming.

Please let me know if you have particular wishes or complaints regarding graphics here. I'll look to migrate some of this update over to "climate change" when I reach diminishing returns here.--Efbrazil (talk) 22:09, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your interest in this. Could you please provide some DIFFS (see how here) or filenames for the new images. It's a little hard to know I'm looking at the old ones and new ones you mean to discuss. Thanks! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 00:07, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
Doing this through diff is tough because it looks like diffs don't work on image changes. Changes so far just with full links:
@Femkemilene: @NewsAndEventsGuy: Thanks for the happy karma! That project Femkemilene was working on looks really similar, I'll look to digest that before continuing forward. If any of you are in Seattle I'd also be happy to meet face to face and do some of this collaboratively. For now, I've overhauled two more images and continue to tweak the ones I already updated. Here's the two overhauls:
Seattle is a long way from here. If you do work together in person or by skype etc take care to keep transparency since some eds might complain about WP:OFFWIKI work. I am not a graphics designer, alas, so can't help in executing ideas and I already offer too many ideas that I don't work on. But there is one image I have always kind of wanted to have, and F and I have already discussed it. See Talk:Sea level rise and discussion of IPCC SLR projections over time. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:40, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
@NewsAndEventsGuy:I could use your help on sea level rise. The existing image has a good range and focus but dates to before AR5 and doesn't seem to align to RCPs in AR5, making the .2 to 2 meter rise really fuzzy. I'd like to update the image with something reliable and probably based on AR5 RCP scenarios. I could adopt the AR5 graphic here, but unfortunately the report graphics are very locked down- they block any modifications and I don't see the graphics being used on wikipedia as a result. Frustrating! So I either need a freely reusable graph (where I can update labels for instance) or source data so I can recreate the graph. What do you recommend?--Efbrazil (talk) 21:14, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
Femkemilene? You've most recently loaded SLR sources in your brain. What do you think? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:11, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
IPCC AR5 is quite outdated, a lot of new reseach in the last 6 years that imply the high end scenario is not well constrained at all :(. Maybe wait till September when IPCC has next report on SLR or use NCA instead. I'm taking a wikibreak till March, afterwards I'm back on it. Femkemilene (talk) 19:39, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
My goal here is to do a full pass on the article now, so I'd rather not leave the sea level graphic that dated and ugly until September. This looks like the best data / graphics I can find- not bad as it dates to January 2017 and aligns to RCP scenarios: {https://scenarios.globalchange.gov/sea-level-rise}--Efbrazil (talk) 20:49, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
They can always be updated again later. FYI in Feb issue of Scientific American, Penn State Richard Alley writes about the unknown and possibly precarious situation at Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier. In the article he describes what he calls "unzipping" of Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier. He writes, "If Thwaites, far larger, unzips the way Jakobshavn did, it and adjacent ice could crumble, perhaps in as little as a few decades, raising sea levels 11 feet." NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:09, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
@NewsAndEventsGuy:I took a crack at sea level rise, see here for the graphic. I included arctic projections as RCP extensions, although it sounds like that's being backed off from. The graphic is an adaptation of the many that are posted online since Parris in 2012- it most closely maps to this graphic from the 4th National Climate Assessment, as published here. I didn't want to confuse things by introducing 6 lines that had no relevance to the RCPs though, so I went with this concept instead. The new graph as published is an attempt to merge the concept behind each of the other two graphs into something coherent and current. Thoughts?--Efbrazil (talk) 23:35, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
SLR image looks very pretty! Maybe we'll indeed have to scale down worst case scenario by some 50 cm in September, which is still far above the old IPCC range. Reason is partially that IPCC only gave a likely range (67% chance it's in that range), so high end scenarios not included.
Maybe a matter of taste, but I think the fontsize in the second graph is now too big. First graph looks prettier. Femkemilene (talk) 09:46, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Pretty indeed. I wish there were a way to include confidence estimates but that's probably asking too much from a single graphic. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:02, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Thanks! Any other asks for graphics in this article? Ctrl+F5 the page, a lot of graphics I've been tweaking multiple times, for instance to include 2018 data. @Femkemilene When you mention the font size of the second graphic, you mean the new one I just made? I'm choosing the font size for two goals- to be legible as a thumbnail (similar size to caption text), and to look good on a smartphone. The fact it looks cartoonish zoomed in on desktop is a down side, but a corner case in typical use I think.--Efbrazil (talk) 17:19, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm (indeed?) referring to this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#/media/File:Change_in_Average_Temperature.png. I agree that it should look good on a small screen the first two graphs of the article (sticking to comparison with first graph for simplicity) both look quite good on mobile phone and an a small laptop. On a normal sized PC screen it looks odd (not zooming in here, I agree it's okay if it looks cartoonish zoomed in). The fact that the heading is so much bigger than figure one distracts me. I don't know whether it's possible, but could you stretch out the legend in width? It's a bit weird that it smaller than the rest of the figure.
I know I'm nitpicking here, and I'm really impressed by everything you do :). Femkemilene (talk) 20:02, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Thanks! Flattery will get you everywhere, fonts dropped 1 click. I also found the key for degrees celcius and used that, which is much better (before I adapted the Fahrenheit key). I'm frustrated by the fonts in the very first image- the reason they don't match with other images on the page is that the image is generated from a large SVG file that wikipedia scales down to thumbnail size really weirdly. It looks good when chrome renders the svg, but not wikipedia. To fix it means rescaling the entire image. It's a huge PIA to do, but maybe I'll take that on next.--Efbrazil (talk) 21:48, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 12 February 2019

Gigantic glaciers are melting, rainforest are dying and animals are suffering due to colossal damage us humans have Caused. As The national Geographic has stated that Green house gasses are [1] There needs to be a change in humans to keep out planet alive. Most people don’t realize that our damaging effects on our plant will eventually come back to hurt us. Our crops will suffer and weather will be much more intense.

“higher now than at any time in the last 800,000 years.”

Stephaniemgonzalez (talk) 19:46, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Rejected; no change proposed William M. Connolley (talk) 19:49, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Sources: global warming definitions, relation to climate change

There's been discussion about a source for the definition in the lead, and its relation to to climate change. Having looked for good quality reliable sources, I've listed the most relevant below, grouped by publisher or publication type, showing selected quotes, trimmed for brevity. I'll add and sign my comments under the sources. Please add any further sources you think are worth consideration, comment in the appropriate thread, or expand the quotes if relevant. . . . dave souza, talk 19:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

George W Bush Administration Renames Global Warming to Climate Change

  • As per the Washington Post, "The gradual change in preferred terminology from "global warming" to "climate change" among scientists and politicians began about a decade ago because that’s what their institutions called for. It also happened to be the preference of the George W. Bush White House." In 2005, the National Academies of Sciences published a pamphlet that expressed the viewpoint that "climate change" was a more scientifically comprehensive description of what was happening to the planet. In 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency changed the name of its Web site on the issue from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change."--Efbrazil (talk) 23:20, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

NASA

  • Erik Conway. "What's in a Name? Global Warming vs. Climate Change", NASA, 5 December 2008: "in a 1975 Science article", Wallace Broecker introduced the term global warming, then in 1979, "When referring to surface temperature change, Charney used 'global warming.' When discussing the many other changes that would be induced by increasing carbon dioxide, Charney used 'climate change.'
    Within scientific journals, this is still how the two terms are used. Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect."
The current page on the topic is What's the difference between global warming and climate change? Relevant quote: 'Global warming refers only to the Earth’s rising surface temperature, while climate change includes warming and the 'side effects' of warming—like melting glaciers, heavier rainstorms, or more frequent drought. Said another way, global warming is one symptom of the much larger problem of human-caused climate change. Date- october 2018.
Conway is a historian of science and technology, his books include Atmospheric Science at NASA, A History (2008) and Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars (2015). The page is archived, so superseded by Shaftel's 2016 article as a basic explanation, but remains invaluable as a concise history of terminology. . . dave souza, talk 19:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • "Questions (FAQ)". NASA Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. 18 March 2015. Retrieved 12 June 2018. 'Global warming' refers to the long-term warming of the planet. Global temperature shows a well-documented rise since the early 20th century and most notably since the late 1970s. ... 'Climate change' encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet. .... The terms 'global warming' and 'climate change' are sometimes used interchangeably, but strictly they refer to slightly different things.
  • Shaftel, Holly (January 2016). "What's in a name? Weather, global warming and climate change". NASA Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. Retrieved 12 October 2018. "Climate change" and "global warming" are often used interchangeably but have distinct meanings. .... Global warming refers to the upward temperature trend across the entire Earth since the early 20th century .... Climate change refers to a broad range of global phenomena ...[which] include the increased temperature trends described by global warming, ....</ref>
  • "Climate change evidence: How do we know?". NASA Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. 21 September 2018. Retrieved 18 October 2018. The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth's orbit .... Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal. [IPCC] .... The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is extremely likely (greater than 95 percent probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over decades to millennia
This highlights the #IPCC WGI SPM statement on observed warming (with a full stop instead of a comma) but does not use the phrase global warming. As compelling "evidence for rapid climate change" it lists "Global temperature rise", "Warming oceans", "Shrinking ice sheets", "Glacial retreat", "Decreased snow cover", "Sea level rise", "Declining Arctic sea ice", "Extreme events" and "Ocean acidification" – treating "global temperature rise" as just one piece of evidence of CC, not the title covering all these points. . . dave souza, talk 10:29, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

NOAA

  • "Global Warming Frequently Asked Questions". NOAA Climate.gov. 16 December 2013. Retrieved 17 October 2018. What is global warming, and how is it different from climate change and climate variability?
    "Global warming" refers to an increase in Earth's annually averaged air temperature near the surface. Thermometer readings ..... Most of that warming has occurred since 1976.
    "Climate change" is a broadly inclusive term that refers to a long-term (decades to centuries) change in any of a number of environmental conditions for a given place and time—such as temperature, rainfall, humidity, cloudiness, wind and air circulation patterns, etc. These oscillations and other similar phenomena can influence weather and climate patterns around the globe.
    "Climate variability" refers to short-term (weeks to decades) changes in some of these same environmental conditions for a given place and time. Climate variability is often the result of natural oscillations in Earth's climate system — such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the Pacific-North American Teleconnection Pattern, etc. These oscillations and other similar phenomena can influence weather and climate patterns around the globe.
Climate variability is a redirect to Climate change#Terminology, looks like one or two more sub-articles are needed. . . dave souza, talk 19:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • "What's the difference between global warming and climate change?". NOAA Climate.gov. 17 June 2015. Retrieved 15 October 2018. Global warming refers only to the Earth's rising surface temperature, while climate change includes warming and the "side effects" of warming—like melting glaciers, heavier rainstorms, or more frequent drought. Said another way, global warming is one symptom of the much larger problem of human-caused climate change.
    Another distinction between global warming and climate change is that when scientists or public leaders talk about global warming these days, they almost always mean human-caused warming—warming due to the rapid increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from people burning coal, oil, and gas.
    Climate change, on the other hand, can mean human-caused changes or natural ones
This also covers history of terminology, starting with "According to historian Spencer Weart, the use of more than one term to describe different aspects of the same phenomenon tracks the progress of scientists’ understanding of the problem." . . . dave souza, talk 19:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

EPA

United States Environmental Protection Agency

  • "Overview of Climate Change Science - Climate Change Science". US EPA. 17 June 2016. Retrieved 15 October 2018. Click on the image for a pop-up on the difference between climate change and global warming. >> Climate Change vs. Global Warming
    The term climate change is sometimes used interchangeably with the term global warming. However, the terms do not refer entirely to the same thing.
    Global warming refers to the recent and ongoing rise in global average temperature near Earth's surface. It is caused mostly by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Global warming is causing climate patterns to change. However, global warming itself represents only one aspect of climate change.
    Climate change refers to any significant change in the measures of climate lasting for an extended period of time. In other words, climate change includes major changes in temperature, precipitation, or wind patterns, among others, that occur over several decades or longer. Climate change can occur at the global, continental, regional, and local levels. Climate change may refer to natural changes in climate, or changes caused by human activities.     (not the current EPA website).
This looks the closest to the usage we're presenting. . . dave souza, talk 19:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC) – but for GW and warming of the climate system, see Myths v. Facts below. . . dave souza, talk 11:20, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
Equates evidence for "warming of the climate system" to "independent indicators of global warming", including surface temperatures, SLR, shrinking ice. Response to arguments based on Climatic Research Unit email controversy. . . dave souza, talk 11:20, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Published papers

  • Benjamin, Daniel; Por, Han-Hui; Budescu, David (22 September 2016). "Climate Change Versus Global Warming: Who Is Susceptible to the Framing of Climate Change?". Environment and Behavior. 49 (7). SAGE Publications: 745–770. doi:10.1177/0013916516664382. ISSN 0013-9165. The terms global warming and climate change are often used interchangeably, but recent research finds 'global warming' has become more emotive and more polarizing, resulting in less advocacy by some subpopulations. .... We find stronger framing effects for political Independents and those who are disengaged from climate change issues, indicating that polarization overrides framing at the extremes, and those with moderate beliefs are more susceptible to labeling and framing effects, especially when beliefs are inconsistent with one's political identity.
    The terms global warming (GW) and climate change (CC) invoke disparate interpretations and call attention to different aspects of the changing global climate. A GW label induces associations with temperature increases, severe weather, greater concern, human causes, and negative affect, whereas a CC label highlights changes in general weather patterns and the possibility of natural fluctuations, and boosts recollection of non-heat-related consequences like increased precipitation ..... Typically, CC leads to higher reported beliefs that climate change is happening and will have serious consequences ..... Scientists today consider CC to be a general term referring to sustained variations in conditions over time, whereas GW refers only to 'one aspect of climate change' .... A leaked memo describing results of a focus group—commissioned by President G. W. Bush's administration—was one of the first to call attention to the different reactions to the two terms and to suggest that GW is more 'emotional and frightening' .... GW has become the favorite term among skeptics and deniers and in Republican-leaning states. For example, 'global warming hoax' is the consistently preferred Google search term over 'climate change hoax.' ...... [our] key result is that those with partisan political affiliations are least susceptible to framing effects in the climate change context. ... We have shown that it is mostly Independents and only those who fit the disengaged profile that show significant framing effects .... Overall, people reported higher beliefs under a CC frame, so we recommend using this term when communicating to heterogeneous groups.
  • Penn, Justin L.; Deutsch, Curtis; Payne, Jonathan L.; Sperling, Erik A. (6 December 2018). "Temperature-dependent hypoxia explains biogeography and severity of end-Permian marine mass extinction". Science. 362 (6419). American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): eaat1327. doi:10.1126/science.aat1327. ISSN 0036-8075. Geochemical evidence provides strong support for rapid global warming and accompanying ocean oxygen (O2) loss {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

UNFCCC

Not for all time and all purposes, but for the specific purposes of the 1992 convention, they use "climate variability" for any other forcing – but that's just a redirect to climate change, and hasn't come into general usage. . . . dave souza, talk 19:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
This notes that their usage differs from the usage in the IPCC, says "During 2010.... The WMO stated that .... the sequence of current events matches IPCC projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming." . . . dave souza, talk 19:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • UNFCCC Climate Change: Impacts, Vulnerabilities and Adaptation in Developing Countries © 2007 UNFCCC, Produced by the Information Services of the UNFCCC secretariat: "The main characteristics of climate change are increases in average global temperature (global warming); changes in cloud cover and precipitation .... The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007) dispelled many uncertainties about climate change. Warming of the climate system is now unequivocal. It is now clear that global warming is mostly due to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases (mostly CO2). .... As a result of global warming, the type, frequency and intensity of extreme events, such as tropical cyclones (including hurricanes and typhoons), floods, droughts and heavy precipitation events, are expected to rise .... Global warming is causing the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas. ... communities who are feeling the effects of climate changes due to global warming"

IPCC

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC Fifth Assessment Report 2013/2014

  • AR5 SYR Annex II Glossary p. 120, "Climate change refers to a change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer." ... [may be natural or anthropogenic] ... "{WGI, II, III}", p. 124, "Global warming refers to the gradual increase, observed or projected, in global surface temperature, as one of the consequences of radiative forcing caused by anthropogenic emissions. {WGIII}"
  • HOWEVER, in the AR5 synthesis report and other AR5 reports, the term "climate change" clearly means modern climate change driven by global warming. Samples include the first mention of the term in their report: "The SYR highlights that we have the means to limit climate change and its risks, with many solutions that allow for continued economic and human development." Chapter titles include "Climate change risks reduced by adaptation and mitigation" and "Climate change beyond 2100, irreversibility and abrupt changes". In their Summary for Policymakers section 1.2 begin with "Causes of Climate Change: Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. This has led to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." As a rule, whenever climate change is used in singular form, it means modern climate change caused by global warming.--Efbrazil (talk) 23:20, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
  • WGI SPM p. 4, B. (was previously at this link) Observed Changes in the Climate System; "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased", D. Understanding the Climate System and its Recent Changes, p. 16 D.2: "the magnitude of global warming in response to past and future forcing." p. 19, E. Future Global and Regional Climate Change: "Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions."
Note: as discussed, "B" has previously been used as a defining statement, but makes no use of the phrase "global warming". . . dave souza, talk 10:19, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
  • WGI TS P. 49 TFE.2 – "ice sheet response to global warming", p. 66 "the observed global warming since 1951", p. 102 "Around the mid-21st century, the rate of global warming begins to be more strongly dependent on the scenario. .... beyond 2100, global warming reaches 2.5 °C ...."
  • WGI Chapter 2, Observations: Atmosphere and Surface – 2.5.2 "an increasing trend in global river discharge associated with global warming during the 20th century"
apparently sole use of the term GW in this chapter. . . dave souza, talk 19:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • WGI Chapter 5, Information from Paleoclimate Archives p. 384 "During the last deglaciation ... the mean rate of global warming was very likely 0.3°C to 0.8°C per thousand years", p. 399 "The PETM was marked by .... global warming of 4°C to 7°C", p. 400 "Deglacial global warming .... from 17.5 to 14.5 ka and 13.0 to 10.0 ka"
Global warming occurred over 10,000 year ago during deglaciations, and in the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum around 55.5 million years ago. . . dave souza, talk 19:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • WGIII p. 187, 2.6.6.1 Popular support for climate policy; "The use of language used to describe climate change—such as the distinction between ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’— play a role in influencing perceptions of risk, as well as considerations of immediate and local impacts", Glossary p. 1263: "Global warming refers to the gradual increase, observed or projected, in global surface temperature, as one of the consequences of radiative forcing caused by anthropogenic emissions."
  • Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC [3] –an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty
  • Final Government Draft Glossary IPCC SR1.5 "Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute" "In press" – defines climate change as SYR Annex II, "Global warming An increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) averaged over a 30-year period, relative to 1850-1900 unless otherwise specified. For periods shorter than 30 years, global warming refers to the estimated average temperature over the 30 years centred on that shorter period, accounting for the impact of any temperature fluctuations or trend within those 30 years."
This is clearly a definition related to post-1850 climate change, but the methodology and time frame would also apply to earlier periods whether warming or not. . . dave souza, talk 20:54, 17 October 2018 (UTC) Updated link, "in press", as archive apparently broken, dave souza, talk 17:14, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Other

2018 AP Style Guide

  • (Source "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." NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:43, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Conclusions for discussion

Draft summary": [citations to be added] Global warming is essentially an increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) averaged over a 30-year period (the standard period for climate), this is commonly the current (since 1900) and projected future warming, which is predominately human caused. Global warming can also refer to earlier periods of increasing temperature, such as deglaciations, and the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. It is an aspect of climate change as a broad topic, and warming has implications of climate change, so in the post–1900 context the terms can be used interchangeably, but climate change also refers to periods when global temperatures were stable or falling, and to local, regional or continental changes of climate which are not necessarily global. In the politicised context of policy, the label "global warming" can increase rejection of science by the uncommitted public, who are more likely to be receptive to discussion of "climate change" – the labelling does not affect opinions of those predisposed to accept or reject the science. . . dave souza, talk 19:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

OMG you have done a lot of work on this! Amazing, thank you! And yes, perhaps it warrants a new Wikipedia article on "Climate change versus global warming debate" (unless such an article exists already?)? Then we could just point across to it from the other articles. About your draft summary is that just for discussion here or is this proposed wording for the lead of the Wikipedia article? If the latter then I think its readability needs to be improved as laypersons wouldn't be able to follow that (even I was struggeling and had to think twice about each sentence...). EMsmile (talk) 01:52, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, it's just a first stab at a summary of the main points, a kind of checklist for assessing the lead and not a new lead. There are also points for other sections, not sure that a new article is appropriate. The main idea is to get discussion started on where these (and any other) good sources take us. . . . dave souza, talk 09:02, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
Sorry to fall so easily into my usual negativity but "is essentially" is horrible, and the explicit tie to 30-years jars. And you might want to mention pre-industrial, which is teh std ref for "warming from" William M. Connolley (talk) 10:03, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
Ta, that's helpful – sorry about the essentialism! Pre-indust is a detail for later in the lead or article, note definitions cited give various reference points, such as "the early 20th century" which clearly isn't pre-industrial. .. dave souza, talk 21:38, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
I agree. I don't think we need too much detail in the introduction. Maybe:
Global warming is a systematic increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) over time. The term is commonly used to refer to the current episode of largely human-caused warming of the global climate, and its projected continuation. Global warming can also refer to earlier periods of increasing temperature, such as deglaciations, and the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum.
--Stephan Schulz (talk) 19:10, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
You could also delete "systematic" and "largely". Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 21:21, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
Arguably yes. I added "systematic" to indicate that it is not a short-term fluctuation (though my hindbrain seems to suggest that there is an even better word that just does not want to come forward), and "largely" from an overly conservative mindset. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 23:31, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
My concern with "sustained" is that it could be interpreted as meaning increase has to be continual (uninterrupted), whence the "hiatus" nonsense of a few years ago. But maybe I'm over-thinking it. "Over time" seems enough to cover your point about not being a short-term fluctuation. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 13:47, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks Stephan and Boris, that covers two points contradicted by the present lead introduction which implies GW is only the present episode, and leaves mention of future warming to the third paragraph, and doesn't call it GW. Will think over the wording. . . dave souza, talk 21:40, 18 October 2018 (UTC) ... now in progress: see next section. . . dave souza, talk 14:49, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Update: I've been looking at the sources for "warming of the climate system" which seems good rather than a focus on surface temperatures, they don't use the term "global warming" but it's reasonably clear that's the same thing. Will add these tomorrow. . . dave souza, talk 21:40, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Sources added: NASA Climate change evidence: How do we know?, and AR5 SPM. .. dave souza, talk 14:49, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Scope and article titles

Your summary makes it sound like the terms "global warming" and "climate change" are general terms that don't apply to modern times unless scoped that way. For instance, you say "climate change also refers to periods when global temperatures were stable or falling, and to local, regional or continental changes of climate which are not necessarily global." I think if you review references (I added a few) it's clear that whenever the terms are used in isolation without qualifications, such as "global warming is caused by" or "effects of climate change include", then the terms refer to greenhouse gas caused climate change in modern times. The only time the terms can be interpreted more generally is when qualified that way, such as "earlier periods of global warming" or "Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum climate changes include". The distinction is very important when talking about how the topics of global warming and climate change should be scoped as entries on wikipedia. Perhaps you could revisit your summary up above or I could with that in mind?--Efbrazil (talk) 23:20, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

@Dave souza:As per my ask above, here is a proposed update to your draft summary- please let me know any thoughts because I'd like to use this as the basis for article reorganization:

  • Global warming: An increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) averaged over a 30-year period (the standard period for climate), this is commonly the current (since 1900) and projected future warming, which is predominately human caused. When explicitly scoped the term may also be used to refer to earlier periods of increasing temperature, such as deglaciations, and the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, but without scoping the term means modern global warming (e.g. "how to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees celcius").
  • Climate change: The terms global warming and climate change are commonly used interchangeably, but climate change includes both global warming and its effects, such as changes to precipitation and impacts that differ by region. As with global warming, climate change can refer to earlier time periods, but only if explicitly scoped that way. Without explicit scoping the term refers to modern climate change caused by global warming (e.g. "how to limit climate change and its risks").--Efbrazil (talk) 22:11, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
While I support your efforts here, I don't think the RSs have converged on a requirement that "global warming" be "explicitly scoped" to talk about global warming in general, or far off in the future, or long ago in the past. It would be nice if the phrase was pre-packaged with usage fine print but alas, such is not the case, and we can't dictate such parameters. I am mulling on some reorg ideas of my own and will post soon. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:47, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
@NewsAndEventsGuy:If you read through the above sources (I added a few), I think it's fair to say reliable sources have converged on saying that global warming and climate change always refer to modern times unless they are explicitly talking about a different time period. NASA, the EPA, and several other US Government sites are very explicit about the issue, as is the UN. The IPCC has that glossary entry that is not explicit, but if you read through the chapter titles and text of their reports then you see that whenever they use the term "climate change" without qualifying it they are talking about modern climate change caused by humans (e.g. "how to limit climate change"). I tried to make that clear in the references up above by including a few quotes and chapter titles. You could also just google the term "climate change" in incognito mode and all of the top articles are about what you think they'd be about- none are about non-modern climate change. I don't see anyone except wikipedia using a more expansive definition for the terms. Why should we be doubling over backwards here to support an interpretation that doesn't exist in the real world?--Efbrazil (talk) 23:20, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
When you say "scoped" I think you mean "explicitly stated". I think you do not mean just figured out from context. The government agencies tasked with dealing with today's world have their viewpoint, and I applaud you for looking at them. But if you go over to the academic literature, its less clear cut, in my view. I do have an alternative to suggest but its broader than you're working on here so its taking me longer to marshall my thoughts, and I'm doing a lot of review of prior archived talk threads in assembling my ideas. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 00:03, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for contributing. Right now I'm unable to spend a lot of time on this, but my reading is that both terms are used in context: since most of the IPCC discussion is about post-1850 changes, most of the use of these terms relates to that. It's not exclusive, and "explicitly scoped" just seems to be a way of saying "in context". For example, AR5 5.3.2.2 Last Glacial Termination has "higher rates may have occurred, in particular during a sequence of abrupt climate change events", there's quite a lot of discussion of "abrupt climate change" in paleo times as well as "climate changes" which you noted above, for multiple changes. That looks like normal grammar, rather than a special term. For example, "WAIS could be destabilized by projected climate changes, although the time scales of the ice sheets response to climate change are very long". Note, of course, that climate change can be regional rather than worldwide, but of course global warming is always on a global, or at least hemispherical, scale. Similarly, climate change is in the title of several works cited about pre-industrial change. . . dave souza, talk 22:02, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
@Dave souza:Yeah, I can see that "in context" makes more sense than "explicitly scoped". I think my point is that wikipedia should be following common use in an absence of context, and in that scope both climate change and global warming refer to the conceptual space of how the climate is changing in modern times as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. To use an analogy, consider if the article on "evolution" in wikipedia was talking about all the possible causes for things changing gradually or "evolving", instead of being about biological evolution. That could be justified, but wouldn't it be contrary to common usage of the term and contrary to the value of wikipedia to educate and inform?
I think that as things stand with climate change article, we are actively confusing the topic for the public. If people come to wikipedia to learn about this "climate change" thing they've heard about and only skim the article, they will leave with the impression that climate change has tons of possible causes, so who knows what's going to happen. Sure, there's the article on "global warming" but that's an antiquated term that is really frowned on by the educational establishment and that we shouldn't be forcing people to use. Additionally, "global warming" is not supposed to be about the effects of global warming (strictly speaking), so that article is misdirected as well. Do you understand my frustration and have a thought on how to address the issue?--Efbrazil (talk) 00:20, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
@Efbrazil: On the climate change article, surely the best option is to treat that as an overview, and right at the outset say that most interest is in climate change since 1850 which is predominately human caused, as well as putting it in the context of knowledge of earlier climate changes. As the IPCC reports do. Don't know that "global warming" is an antiquated term, but clearly it can be narrowly defined as increase in average worldwide surface temperatures worldwide at a climate scale, and our use of it as an article title for current/future climate change can be reconsidered. Still think we need a general "climate change" article covering the whole topic, got any ideas for a better title for this [global warming] article's coverage? . . . dave souza, talk 15:32, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
@Dave souza:I think we see it the same way mostly. The "whole" topic is what I'd name "climate forcing mechanisms"- it would basically be the same coverage as the existing "climate change" article. So in the end the current "global warming" content is mostly a good fit for "climate change", the existing "climate change" content would become "climate forcing mechanisms", and then a new article on "global warming" could discuss the name change that happened and point people towards climate change or the greenhouse effect or climate forcing mechanisms. As a writer, I could tackle all that without much trouble, but the churn would be huge. Do you know how a major restructuring like that is typically tackled?--Efbrazil (talk) 21:07, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
There is a practical consideration that might throw a wrench in the works, or at least eggs on the windshield. We have already plowed a furrow in terms of article/scope with the way things are now. There are a million crosslinks and redirects that point to these pages the way they are now, and even more talk threads that assert the way things are now. If we "gut and replace" content under these same titles with a differently-defined scope, all those prior links will turn into EGGS. I'm not 100% certian that's an issue here... its a long discussion and I haven't really analyzed it for this quicksand. Just calling attention. In any case, I think the proposal will need to be reformulated and summarized before asking for a strawpoll or other measuring of consensus. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:53, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
@NewsAndEventsGuy:Yeah, there would be cleanup and there will be push back I expect (change is hard!) The good thing is the articles will cross reference, so if a link is to the wrong article it is easy for people to jump to the right article. Any suggestions you have in doing this successfully would be great- judging by your talk page, reaching consensus on contentious issues is your hobby, so I hope this is up your alley. You suggested I next create a general proposal as rfc|sci, I guess as a new section on this page? The rfc I'm thinking of will be aimed at getting people to agree on what the terms "climate change", "climate forcing mechanisms", and "global warming" should be covering vs what is currently being covered and why. I don't know if that's too leading and long an issue to capture as an rfc. I'll leave out the mechanism for change from the rfc because that would just open up more possibilities for disagreement.--Efbrazil (talk) 23:47, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Existing first paragraph, suggested rewording

Sometimes easier to try rewording. Here's the existing first paragraph, which confines the meaning to the current observed century-scale warming over the last century , and cites a 2008 [partly superseded] NASA article for usage and definitions. . .

*Global warming is the observed century-scale rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system and its related effects, as part of climate change. Multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate system is warming. Many of the observed changes since the 1950s are unprecedented in the instrumental temperature record, and in paleoclimate proxy records of climate change over thousands to millions of years. The terms Global warming and climate change are often used interchangeably; a 2008 NASA article defines global warming as "the increase in Earth's average surface temperature due to rising levels of greenhouse gases", and climate change as "a long-term change in the Earth's climate, or of a region on Earth".

Here is the suggestion from the previous subsection. This starts with the more technical meaning which doesn't cover related effects or symptoms, and omits the comparison with climate change. . .

*Global warming is a systematic increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) over time. The term is commonly used to refer to the current episode of largely human-caused warming of the global climate, and its projected continuation. Global warming can also refer to earlier periods of increasing temperature, such as deglaciations, and the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Finally, here is a draft rewrite which combines the existing text and the proposed replacement in the grey boxes above. The definition of global warming as "a long term increase in surface temperature averaged across the world" could readily be changed to "systematic increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) over time", but that's a redlink, nearest article is Instrumental temperature record which is already linked. Not sure if the last sentence should become new paragraph. . . Anyway, here is hte proposed combination...

*Global warming is a long-term rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system and related effects, an aspect of climate change. It commonly refers to the mainly human-caused observed warming since pre-industrial times and its projected continuation, though earlier periods of global warming include prehistoric deglaciations and the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. The terms Global warming and climate change are commonly used interchangeably in the modern context, but have distinct definitions: climate change is any regional or global statistically identifiable persistent change in the state of climate which lasts for decades or longer, including warming or cooling; global warming is a long term increase in surface temperature averaged across the world.

Multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate system is warming. Many of the observed changes since the 1950s are unprecedented in the instrumental temperature record, and in paleoclimate proxy records of climate change over thousands to millions of years.

dave souza, talk 14:49, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks very much for all the effort, I'm impressed :). I very strongly think we should keep the lede as understandable as possible and I propose that we don't include any difficult terms yet. Even as a climate scientist, I have to think a second before I know what the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is. I'd prefer if we don't include the abbreviation GMST at all.
*Global warming is a long-term rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system and related effects, an aspect of climate change. It commonly refers to the mainly human-caused observed warming since pre-industrial times and its projected continuation, though there have been earlier periods of global warming. The terms Global warming and climate change are commonly used interchangeably in the modern context, but sometimes a distinction is made: climate change is any regional or global statistically identifiable persistent change in the state of climate which lasts for decades or longer, including warming or cooling; global warming is a long term increase in surface temperature averaged across the world.
Femkemilene (talk) 15:57, 21 October 2018 (UTC)
The first sentence and the last sentence of your proposed paragraph are nearly identical which to me seems repetitive but then also confusing because the last sentence omits the "and related effects" which I think would be a crucial difference to the first sentence. Furthermore, I think we need to explain "and related effects" as this means it's a lot broader than just temperature alone.EMsmile (talk) 01:33, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
I agree that we should mention what those related effects are very early in the article. In terms of the confusion: I think, judging from all of the sources listed above, that the difference between the first and last sentence is correct. Our article is about the warming+related effects, but some people define global warming more strictly. We should in addition mention that we use the first definition (where global warming/climate change are used interchangeably) and not only talk about increased surface temperatures. Femkemilene (talk) 09:44, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Good points; the related effects are covered in NASA 2018. Have tried some rewording below, incorporating the previous suggestions, . dave souza, talk 11:24, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

*Global warming is a long-term rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system demonstrated by measurements and by related effects showing the warming, an aspect of climate change. It commonly refers to the mainly human-caused observed warming since pre-industrial times and its projected continuation, though there were much earlier periods of global warming. In the modern context the terms are commonly used interchangeably, but global warming can more specifically concern changes related to worldwide surface temperatures; while climate change is any regional or global statistically identifiable persistent change in the state of climate which lasts for decades or longer, including warming or cooling. Many of the observed warming changes since the 1950s are unprecedented in the instrumental temperature record, and in historical and paleoclimate proxy records of climate change over thousands to millions of years.

Tried to tighten the wording up a bit, added historical climatology to cover changes beyond temperature measurements. .. . dave souza, talk 11:24, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

@Dave souza, Femkemilene, and EMsmile: I tried to load this in my brain and found it very hard to follow at first and second read. So I boldly reformatted and slightly tweaked the "glue" in Dave's first block of text. I don't think the meaning was changed. This makes it very simple for me to follow and hopefully will assist others who arrive here with fresh eyes. If anyone objects, please revert.NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:01, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Continued in next subsection, "Implemented, with references and minor tweaksNewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 00:19, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

Implemented, with references and minor tweaks

I moved this down here from the subsection above to eliminate redundancy NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 00:19, 28 December 2018 (UTC)@NewsAndEventsGuy, Femkemilene, and EMsmile: Thanks! To keep the variants to date directly comparable in this section, I've shown below the version as of 22:35, 27 December 2018 (UTC) in the same colour scheme. Hope we can improve the wording while continuing to cover the essential points. . . dave souza, talk 22:35, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Bit of a marathon, choosing the best references and getting them formatted. Made a couple of minor changes on the way:

Global warming is a long-term rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system, an aspect of climate change shown by temperature measurements and by multiple effects of the warming.[2][3] The term commonly refers to the mainly human-caused observed warming since pre-industrial times and its projected continuation,[4] though there were also much earlier periods of global warming.[5] In the modern context the terms are commonly used interchangeably,[6] but global warming more specifically relates to worldwide surface temperature increases; while climate change is any regional or global statistically identifiable persistent change in the state of climate which lasts for decades or longer, including warming or cooling.[7][8] Many of the observed warming changes since the 1950s are unprecedented in the instrumental temperature record, and in historical and paleoclimate proxy records of climate change over thousands to millions of years.[2]

Well, that's a start. Climate change also needs attention. . . dave souza, talk 16:36, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

@Dave souza:, I do have some problems with this version. For one, it introduces the article as if it is about all periods in history wherein the world was warming, which is inaccurate. Secondly, it replaced some concise and relevant statements ("The world is currently warming" etc) and replaced it with more ambiguous and light jargon that could more suitably be described in the main article. Prinsgezinde (talk) 08:58, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
Citation: " IPCC WGI AR5 (Report). pp. 389, 399–400. The PETM [around 55.5–55.3 million years ago] was marked by ... global warming of 4°C to 7°C ..... Deglacial global warming occurred in two main steps from 17.5 to 14.5 ka [thousand years ago] and 13.0 to 10.0 ka." So there were at least three instances of prehistoric global warming. The definition of GW from the IPCC SYR AR5 p. 124. is "Global warming refers to the gradual increase, observed or projected, in global surface temperature, as one of the consequences of radiative forcing caused by anthropogenic emissions." Perhaps you have a source to add for "is currently warming", or do you feel that's implicit? . . . dave souza, talk 22:07, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Apologies that I was tuned out for a long while. In my opinion the new text is not nearly as accessible to the nontechnical reader as the replaced text. Ideally this lead should be written in simple language, neither nerdspeark or dronespeak but school kid level normal language. Am I correct in thinking this is an attempt to resolve recent complaints about the article title? Or at least that is the real underlying issue? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 00:39, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
See #Existing first paragraph, suggested rewording – the preceding version lacked sources, conflicted with current sources and misidentified GW as applying only to current climate change, when it also applies to past episodes. Simplification of the new language will be welcome, provided it continues to summarise the current sources or other sources of equal quality. . . dave souza, talk 10:28, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Discussing with the rewrite

@Dave souza: I agree with NewsAndEventsGuy about the new lead being overly complex, and want to add that its focus has also shifted in the wrong direction. You said: "the preceding version lacked sources, conflicted with current sources and misidentified GW as applying only to current climate change, when it also applies to past episodes." For one, the lead doesn't necessarily need sources if they are supported by the body, but I understand that reasoning. I do strongly disagree with "misidentified GW as applying only to current climate change". Both the sources used and the sources you provided tend to use "global warming" as referring to current climate change. Right now, the article lead introduces a minority aspect (general CC) while the article is about the major aspect (current CC). At best, this is confusing; at worst, misleading. In any case, this is a very major change that, in my opinion, needs direct consensus. Prinsgezinde (talk) 09:18, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

The issue of sourcing has been discussed, with #Sources: global warming definitions, relation to climate change covering the relevant points – if you have further defining sources, please add them under that heading. As noted under #IPCC, the defining statement previously used for the introductory statement covers "Warming of the climate system", not "global warming". The tendency in all discussions of climate is to focus on the current warming climate, but that doesn't mean redefining climate to exclude the past.
In any article, the opening statement is a definition of what the topic is about. While there's less coverage of previous episodes of global warming, sources including WGI Chapter 5 clearly show that the term includes these episodes. By coincidence, in today's news, Buncombe, Andrew (16 December 2018). "Scientists who revealed cause of 'great dying' extinction call for action on climate change". The Independent. Retrieved 17 December 2018. states that "Oceanographers based in Seattle said the largest mass extinction in the planet’s history - what has been termed the “great dying” - was caused by extreme global warming that saw ocean temperatures rise by as much as 10C around 252m years ago." . . . dave souza, talk 10:41, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
@Dave souza: That discussion never reached a consensus on all parts, only reactions on a few of its parts and not always agreement. The defining sources just as often say global warming refers to "recent" and "ongoing" GW. But here's the main problem: the article has been written around the definition of current GW. For instance, look at the above Q&A. All mentions of GW are about current GW, and one answer even directly declares that that term usually refers to current GW. Since this scope has been stable for a very long time, the onus is on the editor changing it. Prinsgezinde (talk) 18:15, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
I'd like to support User:Prinsgezinde. Both definitions are quite common in literature, but we should stick to the simple definition. We could maybe mention the other use of global warming in a different sentence, but keeping the lede consistent with the rest of the article is important. Femkemilene (talk) 15:48, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
Which simple definition? #Sources: global warming definitions, relation to climate change shows several. Earlier leads to this article wrongly defined GW as "also referred to as climate change" (as at 13 September), using three sources which made no mention of "global warming" thus relying on WP:SYN to cobble together an inaccurate definition. Several good sources explicitly point out that GW is not the same thing as CC, though in certain contexts the terms can be used interchangeably. The simplest definition is that "Global warming refers to an increase in Earth's annually averaged air temperature near the surface", but this article covers more than that, which is reasonable if we want to show the implications of GW. Fair point that the article needs more on episodes of global warming preceding the current AGW, will try to find time to add a brief section on that point. . . dave souza, talk 20:01, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
No it should not. You are now single handedly choosing to change the scope of this article. I'm tempted to just revert it to its earlier version until this is figured out since you don't seem to plan on getting consensus. Prinsgezinde (talk) 22:44, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
That sounds rather WP:BATTLEFIELD, please don't edit war. The issue of topic area was discussed extensively in Talk:Global warming/Archive 74, more recently above at #Global Warming vs.Climate Change and at Talk:Climate change/Archive 5#Update the politics, scientific discussion, and public opinion subcategory. My efforts to get consensus for the current wording are in subsections of #Sources: global warming definitions, relation to climate change, you made a comment there but didn't continue – suggest making this a subsection under that heading to keep the discussion and sources together. . . dave souza, talk 11:46, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
"Discussing with the rewrite" section moved here, as proposed above. Revert if you object. . . dave souza, talk 11:55, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Dave, its sometimes hard to set aside details and citations to take the view from the window of the ISS. Since before my time here - circa 2011 - this article has been the exclusive province of the current warming period mostly caused by humans. Now we all know that there was pre-human warming periods and we can all be confident that internal variation or non-human forcings will bring about other warming periods far in the future even if we're gone. QUESTION - Looking out the ISS window, do you think we should keep a focus on the current mostly-human warming, or are you suggesting we strip this down to talk about any warming period? In the latter case, would we also need to overhaul the article Global cooling so it isn't just about the 20th century noise on that subject, and how would all that interact with the climate change article? Once this point is clarified it will be easier to process the rest of the excellent work that has been undertaken, yours included. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:57, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

NAEG, my feeling is that to suit our way of structuring the relationship between articles it's fully valid to make this article primarily about the current warming period mostly caused by humans. New readers can't be expected to know that there were pre-human warming periods unless we mention it, and it's important to briefly note the exceptions to our primary focus. Also helpful, as it shows the warming in context. The climate change article is the main article covering all change, whether global or regional, warming or cooling. It needs to be gone over to remove detail about the current warming period which belongs in this article, and climate change should only concisely outline the global warming topic, in WP:SUMMARY style. This article needs less change, but I think a short paragraph is needed under Observed temperature changes to mention paleoclimate records of earlier global warming periods. That section already relates instrumental records to earlier conditions, so it's a minor clarification. dave souza, talk 22:54, 27 December 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification! User: Dave souza: Am I correct in summarizing your point as: the scope of the global warming article should indeed be the current global warming episode, but previous episodes should be summarily mentioned because they are a) mentioned in reliable sources and b) inform us about the current episode.
If so, I agree with you. (and also about the climate change article, but that is a different discussion of course). This is also the choice we made with the Sea level rise article.
On a related point: you showed a lot of sources stating that global warming is defined as covering all paleo period of global warming. The first sentences of the article trying to give a definition of global warming that is consistent with the DEFINITION given in reliable sources. I think that we should instead focus on the SCOPE of these sources: while they often give the definition of global warming as including old episodeses, their scope consistently is the current episode, which is also the scope that we seem to be getting consensus on now. I think the first sentences should clearly define the scope of the article instead of defining the term global warming. This might mean we do not have a bold definition in the first line. Femkemilene (talk) 11:13, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
Thanks Femkemilene, I'm glad to agree! As discussed much earlier, WP:FIRST asks us to define the term at the start if that's feasible. Previous to all this discussion,[4] we had the long-term rise. implying there were no others, and the problematic claim at that outset that GW is also referred to as CC – while common, they're not the same.
*Global warming, also referred to as climate change, is the observed century-scale rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system and its related effects. Multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate system is warming.
The article now opens with a less specific working definition. It's good to mention early in the article that GW and CC are related, that's currently covered by the second sentence:
*Global warming is a long-term rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system, an aspect of climate change shown by temperature measurements and by multiple effects of the warming. The term commonly refers to the mainly human-caused observed warming since pre-industrial times and its projected continuation, though there were also much earlier periods of global warming.
Rewording to make that flow better would be good, perhaps the relationship could be demoted to further down the lead.
Regarding previous episodes, Footnote [5] quotes the AR5 chapter five source, "The PETM [around 55.5–55.3 million years ago] was marked by ... global warming of 4°C to 7°C ..... Deglacial global warming occurred in two main steps from 17.5 to 14.5 ka [thousand years ago] and 13.0 to 10.0 ka."
All we'd need to cover in the Observed temperature changes is a brief comment on the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum and Deglaciation at the end of Ice ages, mentioning how global warming in those periods has been examined in relation to projected global warming. For example, the recent Independent story I linked above has researchers saying "the situation they examined 250m years ago, with the presence of increased levels of greenhouse gases and warming oceans, was similar to today. .... potential for a mass extinction arising from a similar mechanism under anthropogenic climate change." We don't need that level of detail, as the topic's covered by the linked articles. . . dave souza, talk 13:26, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
@Dave souza: Why bury this within a discussion few new people will look into? There was no need to move the section. Fact remains, this huge change needs consensus. I don't see a single reason not to make this article subject shift a request for consensus. If there is a consensus, great. If not, it shouldn't be done. Prinsgezinde (talk) 20:47, 1 January 2019 (UTC)
It's rather a clarification in line with the sources shown above, not a subject shift. Please add any relevant sources you think I've missed, or propose new wording which accommodates the point that GW and CC aren't the same, though in common (non-scientific) usage they're often used interchangeably. . . dave souza, talk 20:15, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Graph

The graph at the following link was created from official NOAA/NCDC databases footnoted at the bottom. Over a century of actual measurements of both CO2 and global temperature demonstrates precisely zero correlation between CO2 and temperature. https://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/dbstealeyco2vst.png216.152.255.199 (talk) 15:35, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

"Some graph" made by "some dude" on "some blog" is not a reliable source. For more information see Wikipedia:Reliable sources. GMGtalk 15:40, 15 February 2019 (UTC),
The temperature change is small compared to the maximum and minimum temperatures over the years but the average temperature over a year is most definitely going up as can be seen even in their graph. Dmcq (talk) 19:13, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
  • NAEG Says
(A) As 90% of global warming goes into the ocean, asserting this conclusion based strictly on graph of the US is misleading.
(B) As polar regions are warming 3x faster than temperate ones, the IP who started this thread is again being misleading.
(C) What happens at sea and at the poles matters a great deal to the US because we all share the same climate system and Earth's energy budget which produce the Effects of global warming, worldwide
(D) But even though I don't usually get into the details of NOTHERE IP's, look at this graph on a full size screen, and lay a soft straightedge (e.g. piece of paper) near the higher and lower temps. As Dmcq says, you can clearly see recent years have had both warmer low temps and warmer high temps even though the limited data is US only.
(E) Better graph
NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:42, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Proposed rewrite of the "aerosols and soot" section

I tried to clean up the first and third paragraphs and add new references. It's a big enough change that I figured I'd solicit input here before flipping the switch. Here's the rewrite, description of what change down below:

Refer to caption
Ship tracks can be seen as lines in these clouds over the Atlantic Ocean on the East Coast of the United States. Atmospheric particles from these and other sources could have a large effect on climate through the aerosol indirect effect.

Global dimming, a gradual reduction in the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface, was observed from 1961 until 1990.[1] Solid and liquid particles known as aerosols, produced by volcanoes and human-made pollutants, are thought to be the main cause of this dimming. They exert a cooling effect by reflecting incoming sunlight, with NASA estimating that between 1850 and 2010 aerosols limited global warming by 1 degree Celsius.[2] Aerosol removal by precipitation gives tropospheric aerosols an atmospheric lifetime of only about a week, while stratospheric aerosols can remain for a few years.[3] Since 1990 global aerosols have been declining, removing some of the masking of global warming that aerosols had been providing.[4][5][6]

In addition to their direct effect by scattering and absorbing solar radiation, aerosols have indirect effects on the Earth's radiation budget. Sulfate aerosols act as cloud condensation nuclei and thus lead to clouds that have more and smaller cloud droplets. These clouds reflect solar radiation more efficiently than clouds with fewer and larger droplets, a phenomenon known as the Twomey effect.[7] This effect also causes droplets to be of more uniform size, which reduces growth of raindrops and makes the cloud more reflective to incoming sunlight, known as the Albrecht effect.[8] Indirect effects are most noticeable in marine stratiform clouds, and have very little radiative effect on convective clouds. Indirect effects of aerosols represent the largest uncertainty in radiative forcing.[9]

While aerosols typically limit global warming by reflecting sunlight, black carbon in soot can also increase global warming when deposited on snow and ice. Not only does it increases the absorption of sunlight, it also directly exacerbates melting and sea level rise.[10][11] Limiting new black carbon deposits in the arctic could reduce global warming by 0.2 degrees Celcius by 2050.[12]. When soot is suspended in the atmosphere it directly absorbs solar radiation, heating the atmosphere and cooling the surface. In isolated areas with high soot production, such as rural India, as much as 50% of surface warming due to greenhouse gases may be masked by atmospheric brown clouds.[13][14] The influences of atmospheric particles, including black carbon, are most pronounced in the tropics and sub-tropics, particularly in Asia, while the effects of greenhouse gases are dominant in the extratropics and southern hemisphere.[15]

First paragraph (global dimming...): Added NASA research/references saying aerosols have limited warming by 1 degree Celcius since 1850. Added research/references saying aerosols have declined since 1990. Combined and trimmed sentences at the end that were redundant or inaccurate. Cut all this as I think it adds nothing and is arguably inaccurate: "The effects of the products of fossil fuel combustion – CO2 and aerosols – have partially offset one another in recent decades, so that net warming has been due to the increase in non-CO2 greenhouse gases such as methane. Radiative forcing due to aerosols is temporally limited due to the processes that remove aerosols from the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has a lifetime of a century or more, and as such, changes in aerosols will only delay climate changes due to carbon dioxide." The offsetting except for methane is more accurately laid out through the 1 degree estimate. The temporal statement is redundant with other stuff already in the paragraph, and the claim about "only delaying climate change" is not necessarily accurate- climate engineering is focused on stratospheric aerosol injection as a long term strategy. I also cut the final sentence in the first paragraph as it didn't fit the paragraph, plus it was overly assertive about numbers that it looks to me like were from 2002 and that were questionable (even the citation said "second or third" biggest cause of GW, but the sentence declared "second").

Last paragraph (While aerosols...): I tried to improve the intro, to make it clear we are going from a cooling effect to a warming effect on balance. Added research/references saying new black carbon could add 0.2 degrees Celcius to global warming by 2050.

Thoughts?--Efbrazil (talk) 00:37, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Looks good thanks for doing that. It's been awhile, but sometimes if I want to check in at talk first I will "go live" anyway, and then self-revert. That way, there's a diff that shows exactly what changed, making it easy to see. This looks great. Thanks.NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:12, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Solomon, S.; D. Qin; M. Manning; Z. Chen; M. Marquis; K.B. Averyt; M. Tignor; H.L. Miller, eds. (2007). "3.4.4.2 Surface Radiation". Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis. ISBN 978-0-521-88009-1. {{cite book}}: External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
  2. ^ Dr. Amber Jenkins (7 December 2009). "Just 5 questions: Aerosols". NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Retrieved 15 February 2019. Using climate models, we estimate that aerosols have masked about 50 percent of the warming that would otherwise have been caused by greenhouse gases trapping heat near the surface of the Earth. Without the presence of these aerosols in the air, our models suggest that the planet would be about 1 °C (1.8 °F) hotter.
  3. ^ Ramanathan, V.; Carmichael, G. (2008). "Global and Regional Climate Changes due to Black Carbon" (PDF). Nature Geoscience. 1 (4): 221–27. Bibcode:2008NatGe...1..221R. doi:10.1038/ngeo156. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  4. ^ Wild, M; et al. (2005). "From Dimming to Brightening: Decadal Changes in Solar Radiation at Earth's Surface". Science. 308 (2005–05–06): 847–850. Bibcode:2005Sci...308..847W. doi:10.1126/science.1103215. PMID 15879214.
  5. ^ Wild, M., A. Ohmura, and K. Makowski (2007). "Impact of global dimming and brightening on global warming". Geophysical Research Letters. 34 (4): L04702. Bibcode:2007GeoRL..3404702W. doi:10.1029/2006GL028031.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. ^ Pinker; Zhang, B; Dutton, EG; et al. (2005). "Do Satellites Detect Trends in Surface Solar Radiation?". Science. 308 (6 May 2005): 850–854. Bibcode:2005Sci...308..850P. doi:10.1126/science.1103159. PMID 15879215.
  7. ^ Twomey, S. (1 July 1977). "The Influence of Pollution on the Shortwave Albedo of Clouds". J. Atmos. Sci. 34 (7): 1149–52. Bibcode:1977JAtS...34.1149T. doi:10.1175/1520-0469(1977)034<1149:TIOPOT>2.0.CO;2. ISSN 1520-0469. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  8. ^ Albrecht, Bruce A. (15 September 1989). "Aerosols, Cloud Microphysics, and Fractional Cloudiness". Science. 245 (4923): 1227–39. Bibcode:1989Sci...245.1227A. doi:10.1126/science.245.4923.1227. PMID 17747885. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  9. ^ IPCC, "Aerosols, their Direct and Indirect Effects", pp. 291–92 in IPCC TAR WG1 2001.
  10. ^ Ramanathan, V.; Carmichael, G. (2008). "Global and Regional Climate Changes due to Black Carbon" (PDF). Nature Geoscience. 1 (4): 221–27. Bibcode:2008NatGe...1..221R. doi:10.1038/ngeo156. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  11. ^ Sea Blind
  12. ^ M. Sand, T. K. Berntsen, K. von Salzen, M. G. Flanner, J. Langner & D. G. Victor (30 November 2015). "Response of Arctic temperature to changes in emissions of short-lived climate forcers". Nature.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  13. ^ Ramanathan, V.; et al. (2008). "Report Summary" (PDF). Atmospheric Brown Clouds: Regional Assessment Report with Focus on Asia. United Nations Environment Programme. Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 July 2011. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  14. ^ Ramanathan, V.; Chung, C.; Kim, D.; Bettge, T.; Buja, L.; Kiehl, J. T.; Washington, W. M.; Fu, Q.; Sikka, D. R.; Wild, M. (2005). "Atmospheric brown clouds: Impacts on South Asian climate and hydrological cycle" (Full free text). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102 (15): 5326–33. Bibcode:2005PNAS..102.5326R. doi:10.1073/pnas.0500656102. PMC 552786. PMID 15749818.
  15. ^ Ramanathan, V.; et al. (2008). "Part III: Global and Future Implications" (PDF). Atmospheric Brown Clouds: Regional Assessment Report with Focus on Asia. United Nations Environment Programme. Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 July 2011. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)

Possible climate transitions from breakup of stratocumulus decks under greenhouse warming

Possible climate transitions from breakup of stratocumulus decks under greenhouse warming

"Stratocumulus clouds cover 20% of the low-latitude oceans and are especially prevalent in the subtropics. They cool the Earth by shading large portions of its surface from sunlight. However, as their dynamical scales are too small to be resolvable in global climate models, predictions of their response to greenhouse warming have remained uncertain. Here we report how stratocumulus decks respond to greenhouse warming in large-eddy simulations that explicitly resolve cloud dynamics in a representative subtropical region. In the simulations, stratocumulus decks become unstable and break up into scattered clouds when CO2 levels rise above 1,200 ppm. In addition to the warming from rising CO2 levels, this instability triggers a surface warming of about 8 K globally and 10 K in the subtropics. Once the stratocumulus decks have broken up, they only re-form once CO2 concentrations drop substantially below the level at which the instability first occurred. Climate transitions that arise from this instability may have contributed importantly to hothouse climates and abrupt climate changes in the geological past. Such transitions to a much warmer climate may also occur in the future if CO2 levels continue to rise." Count Iblis (talk) 22:38, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

It's an interesting new WP:PRIMARY source. Does it really need including now (see FAQ 21 in this list? How would you include it, writing in our own words? Got a good SECONDARY source to go with? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:06, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Answering myself, Phys.org puts this in context for the layer reader... and wow. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:25, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Also; Johnson, Scott K. (25 February 2019). "Striking study finds a climate tipping point in clouds". Ars Technica. Retrieved 27 February 2019. . . dave souza, talk 10:02, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Planck 'feedback': mathematical correctness vs readability

In the current version of the article, we are stating that the Planck 'feedback' is a feedback. Strictly speaking this is not true, for a feedback is defined as something that makes the initial change (in T) to a forcing larger or smaller, compared to a reference system. Since we cannot define a reference system without the plank 'feedback', it doesn't make sense to call it a feedback. For a better explanation, see this review paper: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.earth.061008.134734.

I have not been able to think of wording that is understandable to young or non-expert readers and also correct, and think that the current mistake is not really bad. I imagine that most popular science sources will make a comparable mistake. Do we want a rewording here? Femkemilene (talk) 14:26, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

I disagree with you that it is not strictly true William M. Connolley (talk) 14:54, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with a definition of feedback in which the Planck 'feedback' is actually a feedback. What makes you say you disagree? Femkemilene (talk) 15:47, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

New model section

@Ebrafil: thanks for the rewrite. While an update was definitely necessary, in my opinion, the updated version is in some aspects worse than the outdated version.

First of all, I think the new model section focuses disproportionately on the RCPs and the IPCC. Statements like: the IPCC predicts are really weird to me. The IPCC assesses the whole literature on climate models and is not making predictions itself but reporting on predictions of the entire climate research community. Neither does the IPCC study the carbon cycle: they assess and report on the literature around the carbon cycle, which they try to streamline as well. Additionally, it also doesn't make sense to say the IPCC ignores the carbon cycle as climate centres have done a tremendous effort to improve that part of climate models. Lastly: the new version feels more technical to me and doesn't address the basics of what a climate model is and does.

I'll try to further update the section and combine your improvements with the spirit of the old version. Femkemilene (talk) 11:05, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for critically reading my rewrite. I will explain a bit more in detail why I'm not completely satisfied with our work. First of all: a lot of climate models (for instance, Earth system Models of intermediate complexity, EMICs) can actually be run on simple laptops. It's only the state-of-the-art high resolution models that need to be run on supercomputers. These EMICs are still in widespread use in the climate community and many applications can only be done on those. I don't want to mention them, but I do think we should not give the false impression all climate models are run on supercomputers.
I think the section was way too long. If you compare this to f.i. adaptation (which tbf is too short), it doesn't make any sense. I've removed the lines on feedbacks as these are described in a previous section. More later Femkemilene (talk) 09:28, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
Nice NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 11:41, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

History

Collapse wp:FORUM speculation based only on synthesis going beyond a non-notable primary source. . dave souza, talk 21:58, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

In June 1989, Noel Brown, the director of United Nations Environment Program claimed by year 2000, flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees", that would threaten political chaos. Reportedly, coastal regions would be inundated. Brown claimed, entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Excess carbon dioxide was pouring into the atmosphere because of human beings use of fossil fuels and the destruction of the rain forests. ~ Bought the farm (talk) 19:37, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

So this content was added to the article and promptly removed by NewsAndEventsGuy. The contribution has historic connotations regarding this article, and illustrates the fear-mongering related to this subject. Why not include? ~ Bought the farm (talk) 20:08, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

To answer your question "why not include" see the WP:EDITSUM that went with my revert. (It said "undue weight to one guys rhetoric".)
On reflection, I think Brown was making sense and it wasn't just rhetoric. You just read it with Confirmation bias since you think this whole thing about global warming is (your words) "fear mongering". Well, I think you don't really get what Brown was saying and here is why.
There are three things you are probably confusing
* Factors that increase Earth's energy budget and how long they keep on making this impact
* Timing of human efforts to stop adding to those climate-system warming factors
* Timing of the impact of the Effects of global warming
When you really understand all those, you can understand what Brown was saying in 1989. If you want to retire at 50, start putting all your beer and pizza money into good investments starting at age 15. Because what you do those first few years has an enormous impact over time. Since 1989, the UNFCCC has agreed to try to limit warming to 2C over preindustrial, but what is that number? At the time, that was the best guess for having a 50-50 chance of avoiding dangerous climate change. Just a 50-50 chance. Now limiting warming to 2C is looking more and more unlikely. Had we listened to Brown in 1989, we'd be in much better shape, just like I would be if I had not eaten and swilled all that lost investment capital in my youth.
NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:14, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
NewsAndEventsGuy, I read the source as the beginning of the continual revisionist theory regarding this subject - Human existence, Human achievement, capitalistic achievement on planet earth bringing humankind on a continual "brink of disaster", due to our mere existence here. Let's agree to disagree and just improve the article.. OK? ~ Bought the farm (talk) 20:21, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, it looks an awful lot like the fringy blogs that picked up on this just read the entire thing wrong. There is a difference between saying bad things will happen by 2000 if climate change is not reversed and if climate change is not reversed by 2000, bad things will happen. The people who tout this are using the first interpretation, the source itself seems to be using the second. Specifically, the article says Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years and here were are almost 30 years to the day and we're sitting pretty at 1.4 degree Fahrenheit warmer globally than we were in the 1980s. GMGtalk 20:27, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
NewsAndEventsGuy, Brown suggested that compensating Brazil, Indonesia and Kenya for preserving rain forests may be necessary. Reportedly, each acre of rain forest can store 100 tons of carbon dioxide and reprocess it into oxygen. Have any of the forests been preserved since 1989? Have these countries contributed or been compensated thru the years? Has the U.S. subsidized this? Are we merely targeting the U.S. and slamming her progress when citing global climate change? Is this concept of global climate change warming merely "fear-mongering"??? ~ Bought the farm (talk) 21:31, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Since I commented I'll let someone else delete this thread or collapse it on grounds that it is mostly WP:SOAP and WP:FORUM NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:33, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Or an open question to discuss wiki's content.. ~ Bought the farm (talk) 21:37, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

AP News is a reliable source. ~ Bought the farm (talk) 22:05, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

3C to 5C rise in Arctic likely even if Paris agreement emission targets met

"Sharp and potentially devastating temperature rises of 3C to 5C in the Arctic are now inevitable even if the world succeeds in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement, research has found."[1] Seems relevant to the article, but I am unsure where best to insert it. Should it be mentioned here, or on the Paris Agreement article, or both? Zazpot (talk) 20:50, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

The agreement is 1.5-2C while the Arctic warms at least twice as much (which should be somewhere in the article). Unfortunately humanity is to dumb to understand the implications. prokaryotes (talk) 23:48, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/13/arctic-temperature-rises-must-be-urgently-tackled-warns-un

Updating a couple of diagrams

I know the FAQ says some diagrams do not need updating often and I am afraid I am not volunteering, but maybe it is time to update or replace the one on "greenhouse gas emissions by economic sector" which refers to 2010 and the one on mitigation dating from 2012. I guess there might be significant differences e.g. transport might be a bigger proportion? Chidgk1 (talk) 19:39, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm now mostly busy with the article on climate sensitivity, but I might be tempted to update these two graphs later :). Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:48, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Copyediting

This article is edited heavily and and such there is usually little regard for stylistic consistency. While the worst sentences are quickly rewritten, the article is still not really easy to read. Would it be an idea to sign this article up at the Wikipedia: guild of copy-editors to get it back into top quality? Or maybe have it reviewed again entirely? Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:07, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

I've put it on the waiting list for the guild of copy-editors after having updated some sections in dire need of updating. Don't want to waste their time on sections that are out of date. Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:43, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
This article certainly could use some copy-editing, but that is way too premature: 1) substantial updating needs to be done, and 2) the citation "style" needs to be worked out (see following section). As both of those will take some time, I suggest holding off on major copy-editing until the content and structure are substantially improved. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:00, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
I've removed it from the copyediting request page for now. If you have specific concerns about what needs to be updated and don't have time for it yourself, please put it on the talk page. I want this page to be good again :). Femke Nijsse (talk) 21:12, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

Archiving; maybe too much?

@Gog the Mild:: I saw that you had a bot add a lot of archives to the article. I saw that you did it to a lot of cite web links, which are prone to being changed if they are not on news websites, and links are prone to break in general, so archives are quite useful. I was wondering why it was done to reports as well as those reports are not changeable. I might be overly picky on aesthetics here, but all these extra links don't look pretty. If it is useful, I'll shut my mouth. Femke Nijsse (talk) 21:08, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi Femke Nijsse. No problem. What I was doing was saving a copy of each of the sites/pages linked to in the article at Wayback Machine, an archiving service, in the same state they were in when the link was first created, and adding that link alongside the original. Hopefully you can see the advantages of this, but there is an explanation here - Wikipedia:Link rot. So while it may be unaesthetic, sorry, I have future-proved 256 links in the article against anything happening to the link or the site they lead to. Clear? If you really don't like it, feel free to revert - although I would advise against it - I won't object; I was just passing through, trying to do a good deed.
PS It is a fantastic article and I am impressed by your contribution to it.
Gog the Mild (talk) 21:33, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
Rereading this, I am not sure that I really answered your question. The short answer is that it is a lot easier and quicker for me to create an archive for everything than to pick and chose the links that I personally feel are not, ever, going to rot, fail or change. If you say that a link to a report is never going to break, then I am happy to believe you. But between me being the sort of editor who, metaphorically, wears a belt and braces and carries a piece of string in his pocket; my not being able to certainly identify which links are the more secure; and the ease of running a "no-exceptions" archiving operation this latter is what I tend to do. As I said, feel entirely free to revert any or all of them. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:51, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
Okay, thanks :). I won't have this as a priority at all, but now I know you won't feel hurt if I remove some of them. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:19, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Citation style consistency

reference info for Global warming
unnamed refs 0
named refs 0
self closed 0
explanations

I came here from the GOCE Requests page, as I like to give articles a quick check and cleanup before our copy-editors get to work. As I was poking through looking for easy-to-fix problems, I noticed that the citation styles have drifted from a presumably consistent state. A template showing the updated citation consistency state is at the right. Right now, there is a mix of templated and untemplated refs, a mix of date styles, and other things that could be fixed. What is the desired/consensus citation style? If your answer is "They should as much as possible be CS1 (cite web, cite book, cite journal)", I would be happy to make the references more consistent. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:21, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks very much! I don't know much about the citation style choices, but I think cite web, cite book and cite journal are probably preferable as these are the ones that the visual editor uses, so the ones that will be inserted most in the future. One source that I've not completely made up my mind about how to cite best are the IPCC reports. They are quite lenghty, so ideally you would want to specify at least the chapter, but maybe even the page number. If you use cite book (that is the one for reports, right?) inlcuding a page number, you can't reuse it. But if you put the full citation in, and than refer to that citation by using a short citation (f.i. Field 2013, p.8 for one sentence and Field 2013, p.12 for another) you mix up the citation styles. If we choose CS1, what would you advice us to do in those cases? Femke Nijsse (talk) 13:40, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
My thanks and appreciation to Jonesey for raising the issue rather than (as many editors do) proceeding unilaterally to "fix" things. Yes, the practice of "citation" here is a mess, especially for one of our major articles. Also: he's right that there has been a great deal of drift (though I doubt if there has ever been a high degree of consistency). That is due to a large proportion of editors who do things "their way" without regard for consistency relative to others. But the foremost cause of inconsistency here is the lack of a clear, explicit statement of the preferred style. We need to work up such a statement.
However, previous experience – and I will point out that I have substantial experience on this topic, and have given it a great deal of thought – suggests that determining a preferred style is going to be difficult, and very frustrating, because of clashes of definitions and concepts. To avoid a lot of difficulty I strongly suggest we adhere to the definitions of the key terms at WP:Basic citation concepts. Some of you have been using the key terms very sloppily, which not only clashes with other editors, but impairs your own understanding of how things can be done.
Determining a preferred "style" should start with the preferred model of citation. But for now I would like to address two particular points raised by FN.
(1) The IPCC reports are complex sources, which require more complicated citation than most editors are familiar with. It can be done in several ways, but easiest is with {{citation}}. Which implies CS2 style.
(2) We should not constrain our choices here to what those who designed VE thought we should all use. For sure that is, and will be, a major source of inconsistency, but we are not improving matters by yielding to someone else's poor design choices.
♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:15, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
I agree with the above comments that something systematic needs to be figured out for citing the IPCC reports. Ideally, they could all use a template, perhaps with permanent instructions on this Talk page about how to cite IPCC reports. Re: Which implies CS2 style: If the occasional instance of {{citation}} is needed, it would probably be most consistent to use it with |mode=cs1, since the vast majority (~95%) of templated refs use CS1 (cite web, cite book, cite journal, etc.).
What date format do you want (dmy, ymd, mdy)? Should all authors and editors be cited using last=/first=, or is author= preferred? I recommend not worrying about the short refs at this time, unless you decide that you want a lot more of them. The first step (after making a decision) is to get all refs using templates with the same date and author formats. – Jonesey95 (talk) 07:04, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
@Jonesey: I'm up for ymd and last/first. I think the dmy/mdy can be confusing because it's not clear a priori which of the two is chosen. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:38, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
@ J. Johnson: I've read your basic guide, and that did clear up terminology for me :). Hope I can be an easier person to talk to from now on. I'm afraid I've been one of the editors with no regard for consistency on this page. I hope you can bear with my lack of knowledge a bit more.    [I'm glad! That's what it is for. -JJ]
(1) I've been trying to use Talk:IPCC Fifth Assessment Report/citation to properly cite IPCC on some pages, but found it quite difficult with no example or explanation of what that Harvnb does. I specifically found it difficult to understand what information I have to give it so that linking works. I think if we improve (i.e. explain for beginners) that page a bit further, IPCC citations shouldn't pose a problem.
(1b) You say this IPCC citation requires CS2. Is that because the Harvnb linking magic only works with CS2 or because you've done awesome work streamlining this in CS2?. I hope Jonesey's idea of |mode=cs1 works for you! Reading the harvnb page, I get the impression it works with CS1 as well, but you need an extra parameters in your full cite for it to work? Do I understand that correctly?
(2) While, after having read your guide, I understand that questionable design choices were made, I do wonder how much of a hassle it is to deviate from it. Is there a bot that can assist people with converting the citation style from VE to our citation style in the future, assuming we would choose CS2?
(3) Say, we take the short-cite, full-cite model of citation (that is what you mean by model, right?), would we do that for small news articles and small websites as well? If so, I assume it's best to subdivide the sources sections into news-articles/reports/government website and so forth? If not, it's going to be a long long list.
(4) A concern I had with short-cite/full-cite system was that it would increase the amount of unique note-links in the page, so that in the end the last note-link might be over 500. Having thought a bit more about this, I don't think it's bad anymore. With this system, we're able to bundle citations, so that large numbers are not as annoying as they were. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:38, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
Re your (4): yes! Details further below.
For citation of scientific works I am generally inclined towards dmy format. For non-scientific works I am inclined to the format of the source. (Which may make it easier to search for the source.) Do we need to force all source dates into a consistent format?
Everyone please note that |author= has a use for corporate authors – such as the IPCC – but should not be used for personal authors who have first (personal) and last names (surnames). There is no "or" option here.
Citing the IPCC reports is a particular challenge which should have its own thread. A specialized template might be warranted; that would take a bit of study.
Re terminology: Let's not say "full-cite". The general term used in all (?) style guides is full citation, and I think we should scrupulously stick with that exact term for the precise concept. That falls into what in digital electronics is called a forbidden zone, where a signal is not clearly one thing or the other. The model here (in part) is properly denoted as "full citation/short-cite". The distinction between "citation" and "cite", and also the use and non-use of the hyphen, are for reinforcing the distinction between the "long-form" and "short-form" use of "citation".
Similarly for "refs", and especially "short refs". "References" is such an ambiguous and carelessly used term its use in any citation discussion should be severely deprecated; "refs" as an abbreviation adds nothing of value. As for <ref> tags: those are used to automagically create notes (a.k.a. footnotes and end-notes), which have no "short" form.
Re your (1): the IPCC AR5 citations page was an early attempt to provide a canonical full citatoin, has (I just noticed) a few errors, and, for sure could use fuller documentation. That all could be worked on. Though now I wonder if it would be easier (in the long run) to provide some customized IPCC templates. (I'll address 1b further on.)
Re your (2): whether we go with CS1 or CS2, there is (from the past) and will be (courtesy of VE) much cruft to iron out. I am not aware of any useful bots or scripts, though perhaps that could be arranged. VE is more of a problem. Regardless of what style we select for this article, there should be some pushback on the VE developers to not force their preferred "style".
Re your (3): I don't know what you mean by "small news articles". I suspect that "small", in regard of both "news articles" and "websites", could be applicable to where there is an insufficiency of bibliographic detail – like "who wrote this?", and "when?" – in which case there might well be a question of reliability. But in general: no problem, and no need to subdivide the sources. Where news articles don't have an identified author it is standard to atttribute them to the publisher.
Re your (4): yes. I should point out that under "citation model" I would specify (as you imply, and the article currently has) a section for full citations (preferably named "Sources" instead of "References"), and that (which the article does not currently adhere to) all cited sources have a full citation in that section, instead of in the wiki-text. An IMMENSE benefit of doing this is making it easier to organize and maintain the full citations, being all collected together. It is also a significant benefit not to have them cluttering the wiki-text. As to large numbers: I suspect you mean long strings of note links with large numbers. As you note, all of the short-cites, and any other note-worthy (ha ha) details, pertinent for a single sentence can be bundled into (generally) a single note. So there can be a single note-link per sentence.
The main issue with using CS1 templates is the additional coding required to (a) enable linking from short-cites (i.e.: |ref=harv), and (b) to suppress the automatic terminal period. There was a suggestion to make "ref=harv" automatic; I'm not clear on why that didn't go through. As to suppressing the punctuation: I don't know how the various options might work, but requiring editors to copy in "|postscript=none" in every instance would be a serious impediment.
Hopefully I have covered all the points raised above, except IPCC citation, which I think should have a section for just that. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:17, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

For scientific works, I usually stick to the citations style in the sources, which is y format. There are some journals that only publish month & year data, and leave out the day.

My (1): You would instantly be eligible to be my favorite Wikipedian if you would to work on that. I might be able to help with making the documentation easier to understand for beginners.

(2): Okay.

(3): When I wrote small, I was referring to just a single page, not to what kind of information is available. The point I was trying to make is that the system of small harvnb notes and a separate sources section is very sensible for books and reports, but might be a bit awkward for news articles. Come to think of it, what would it look if no author is available? Do you have example of some other featured article maybe?

(4) You have convinced me. I changed references to sources.

(5) So we can make CS1 look the same as CS2 with these extra parameters? That would mean that when 'new' users add a new source in a note CS1 style with VE, we can add only these two things to make it consistent with CS2 style. This is not as much work as I thought before, so my resistance to CS2 is now less. I don't care about punctuation and you do, so let's follow your lead :). Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:45, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Ohhh, you beat me to changing "References" to "Sources". (I was saving it as a bad example.) So I went ahead and removed the "Citations" header that split "Notes" back at the end of 2011. There's no compelling reason why a "Notes" can't have more than one kind of note.
I think the issue with VE is not going to be resolved simply by adding a parameter; that is going to need some work. As to the differences of formatting (e.g., periods as separators versus commas), the original sense of citation "style", this can be controlled by setting the |mode= parameter to either "cs1" ('cite' style) or "cs2" ('citation' style). However, I don't know how that affects other aspects, such as 'cite's automatically added terminal period. If everyone is okay using CS2 style (commas), then making all of the existing or future 'cite' consistent in regards of style is as simple as adding |mode=cs2. However, I don't know if that fixes just the "style", or if other needed fixes are also done. I think it would be just as easy to replace all instances of "{cite book", "(cite web", etc., with "{citation". I believe 'cite' and 'citation' both use the same parameters the same way, and should generate the same result. A minor benefit of that is that any addition of a 'cite' template is effectively self-flagged as "check me!"
As for news articles: the awkwardness is due to often not having an author (which would otherwise by like a journal article), or having multiple articles in a year (thus requiring a fuller date). There are multiple ways of handling such cases. My favorite is at 2014 Oso mudslide#References, where articles from newspapers are sub-listed chronologically under the name of the newspapers (instead of the author), and the harv templates use a single string name and complete date to link to the full citation. Note that {{Harv}} (the template) ≠ "Harvard Referencing" (the style), and Harv does not have a strict "author-year" requirement. If you have a particular case in mind I would be happy to demonstrate. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:10, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 28 April 2019

Resolved

In the section "Climate change feedback", second paragraph there is this line: "After an initial warming due emissions of greenhouse gases, the atmosphere will hold more water." which appears to be missing a "to" after "due". With the "to" added the line would read: "After an initial warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases, the atmosphere will hold more water." 174.62.95.31 (talk) 13:28, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Fixed. Thank you for pointing this out! – Teratix ₵ 13:32, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 29 April 2019

The summary states that global warming is anthropogenic, but the main article does not provide the reader with any idea how scientists arrive at this striking conclusion. Could someone please provide a referenced sentence or two explaining why scientists believe that humans are at fault? (I suspect the anthropogenic claim is based on computer simulation rather than real-life experimentation, because you cannot easily experiment on a whole planet. But please prove me wrong: I can for example imagine that scientists gathered real-life data on global cooling/warming when a complete flying ban was imposed after the twin tower attacks in New York in Sep 2001.)

And a minor point: The summary states that global warming started in 1900, but the first graph seems to show that warming started in about 1935. Some explanation here would be helpful. Or a new graph starting much earlier, say 1820 or 1850, to demonstrate that warming was indeed under way by 1900.

Finally, let me say that this article has much improved since the advice I provided a year or two ago. Thank you. Keep up the good work.86.172.133.131 (talk) 14:07, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. DannyS712 (talk) 14:34, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
Hi Danny, please be patient. Wait a week whether someone can come up with the requested reference. If that does not happen within a week, then feel free to deactivate my request.86.172.133.131 (talk) 14:55, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
IP 86.*: Please note the text in the box above: This template must be followed by a complete and specific description of the request, that is, specify what text should be removed and a verbatim copy of the text that should replace it. You are not requesting a specific edit, you are saying that the article is deficient in some way. Which is fine, perhaps some improvement can be made, which is a matter for discussion. As it is, you do not have a specific edit to request, so there is nothing to be done. If you think something should be done (or at least considered), please start a new section explaining that. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:58, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
Attribution is now mentioned interspersedly in the physical drivers of climate change section. This should be made clearer. I've added this to the discussion for FAR. Femke Nijsse (talk) 11:23, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Photos of impact climate change humans

I've added a photo of climate change impacting humans: the California wildfires. Attribution of single events to climate change is a rapidly developing field of climate science, but it can still be controversial. I think it is important that we add is, as the conversation and scientific studies about global warming are now turning more to humans instead of those poor polar bears. I've decided not to include a photo of a hurricane, as my assessment is that tropical cyclones are quite difficult to attribute to climate change. I'm trying to find a figure of flooding, but have not been able to find a good figure on Commons that I can find a decent scientific study of, linking it to climate change. The link between coastal flooding and climate change is quite well-established, so I should be able to find one. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:40, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

Any objections to not having columns in sources section

The columns generated by {{refbegin|30em}} are basically uneditable from the Visual editor. With our push to bring all of our full citations to this section and to encourage newer editors to do the same, I think we don't need to put them in columns. I'm not sure whether there was a reason to put that template there in the first place.. Femke Nijsse (talk) 11:27, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I object to not having the "Sources" section (as wells "Notes") in columns, and also reduced size text. It's a matter of readability, and a significant degradation if it is lost. If VE has a problem with that then we need work out why. What do you mean by "basically uneditable"? Does it have anything to do with the size of your browser window? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 18:32, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
I hadn't noticed that the text size is smaller, and agree that that is desirable. I've turned it back. My browser window is not the problem (I edit on three different devices with substantial differences in monitor size). In VE, we basically get a small pop-up box in which all 100 sources are put together. It would take me about 2 minutes to find the correct location to add a source. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:16, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
It's not the browser window that could be part of the problem, but the size of the window. More specifically, the window's width, as that does affect the display of columns. I was going to suggest trying (in lieu of {{reflist|30em}}) something like "{{div col|colwidth=30em}}{{reflist}}". But if the problem is basically how things are displayed (previewed?) in VE, well, I don't know. Perhaps VE would honor the {div col}. Or (cross your fingers) may be there is a configuration parameter for that. See if you have any problems at Moment magnitude scale#Sources (which uses {div col}). ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:37, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
I have the same problem in Moment magnitude scale. And the problem is the same if I zoom in extremely, mimicking a small window width to get only one column. So I guess I'll just have to switch to source editing for a bit... Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:15, 5 May 2019 (UTC)
Yes. I just tried to do an edit with VE. And the experience was so atrociously awful as to be Dantesque. I am becoming firmly settled that VE is so bad that no accommodations should be made. If you can't do something in VE (let alone do it well) there is only one useful answer: don't use VE. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:06, 12 May 2019 (UTC)
I'm sorry you had to go through that :P. For this article, I'm switching to the source editor. I really hate the fact that full citations are in the middle of the text, but we're working on solving that. If I recall right (can't find the page back, but some page said rich editing is highest priority now) VE will support editing {{refbegin|30em}} easily in the future. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:13, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
Most people almost universally take what they consider the better alternative. Once in a while I like to try the other, and see if it really is as bad as I thought it to be. :-) ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:02, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Edit Request re possible typo

Hi, I don't know if I'm doing this right, but ...
7.1, final paragraph, contains the sentence:
"In 2009 several UNFCCC Parties produced the Copenhagen Accord, which has been widely portrayed as disappointed ..."
A disappointed Accord is probably a heartbreaking sight, but should it possibly have read "disappointing"? T 88.91.200.88 (talk) 21:49, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

 Done. Thanks for pointing it out.
P.S. You're doing it right :). Alternatively (sometimes the response is quicker), you could use an edit request by clicking View Source and click the blue 'Submit an edit request' button. Femke Nijsse (talk) 16:50, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Last sentence in lead - about adaptation

About the sentence which I changed and is now reverted to "Some scientists call into question climate adaptation feasibility, with higher emissions scenarios,[29] or the two degree temperature target.[30]"

I didn't mean to change the meaning of the sentence just clarify it.

I know the meaning is not the same but how about replacing the sentence in the lead with a direct quote from [1] saying "Climate-related risks for natural and human systems are higher for global warming of 1.5°C than at present, but lower than at 2°C"

Then in the "adaptation section" Steffen; et al. (2018) could be cited. Or maybe a new "tipping points" section created transcluding the lead of Tipping points in the climate system. Is Hansen et al (2013) now out of date?

I'm not that big of a fan of replacing the sentence with "Climate-related risks for natural and human systems are higher for global warming of 1.5°C than at present, but lower than at 2°C". I think there is little information in that sentence. I think that the sentence that adaptation becomes increasingly unfeasible for higher temperatures might be more important. I very much don't like the term some scientists of the current sentence. I will continue to think about this more.
You're proposing to include tipping points in the adaptation section. Currently, tipping points are being described in the physical impact section. One could argue that they also have an impact on humans, and in the summary for policymakers in AR5 WG2, they are described in this context (vulnerability, which corresponds to our effects on humans section). Importantly, they are not described in the context of adaptation, and I think we should not do that, based on a single PRIMARY source (Scheffen). For decisions on structure, there are no reasons to use primary sources.
I think tranclusion is out of the question for this article for two reasons. One: there is not enough place in this article. We need to be very careful in giving everything due weight, and not overly stressing one aspect of climate change over other aspects. The second one is quality control. This is a featured article, transcluding information from lower-quality pages endangers our quality control. I do not think that a separate tipping points section is warranted. It should (and is mostly already) be described under various of our current sections. Femke Nijsse (talk) 12:20, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/summary-for-policy-makers/

Structure Society and culture

One of the changes in the edits of @Chidgk1: is a change in the structure of the section of Society and Culture. I think this is one of the most difficult sections to write, as I've not found a proper secondary source that described this. However, I'm not entirely satisfied with the changes that were made. What is the reasoning from splitting the position of oil and gas companies from the public opinion and debate section? They are clearly part of this section. If we want to make them stand out, the better thing would be to make a subsubsection for them. Why are we singeling out oil and gas, and ignoring coal? To me, it also doesn't make sense that think tanks, often secretly funded by these fossil fuel companies, are separated from their public stances on global warming.

I think that making changes in the structure of this article should be done in one of the two following ways:

1. You follow a very reliable secondary source in their structure

2. You first seek consensus on the talk page.

Could you answer these questions and propose improvements? Thanks! Femke Nijsse (talk) 12:31, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

I don't have any opinion on the structure of the "society and culture" section or its general content so if anyone wants to change my changes, move them around or revert them feel free. However having read both The Economist and The Guardian for many years I am sure they are both very good secondary sources on the position of fossil fuel companies. Also I would be happy to add a sentence or two on coal. For example "Coal can be a political hot topic in some countries or regions, such as Poland and Australia." with cites for those countries. "Coal rents are a significant proportion of the economy in Mongolia" citing the report from https://www.carbontracker.org/reports/a-new-world/ (which requires registration but is free) "and have been alleged to be linked to corruption (the charges are denied and the trial ongoing)" citing https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/najib-src-trial-malaysia-pension-fund-paid-13b-to-1mdb-unit (don't know how reliable that source is).Chidgk1 (talk) 14:05, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
I'm against mentioning individual countries, there's simply too many of them. While the Guardian and Economist and generally good primary or secondary sources (they both do investigative journalism, making them occasional primary sources), they do typically not offer the type of source we need to determine the structure and relative importance of different sections. The Guardian, while a very reliable source, it also quite a biased source (the facts are almost always true, but their selection of facts and framing is typically quite left-wing and activist), so I would like us not to overly rely on that source. Unfortunately, more centrists newspapers have often ignored climate news altogether in the past. Femke Nijsse (talk) 14:34, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
Yes on reconsidering the above you are right, mentioning individual countries in the text is too detailed for this article. I see a few of the existing cites are for particular countries but I think that is fine if it illustrates a general point in the text. And yes probably very few people would accuse The Economist of left-wing bias. However sometimes the drawback with citing The Economist is that it only shows the first couple of paragraphs without registration. So how about the below:

Regional effects of aerosols

There does not seem to be much on this in the executive summary of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter07_FINAL-1.pdf so if the last sentence of the "aerosols and soot" section is in doubt maybe it should be completely removed for now.Chidgk1 (talk) 13:29, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

I've done some extra research and tweaked the sentence. It is now correct. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:01, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Natural variability and attribution

According Knutson (2017) "natural variability can obscure forced climate signals for decades, particularly for smaller (less than continental) space scales." so perhaps that is worth adding.

Again, I think we shouldn't delve too much into very small-scale processes. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:05, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Some comments on reworks Chidgk1

@Chidgk1:, many thanks for your hard work today. A lot of sentences that I've been staring at frequently because I didn't like them, have now been improved (some of which I introduced myself)! I'm a bit envious of your skill to simplify language. I'll be building on your works over the next couple of weeks probably, maybe reverting some. I'll always include an edit summary and I'm always available for extra information if you want to.

A couple of remarks already + answers to questions you seemed to pose in your edit summaries.

1. You may be aware that we've developed a citation model, to make sure the article has a consistent citation style. Could you start implementing this as well? Saves us a lot of work

2. I was the one adding the request for extra sources about internal variability. (normally, I'd refer you to edit summaries, but I know I've edited too much lately for people to trace everything back). Here are two sources stating that multi-decadal, and even multicentennial internal variability is a probably a thing:

So the citation needed tag was correct at the end of the sentence. I'm not entirely sure what introductory sentence we should put that, that is actually correct.

3. Extratropics = mid-latitudes and the polar regions. So changing extratropics to midlatitudes deviates from the source. I would like to fact-check that entire sentence, because I've always learned that aerosols are dominant over industrial areas, which are mainly situated over mid-latitudes.

4. You stated that you don't understand attribution maybe. I think you do, your sentence is fine.

5. About changes being random. I'm okay with removing it. The word random has a slightly different meaning for scientist as for normal people. We understand the driving mechanisms of ENSO, but because it's not very periodic and we can't predict it upfront, we sometimes use the term random.

6. You've changed the last sentence of the lede completely, and it now means something else. It now says that some scientist doubt the 2-degree target (doubt what about it?) if emissions are high. Hereby you imply that some or even many scientists believe we can actually get to two degrees with a high emission scenario. This is not true, and not reflected in the cited sources.

Could you fix the points I made in 1, 2, 3 and 6? Thanks! And thanks again for the hard work! Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:05, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

You've fixed 2, I've fixed 3 and 6, so these comments are now done I think. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:07, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Changes to greenhouse gas section

User:Chidgk1 has just made over 40 edits, some of which are passable, many are rather idiosyncratic, but some are definitely questionable. E.g.: Why is mention of ExxonMobil removed? Why are three citations removed from the first sentence under "Global_warming#Physical_drivers_of_climate_change" diff), and that sentence tagged with {cn}? All with little or no explanation. I am thinking a rollback is warranted, then perhaps Chidgk1 might be coaxed into discussing these edits. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:33, 19 May 2019 (UTC) (I just noticed that FN's new section about this got in while I was still editing mine.)

The changes continue. I have just reverted two of his edits (to catch his attention) with a suugestion to come to the Talk page. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:51, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

J. Johnson (JJ) Hello. Re catching my attention feel free to write on my talk page as that sends me an email, whereas this page is not on my watchlist. Although the number of edits is large they are mostly very minor tweaks. So I thought I had marked those as "minor" and put enough explanation in the comments of the others but sorry if I did not. Perhaps ExxonMobil was temporarily removed part way through my edits and put back later on - it is there now.
Re the first sentence of Global_warming#Physical_drivers_of_climate_change I removed the citations because apparently they did not support the sentence. I then removed "only" rewrote the sentence and asked for a citation because I did not fully understand Climate oscillation and it was not obvious how to contact whoever recently wrote "We have quite a few indications that century scale internal variability is a thing. Some CMIP5 models and some interpretations of proxies show that." Presumably they are a professional researcher so perhaps one of the people Femkemilene asked for comments.Chidgk1 (talk) 07:23, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
Oh I just saw above comment by her - maybe I need to put something in my user page to get email notifications when someone mentions me - I'll try that.
J. Johnson (JJ) I'll come back to your and her comments hopefully a lot later today - it will take me a while to read up on how to follow the citation style so please be patient. Meanwhile you have some opinion about the greenhouse gas section where you undid a change I made? Or any of the other changes I made which Femkemilene has not already said above?Chidgk1 (talk) 07:50, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
As I have mentioned elsewhere, the notifications you get are set in your "Preferences". Also, when you do a lot of edits to an article it is usually a good idea to 1) start with a discussion on the article's Talk page so any potential problems can be addressed before the fact rather than after (which can be extremely messy), and 2) put the article on your watchlist so you are notified of any changes and discussions. Not knowing what notifications you had set I did a reversion as I know that is an automatic notice, regardless of how you are set.
The main thing about citation: we are in period of flux, so most of the existing citations are not really good examples, and we are not quite done formulating the preferred model of practice. See the #Second draft (above) for general guidance, and ask if you have any questions.
As to your edits: I think you are proceeding rather too quickly for good consideration. (E.g.: why did you remove ExxonMobil? It is a key player, and your impulse to remove that mention should have been tempered with the realization that no one else has felt it was necessary or good to remove it.) Similarly with your removal of those citations: that you (as you have just stated) "did not fully understand" some part of the content, or whether a source supports it, is a good reason for NOT deleting either content or citations. In such cases you should ask about it, either on the Talk page, or (implicitly) by tagging with a suitable template. Many of your other edits are subject to similar criticism, but I don't wish to get involved in long discussions on each point.
I see that your edits are predominately about about coal. I would point out that if you are employed (directly or indirectly) in the coal industry there is a possible conflict of interest, which you would need to declare. If so, please see WP:COI. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:05, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Terminology

Recently, @Cosmicseeds: added the sentence: Terms such as the climate crisis and global heating are increasingly beeing (sic) used. At first, I wanted to remove the sentence, as I feel these terms are typically used by activists and might therefore not be neutral. According to the cited Guardian article however, the UN and the Met Office are increasingly using these terms as well. This would maybe make them valid synonyms. I've not checked whether increasingly means going from 0.00001% to 0.01% or from 1% to 20%. In the first case, we should not include these synonyms I think.

I have not found much guidance in the relevant manual of style section. I'm trying to look at different articles about controversial topics to see what they've done with loaded terminology. In Climatic Research Unit email controversy, the term used by activists (climategate) is used with straight quotation marks (also known as "Climategate"), and similarly Volkswagen emissions scandal has "Dieselgate". As Climategate and dieselgate are weird words, this might not be completely applicable.

The MoS did mention that if there are more than 3 terms, there might be need for a names (terminology) section. So we could place a single-sentence description of this discussion in that section maybe? What do you think? Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:29, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Have a look at the people they quote, being in a reliable source and quoting them is enough on its own practically. The only real decision is were they saying what they though it was or were they using those as names to reference it. Dmcq (talk) 10:34, 19 May 2019 (UTC)
That's a good point: are they used as synonyms for climate change/global warming or are they used as description. For climate crisis, I'd say it is used as a descriptive term, and not as a synonym. For global heating, the source literally states: global heating is a more accurate term than global warming, so this would count as a synonym. A quick Google of the latter shows in really in use (yet?). It's this one professor that proposed it, and the Guardian. Many of the hits for global heating are for technological heating systems for houses..
As such, I strongly believe that the term global heating should not feature in the lede. I'm more divided on climate crisis. As it is not a synonym, it should not be mentioned in the first paragraph. It could (I'm slightly against this for POV reasons) be mentioned in the fourth paragraph, after Globally, a majority of people consider global warming a serious or very serious issue'.
If we include it in the lede, we should also dedicate a couple of lines on this in the article itself. I think public opinion and disputes is the best section for this. We have a terminology section now as well that is a complete mess, so maybe it can be woven into that section? Femke Nijsse (talk) 12:20, 19 May 2019 (UTC)
And I have just reverted the wikilinking of those terms, which went to redirects that sent them right back "Global warming". There is no sense in that. Especially as there is no discussion of those terms here. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:10, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Position of fossil fuel companies

How about changing the section title from "Position of oil and gas companies" to "Position of fossil fuel companies" and adding as a first sentence something like: "In places where fossil fuel extraction is a significant part of the economy it is sometimes politically controversial, and lobbying by fossil fuel companies may be regarded with suspicion.(footnote here with an example country or region for each of the 3 main fossil fuels)"Chidgk1 (talk) 12:39, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

Current citation work (May, 2019)

FN: I've been pretty busy, and feeling a little guilty I'm not helping you much. I'll try to make it up!

I'm thinking we (me?!) should go through each section and see that all of of the {cite} templates have a suitable 'ref=' parameter. It looks like a lot of them do already (your work?); I've grabbed the raw text to go through (tonight or tomorrow, hopefully) and see what else needs to be done. At that point (or even now) we can adding short-cites (Harv doesn't care where it finds the full citation), and see that they work. Once a source's short-cite links properly we can move that source to Sources. Initially I would not be too concerned if they are in proper order or not; I would be more interested in cleaning them up and seeing that they are correct.

Does that sound good to you? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:03, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Never feel guilty for being busy!
Sounds good to me. Wasn't me who added ref= parameters for citations within the section. So far, I've tried to immediately move to sources. Your strategy sounds good me to as well. Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:05, 19 May 2019 (UTC)
Well, I haven't been much busy here.
I am thinking somewhat in terms of process. I think it's easier to move the full citations (a somewhat complicated process) if they don't have to be modified and tested at the same time. And it is handier to modify them, add the short-cites, and test, if that is all done (mostly) in a single section. This might result in transitional states where a short-cite in one footnote links to a full citation in the next footnote, but that doesn't bother me. I think we need a "Pardon our dust" template. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:37, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Ohmigosh. Last night I looked closely at the first two batches of citations extracted from the text, and I am quite dismayed. Out of 27 and 16 instances, only five and three (resp.) were in good enough shape to use with {harv} without significant editing and/or verification. Most typically they lacked any attribution of authorship, or misused |author=, or lacked a date. To even see what was missing or screwed-up was difficult because of the obfuscation from the haphazard way parameters are thrown together. It's such a tangled swamp that I am wondering how much work I should put into this.

Some of the problems have been present for nine years or more. Others are more recent, showing a definite failure to uphold any kind of standard. And as I mentioned above, it is extremely to see this stuff in it is crushed into the wikitext in an unstructured manner. I am therefore convinced that we must require a structured citation format.

I am also wondering if we should call a moratorium on adding new content for a month or so, so we don't have people adding crappy citations while I am trying clean them up. (Like: some editorial responsibility is required?)

I am further concerned that approximately half of the citations need some research just to verify the citation. Can we draft some editors? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:03, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm not that surprised by the swamp state. Have fixed a few already. The text was/is is such a deplorable state, with many citation not checking out as well.
In terms of a moratorium: I think the best strategy instead is to 'release' a beta version of our citation model into the wild. I'm quite convinced it's very very close to being finished. If you agree, I propose we add it in a prominent location in the top banners, maybe before the FAQs? I myself would lose motivation to work on this article if I can't edit the text as well as doing some proper wikignome activity (dunno wether wikignome is still the proper terms with how much of a mess it is).
Your concern that citations need verification is justified, too many of them are just not checking out. Not sure if it's the smartest thing to do simultaneously?
Drafting in more editors would be lovely! @Jonesey95: offered us help with the citations before. Does that offer still stand? Two other editors that have been very helpful in the recent past are @Efbrazil: and @Enescot:? Would either of you be willing to help us with the tidying up and verifications of the citations? Do you have more editors in mind, J. Johnson? Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:29, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
I'm happy to help. I'll make a quick pass through the citations to clean up some of the minor inconsistencies. Then let me know what your specific needs are, and I'll contribute. The ref info template can be useful to check consistency.
Question: Should all authors/editors in citations be listed using |first=, |last=, |editor-first= and |editor-last=? Some have their full names listed under |author= and |editor=, which is inconsistent. – Jonesey95 (talk) 08:26, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for the work so far :). In terms of the specific needs, I think it is now safe to refer to our citation model, don't you think so J. Johnson? So completing citations, making sure the parameters are filled in consistently, putting them in harvnb format and moving the full citations to the sources section is what needs to be done. I think J. Johnson is doing some work 'offline'. Johnson, could you confirm that, so that we don't do any double work?
Yes, authors/editors should ideally be listed using the |first=, |last=, |editor-first= and |editor-last=. Femke Nijsse (talk) 20:45, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
I see Jonesey is already chopping at the underbrush (thanks!). Though what I had in mind was more on the lines dragging in some of those editors (generally not GW regulars) who have added trash citations and get them to do some clean-up. Yeah, a moratorium is likely too drastic; perhaps we can do this in more nuanced increments. I think we should start by putting the full citations into an ordered, generally vertical format, just so we can see what's there. By ordered: the |url= should not come first! It's too "noisey", it distracts and distances the start of template from the key information of a source's authorship, date, and title. A full citation can be moved to "Sources" when it has enough information the short-cite works. Incomplete or questionable citations are probably best left in context.
As to "first" and "last": yes. I see you have already added that to the draft. Except: |author= should be used for attributing group or institutional authorship. Most of the current "author" mis-usage seems to have been one past editor (I havent' identified whom).
Yes, I have been doing some work off-line, which means I may be chasing a moving targeet if other edits are done. I'll stick to single sections at a time, may leave the {{in use}} template in over-night. +Probably better to use {{under construction}} for periods of a day or so.
I may take a whack at this in a few minutes. In order to avoid edit conflicts (especially where large, complicated edits are involved!) I remind everyone of the {{In use}} template. Perhaps we should avoid doing whole-article edits, in case something is being done in a section. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:02, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
And I have reformatted the first half-dozen citations in the lead. Everyone take a look at the wikitext to see how much easier it is to see – and therefore to work with! – what needs to be done when there is some structure to the text. Style matters! ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:57, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
NB: If you're going to change to vertical citations, please move the citations to the Sources section first, without changing the format or the content. In a subsequent edit, you can change the citation content. If you change the citation content and the format at the same time, the content changes are very difficult to detect in a diff. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:27, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
I grant the difficulty with the diffs, which is why I generally prefer to not change actual data when I'm changing format. But the full citations must not be moved out until a link (short-cite) is in place, and as they are most of these citations are so obfuscated that it is hard to see what is needed to make the links; re-formatting is thus a pre-requisite for moving. Alternately, the full citations could be echoed in "Sources", fixed, and a working link built prior to removing the original. The difficulty with that approach is that the link can't be tested in Preview (unless one edits the whole article, which is a significant processing drag, and increases the risk edit collisions). Despite the difficulty you mention, I think that the reformatting/fixing/testing is nonetheless best done in place, section by section. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:09, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Got the first batch of linkable full citations in the lead moved to Sources (~7kb), and replaced with short-cites. (The rest need some work.) And I will re-iterate what I have been saying about the importance of "pretty printing" (clear formatting): it is a lot easier to locate (for copying, deleting, whatever) a templated citation when they begin and end in the first column. And missing an editor (for filling the harv template) is less likely when all the last names line up. Etc.

I've been retaining any "quote=" text, as that might be needed to find the location, but in the long-run I expect such stuff will likely be cut-back.

I'm seeing a lot of stuff that needs cleaning up, but for now I think it's best to just get the full citations out of the text. Same for sorting Sources: later! Right now we're shoveling muck. When the level is lower we'll come back with brooms. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 01:10, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

I've started working from the other side: first tidying up citation, and removing them to the sources section later. I don't think it's a problem if we have a slightly different strategy, right? Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:24, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
Nah. Main thing is to avoid edit conflicts, so use, watch for, and heed {{in use}} warnings. Personally, I would prefer to pull the citations out of text first so they can be worked on without the encumbrance of all the text, but (as I said before) we need a working short-cite first, and the citation may need some work to get that. I find that just putting the closing double-braces in columns 1 & 2 really helps to sort out what's "citation" and what's not. I am also finding that putting the |ref= immediately following the "{{cite xxx" makes it clearer which citations may be ready to move.
By the way, a huge thanks to Jonesey for his latest work. I was psyching up to fix all the |author= problems, and .. what? he's already fixed them! As it looks like he's got them all, I guess I'll have to find something else to fix. :-) It is, indeed, mind-numbing work. (I think vertical-formating really helps.) Hopefully this immense slug of work is just a one-off, and once things are in better shape it should be lot easier to maintain. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:27, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
I think I got all of the human names in author/editor parameters. There is more out there to fix; I found some bogus |issue= values, and there are a few un-linked short refs, some of which I probably caused by separating names properly. I will let others do the citation moving and organizing, and then I'll make sure the short refs are working. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:37, 27 May 2019 (UTC)
If any instance of "bad author=" turns up it will undoubtedly be some new contribution.
I see that the {{cnf}} template (shortcut to {{citation not found}}; does not take a date) is intended for where a short-cite can't find the full citation; that's a good one for us. Not to be confused with {{fcn}}, a.k.a. {{full citation needed}} (wants a date). I don't know that we need to apply {fcn} right now, but at some point we should start tagging all the incomplete full citations.
I see a lot of bolluxed IPCC citations. While you guys hack away here I'm going to revisit and update the IPCC model full citations, then I'll see to fixing them here. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:23, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Head up: asked for external help for mitigation section

I've asked an academic at my university to check and rewrite a part of the mitigation section. He is an expert in mitigation economics. I think the structure is currently not that good, hence the request for external help. Not each paragraph has a coherent topic, for instance.

  1. The general introductory paragraph ends with one line on a specific report from a specific company about economics. (Preferable, we'd find other sources to support that statement and not attribute it to a single entity, but that's not my point)
  2. Cobenefits and clean energy upscaling dont naturally belong together, I don't think
  3. The last paragraph is a mess: it contains too many details about one aspect of mitigation (individual). I've once deleted the sentence about the category mistake because I feel it's not an important detail at all. It's been put back (by User:Chidgk1) and extended. The next sentence suffers from being out of place (going from policy, to individual, to economics again, where economics was mentioned waaay before.. ).

I'm not going to edit till I've won in some expertise, but just a heads up that I'll probably edit this section a bit more later. Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:00, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes the section certainly needs improvement e.g. the discount rate controversy should be mentioned. But please could you ask your fellow academic his opinion about the category mistake point (or I can ask directly if you prefer) as I feel that is important enough to be in. But I did not extend it and that point is too long now - I suggest a very few words and a cite would be plenty in this article and the detail could be moved to the main article.Chidgk1 (talk) 19:57, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
I don't think that the discussion about discount rates should be considered a controversy. It's a normal scientific discussion. Might be a good one to add though, but I'm awaiting the response from my colleague (I've not asked permission for a name to be put online). I do worry that the whole section on mitigation is getting too big, so not sure what we should condense or remove. I've asked my colleague for his opinion on that as well.
I think there must be a different way to express the category mistake, without explicitly using that term. The term itself is jargon, and I'd like this article to be very easily accessible. Maybe the jargon can be put in a note (of which we have too many as it is?)? Femke Nijsse (talk) 21:05, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Re "unnecessary bare reference(s)"

I have just reverted this edit by D Eaketts, with the summary "Removed unnecessary bare reference(s) with reFill()", that merged some short-cites in named-refs.

As a matter of general edification I point out that short-cites – the in-line abbreviated links to a full citation – are not "bare" in the sense of WP:Bare URLs (that is, lacking information about a source), nor are they in anyway "unnecessary". They contain the minimum information necessary to link to a full citation in the article that contains full details of the source. (Well, ideally. We working on that.) And the purpose of having distinct and separate instances of these short-cites, rather than having a single instance made to appear in more than one location, is so they can be associated with specific content, and can be augmented (such as with page numbers, more information, or other short-cites) as appropriate for that specific location. While full citations should not be duplicated, 1) this does not apply to short-cites (or shortened citations), and 2) the proper response for a "duplicate" full citation is not a named-ref, but replacing one instance with a short-cite. Which is part of what we are doing here. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:07, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Citation of newspapers and weekly magazines

Congratulations to Chidgk1 for figuring out (here) how to set |ref= for newspaper and magazine articles that do not identify an author. (It is a bit of an advanced lesson.) It is pretty simple: just append the different arguments of the {harv} template to "CITEREF". E.g.: |ref=CITEREFThe_Economist2019. There was one little hitch in not removing the |ref=harv parameter. Which illustrates why I have become convinced that (despite long-established personal practice) the ref parameter should be on the same line as the template name (e.g.: {{cite news |ref= harv), as they modify how the template works. (Same for |.)

Another point: newspapers (and weekly magazines) are typically cited by the name of the paper/magazine and the full date. Which can done in {Harv} using just a single parameter (e.g.: {{Harvnb|The Washington Post, 14 August 2018))) and the appropriate CITEREF. A possible problem is that in some cases it may be preferable to cite by the author when he or she is well known. Any suggestions on how that might be handled? Something like "Chris Mooney, in {&#12Harv|The Washington Post, ..."? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:21, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Sounds good and I like the idea of making the distinction between scientific and non-technical sources clear in the short-cites! Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:07, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Archiving/removing banners

There are three banners that, imo, have lost all relevance, and are in the way on the top of this page:

1. The denver post review

2. The Wiki Foundation exercises.

Can I delete those? If I do, how do I properly archive them? Should a new page be made for that? Putting in in a random archive would render it unfindable, as I wouldn't expect to find it there even if I'm looking for it.... Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:30, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Those banners result from templates inserted at the top of page. I suspect the Denver Post review is expected to be kept as part of the history of the article. I would expect the notices about class exercises to come down after some point, but I have no idea when. You might ask the editors that put them in. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:30, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
The editors that put them in seem not to have stayed after their university module ended, in end 2017 and begin 2018. What I would like (and this might be completely unfeasible) is to have two tabs at the top of the talk page. One with the actual talk page and the other with historical milestones & these group assignments. Would that be entirely crazy? Femke Nijsse (talk) 14:33, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
Yes, entirely crazy. As far as I know it would require some deep configuration changes (good luck with that), possibly even s/w changes. As far as merely collapsing that stuff... that's not the standard format here. Do note that there is a little thingy at the top that will fly you over all the header stuff. For the school assignments: you might ask the editors who inserted those templates if they might be removed. Or, if you're feeling Bold, delete them yourself. If anyone objects, they can go back in. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:26, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

Global heating

More and more media outlets have adopted the term "global heating" instead of "global warming". For example, The Guardian has just switched to this term in their articles. I have tried to integrate this alternative term, which has become widespread in the public debates across Europe, in our introduction, but it was quickly reverted afterwards. It is by no means my intention to make Wikipedia follow The Guardian's style guide (why should we?), but what would be necessary for a good overview that represents the full spectrum of terminology is that we should also show that at least some authors have already adopted other terms that represent the topic maybe even better than global warming. That this is not the term used most often yet should already have been clear enough from my suggested text ("also [not: mainly!] referred to"), but there might of course be formulations that could make this even clearer. I therefore suggest that we add this term in the introduction and would like to hear what you think about this suggestion. Flugscham (talk) 16:53, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

The "Terminology" section is a good place for content about terminology. A search within the article for the word "heating" would have found it for you. You will see that the Terminology section refers to "global heating", with a reference that includes a link to the Guardian's page about their terminology. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:19, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
I was more thinking of a representation of this term in the introduction, as it is increasingly in use. Flugscham (talk) 17:29, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
A good way to show that it is increasingly in use is to add references showing that usage to the Terminology section. The lead is a summary of the most significant parts of the article. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:27, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
Yes, and yes. Also: Flugscham, your "reference" was a naked URL, without any other information, and not an acceptable in-line citation. That source has a name, an author, and a date, which should be specified, preferably in a suitable template. You might also note that we are in the process of moving all the full citations to the Sources section, using a short-cite (that links to the full citation) as the in-line citation. If you don't know how to do a short-cite, that's okay, we can do that, but you should provide the full citation with the details of authorship ("who"), when, as well as where. But in this case, perhaps not in the lead. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:02, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
When I reverted your addition I was not commenting on whether it should be added elsewhere in the article, it just seemed out of place in the lead section, particularly the first sentence. As ever on Wikipedia we follow the usage in sources and currently this appears to be relatively rare when compared to "global warming". this 2014 blog makes interesting reading on the usage of the term. Mikenorton (talk) 10:58, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Re "Sources"

In the "Sources" section: I'm not real clear on how we should partition technical/non-technical sources. I'd like to change "Technical sources" to "Scientific sources" or "Expert sources". I think "technical" is ambiguous here, suggesting a certain characterization of the content or topic, whereas "scientific" and "expert" lean more towards the basis of the content and the rigor of analysis. Perhaps "Peer-reviewed sources" would work.

I'm fine with "Non-technical sources", as that seems (to me, at least) to suggest "no hard concepts or hard thinking involved". Which sources might be from an expert, or be scientifically based, but lack the rigor of a scientific report. (And while "Sources of relaxed rigor" might be accurate, I don't think that will fly.) ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:53, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes I think that is also good in British English. I would lean towards "Scientific sources" rather than "Expert sources" unless perhaps other types of expert sources are likely to be added, for example economics papers which might be tough for non-experts. Even then they could always be put in a new section of "Economics sources".Chidgk1 (talk) 05:11, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
I think you're right and technical sources can imply certain subset of scientific sources. I prefer peer-reviewed sources as the alternative. As Chidgk already mentioned, some peer-reviewed sources might not be considered scientific. Economics is considered a (social) science, but some humanities that we cited, for instant about protest, is not considered scientific. I think expert sources is not completely accurate either. I assume that the public websites by NOAA and NASA are written by experts, but not peer-reviewed. I'd put these websites under non-technical sources. You could even argue that some journalists are experts too. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:22, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
Aside from there has been some debate as to whether economics is a science or not, that's a good point. If an economics paper is peer-reviewed in a reputable source, I'd say it is in. Of course, just because a paper is peer-reviewed doesn't mean the results represent scientific consensus, only that the reviewers and editors don't see any fatal flaws in what is presented. (Or they are a cabal of POV pushers? NIPCC comes to mind.) While many experts do journalism, the standards there are not scientifically based. (How such sources should be presented in the text is something for much later on.)
I'm going to change the first header to "Peer-reviewed sources". Perhaps a couple of weeks staring at the second header will inspire something better, but good enough for now. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:29, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
P.S. I think we can safely assume that anything from the IPCC is peer-reviewed. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:37, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
Yes, indeed. IPCC sometimes use non-peer reviewed sources (e.g. governmental reports), but the reports are peer-reviewed themselves. The Summary for Policymakers is not only peer-reviewed, but also reviewed by governments. More info: https://www.ipcc.ch/about/preparingreports/. Both the SPM and the synthesis report are written in a non-technical manner. I initially wanted to put them under the non-technical sources heading, but that doesn't make any sense anymore with our renaming of the section to peer-reviewed... Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:28, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

After pondering a bit about how to handle newspapers(&c) I'm coming around to your idea of listing the IPCC AR chapters in chapter order under each AR/WG. What moved me in this direction was the consideration that the IPCC works are effectively "super peer-reviewed", and super authoritive, and warrant their own section. (The existing "Peer-review sources" would become "Other peer-reviewed sources".) We would still cite them by author-date. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:42, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Or we could put the IPCC reports in their own section, labeled "IPCC report chapters" (with the IPCC abbreviation spelled out). – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:33, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
Nice you're coming round to the idea of listing IPCC AR chapters under each AR/WG. In terms of your suggestions to list the IPCC separately, I think we should take two things into consideration:
  1. That this 'super peer-reviewing' happens in all types of review articles, not only in the IPCC reports. The IPCC reports stand out for their comprehensiveness. The National Climate Assessment (national being USA here) are quite similar in their structure and set-up. They have separate chapters with separate authors, and there is also external peer review (from their site: "An expert external peer review of the whole report was performed by an ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)").
  2. This might not be a valid argument for Wikipedia, but in my editing the Dutch featured article on this topic, where climate 'skeptisms' is rife, I noticed that people believed the IPCC to be the 'only' scientific source stating climate change is 'real and bad'. (The article was full of facts stated as IPCC opinions (WP:NPOV#Explanation of the neutral point of view)). I fear that if we give extra status to the IPCC over other 'super-peer reviewed' sources by putting them in their own section, we might slightly enable this type of reasoning..
My proposal therefore is to subdivide peer-reviewed sections into articles and scientific reports. We still have many of the advantages your proposal (grouping together the chapters and emphasizing that it's a different type of source), without the two disadvantages I sketched above. Femke Nijsse (talk) 06:52, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
Jonesey: isn't that what I said ("in their own section")? :-)
Femke: I don't see "articles" and "scientific reports" as useful distinctions ("peer-reviewed" or not). The only trace of a difference I discern is that while scientific articles (typically in a journal) are typically peer-reviewed (though articles in magazines, newspapers, etc., are not), a "report" can be issued by anyone, and even scientific reports are not necessarily peer-reviewed.
The IPCC is certainly not "the 'only' scientific source" re GW/CC. But (e.g.) the ad hoc committee that reviewed the NCA is hardly of the same stature and weight as the IPCC, not what I call a "super peer-review". The IPCC has a broader base of experts and more comprehensive scope, and more levels of review (including the governmental, for better or worse); it is the ultimate distillation of expert knowledge on the topic. It is because the IPCC reports are so extensive (and their citation more complex) that I am inclined to have them in their own section. And there it would be sensible to arrange the chapters under each AR/WG. But to do that in a general section interferes with the alphabetic ordering of the non-IPCC sources, and there I would object.
Sorting out the IPCC reports is daunting enough as things are now, but I would prefer to do that before we move in lot more sources. Are you all okay with having an "IPCC" (only) sources subsection? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:26, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
Sorry for not being clear before. I'd like to see a distinction made under the peer-reviewed section of peer-reviewed scientific articles and peer-reviewed scientific reports. This latter possibly only has the IPCC and NCA reports. I'm not aware yet of what the PBL does and some of the other USA governmental reports.
While I agree that the IPCC is more comprehensive than the NCA, I don't think there is a large difference between the expertise of those who write the NCA or PBL reports, compared to those who write the IPCC reports. (There is however some difference in favour of the IPCC) Both NCA and IPCC have normally one round of external peer review, and only the IPCC Summary for Policymakers has an additional review by governments. The NCA report is closer to the IPCC reports than to other scientific articles, so for me it's only nature we group them together. Also considering their citations are similar, with chapters having different authors as the overall report. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:32, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
Again, I don't see a clear distinction between "scientific articles" and "scientific reports". I have always seen them as pretty much synonymous. Event if "article" is restricted to what's published in a journal, with a presumption of editorial review and standards (as well as several peers) that is generally not found in non-articles, it seems quite common to call them reports.
The expertise of who write (or edit or review ) these reports is not useful distinction; we can presume they are all top-level experts. What might be different is that the IPCC has so many more experts, as well as not being limited to the U.S.
The difference in citation is not in having multiple authors (that is quite common), but in having the doubled levels of inclusion: "Chapter X in WG report in AR Z report". (And conventional citation would have us include the editors for each "in".) That requires special handling, and because there are so many such IPCC reports it is much more convenient to have them segregated. (And the rest of the peer-reviewed sources are easier to collate and find in not having the IPCC reports.)
I feel fairly adamant in not having IPCC and NAS sources mixed. But if you feel NAS sources should be pulled out of the rest of peer-reviewed, well, they could have their own subsection, right? (How many distinct NAS sources do we have?) I am more inclined to grouping them as we are doing for newspapers, but I am okay with a subsection. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:09, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
I was just looking at the NAS sources. At this point I see six that are fairly well cited (yours?) except for the little detail of lacking a year, two that need work, and an incidental mention that is cited to another source. (Presumably more could added.) A rough count of IPCC sources (not allowing for duplication, which is not readily determined in the current state of affairs) is over fifty. That in itself justifies a dedicated subsection. But the real need for a dedicated subsection is so they can be coherently organized and managed. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:52, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

While the three-layeredness is the same in the NCA reports (Chapter X in Volume X in NCA X report, I do admit it's used way less. Because Volume II is almost exclusively focused on the US, we barely use it. So in that sense, the IPCC reports might well be unique and I concede to giving them their own subsection.

I'm btw almost done completing, properly formatting and adding ref=harvs or similar to all citation in the text. I'm not that meticulous, so I imagine I haven't caught everything. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:41, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Relative to some other work I'm doing I am rather looking forward to do the IPCC stuff. And sometime this side of next winter I might take a look at the NAS citationing. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 02:39, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Summary of work I've done

For all citations, except the IPCC ones, I've tried to

  1. Complete them
  2. Check accuracy information when in doubt
  3. Format them properly
  4. Make it easy to make shortcites for them by sorting the paras (url not first)
  5. Check whether the urls still work
  6. Add a proper ref=harv for journal articles and ref={{harvid|The New York Times, 2 September|2010}} for newspaper articles

The next step is to move the easy ones (newspapers and journal articles) ones to the sources section. I'm not really keen on doing that. I'd like to get cracking with updating the figures, which shouldn't disturb this process too much. Who's willing to do the next step(s) here? Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:26, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Inclusion Welsh video

A general overall look at global warming on film, created by Natural Resources Wales for 16-18 year olds.

@Llywelyn2000: I just removed the video you put on the page, for a couple of reasons:

1. It is not entirely clear. It starts for instance with a lot of scenes implying (intentionally or not) that global warming might be natural due to orbital forcing

2. It deals not only with climate change, but also with biodiversity loss and other things. With people mixing up different environmental treats, we should keep that distinction very clear.

3. Some of the examples are very Wales-specific.

4. It feel amateuristic to me: It has this weird timer at the bottom, had weird transitions between scenes..

Before putting it back (this is the second time I deleted it), could you please discuss it? Thanks :). Femke Nijsse (talk) 18:50, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Hi and thanks for your comments. It's a general introduction to global warming, with discussion by a group of people, pupils. The points in your order:
1. The first 40 seconds only suggests natural possible causes of warming. The rest, 240 seconds is that it is man made. I would say that is very fair.
2. 'Biodiversity loss and other things' (deforestation) contributes towards global warming.
3. No! The video was made in a specific country, and that's it. It also had a 2 second shot of a the level of the sea and its rise against a castle wall. So would it be politically correct if it showed the Thames, and made in London? Or have I missed any other 'examples (which) are very Wales-specific'?
4. I agree that its not hd, but all the footage is professional, and open licenced! The purpose of the 'weird' timer is for discussion groups to note different scenes within the video. I have a second video without the timer, if you prefer. The subtitles can also be changed or deleted.
If others agree with you, for the correct reasons, then by all means let it go. However, I think it's it's a good general visual introduction to the subject, until a better video is offered. Llywelyn2000 (talk) 20:50, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for your quick reply :).
1. I'll mostly reply to this point, because I think it's the most problematic. Suggesting possible causes of warming that have been shown not to be the cause of global warming can be quite confusing to the lay public. The video is unclear about the current state of knowledge of climate change. Not only is it (implicitly, and I don't think on purpose) 'questioning' the causes of global warming, the subtitles later even question the existence of global warming by stating: "If our climate is changing, can we make a difference". I'm assuming the video was made in good faith, but such unclear communication can be quite damaging to people's understanding of global warming.
2. That's true, but the video names the disappearance of forests in the context of biodiversity loss, and not in the name of global warming.
3. The first 20 seconds, arguably the most important ones, are about Wales and not specifically about global warming.
4. Let's first agree on the first three points, before we discuss modifications that might make this video suitable for the page. Femke Nijsse (talk) 21:09, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
Thanks Femkemilene! I think I'll take up your points with NRW and discuss a second draft, hd, new script, and as you say it has aged in only a few years, just like me! Many thanks! Llywelyn2000 (talk) 04:40, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Short cites for undated websites

@J.Johnson: There are a few websites around, for instance NASA, with a lot of information about the climate that is undated. How do we short-cite these pages? For instance, two full citations we now have point to: https://climate.nasa.gov/solutions/adaptation-mitigation/ and https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:24, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Good question. (I've run into the same issue on some USGS stuff.) Short answer: I don't know!
Chicago Manual of Style suggests using "n.d." (for "no date"), but I don't find that satisfactory. In some cases it might make sense to use the "updated" date — provided, of course, one is supplied. For purposes of short-cites, note that a date isn't really required. We could probably do something like "{{harvnb|NASA Climate website (undated)}}}. Or we could leave it be with all the other cruft until we get the major work done. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 02:36, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
Let's leave it until all of the straightforward work is done. When the dust settles, it will become clear what sorts of oddball citations are left for us to deal with. – Jonesey95 (talk) 07:20, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
Okay with leaving odd-ball citations till later. One idea that popped up specifically for this NASA website: we might want to have one full citation and distinguish between the different sections/webpages using the |loc= parameter in the short-cites. Short-cites can have their own links to sections, so I think that might work..
There is only one "updated" date for all subpages, so we can't distinguish them by date. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:45, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
"Yes" on all the above. As to using Harv's |loc= for specific pages on a website: that can get a little dicey. It works best if the website has built-in anchors. URLs (as for specific pages) don't work so well in the template, but an equivalent link can be appended. But we can deal with that later. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
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